It wasn't in my nature to be overprotective. Having my wild child little sister Gus had cured me of that many years before. There was no protecting someone like her. She refused to be kept under anyone's thumb. And while I tried to make sure none of the damage she caused or the trouble she got into was lasting, I knew better than to sic a guard on her, or try to be one myself. She did what she did. I cleaned up the messes if she couldn't do it herself.
I'd always been very live and let live about everyone else's lives.
Yet here I was, butting into Harmon's life when she'd made it clear she didn't want me—or Seeley —there.
"Head in the game," McCoy reminded me as we climbed off our bikes.
"It is," I assured him, even though it wasn't true. I rolled my neck, trying to clear my head.
We'd made our way back to our old stomping ground—Miami—where we'd chopped cars for years before starting our new venture. It was where our connections were, where our competitors were most likely located.
I figured, after our place in Miami got destroyed in our first real scuffle with the arms-dealing world, that I would miss the place where we'd all met, where we'd built our friendship, then, later, our business.
And while it was nice to be closer to the bars, the clubs, the beach, we'd been putting down roots in our new town. Besides, a house party was better than trying to figure out how to get all our drunk asses back home.
Still, it was nostalgic to be back, to walk down the streets that were so familiar, brush shoulders with strangers as we ducked down a side street in the iffy part of town, back behind an Indian restaurant, in a shack of an apartment that would fit inside my master bedroom, looking for an old friend.
"Jesus," he hissed as he came in the main part of his apartment from the bathroom, eyes wide, his wavy hair a mess, flat across the top of his head from his headphones.
Arty was six-two and a hundred pounds soaking wet, surviving off of coffee and energy drinks, often too obsessive about his work to remember to eat. From the looks of things—his cheekbones sunken, his wrists looking downright breakable—he'd been working even harder than usual.
If the fuck would eat something, maybe hit the gym once in a blue moon, he'd be drowning in pussy. As it was, I don't think I'd ever seen him with a chick.
"You guys are here," he said, slow blinking at us.
"When the fuck are you going to upgrade this place? You can afford something bigger."
Hell, just from the jobs I paid him for, he could be somewhere less pathetic, and I was far from his only client.
"It's comfortable here. And they give me leftovers," he added, nodding his head toward the wall where the restaurant was situated.
"That you don't seem to eat," Che commented, shaking his head.
"Do you have another job? You've been busy," Arty said, walking over to his desk—a fucking fold-up card table—where he kept a state-of-the-art computer set up with multiple monitors and several fans going to make sure nothing overheated.
"We had a drive-by last night," I told him, watching as he looked over, gaze roaming over us, counting us. "Teddy?" he asked, eyes going a little wide.
"Teddy's fine. Back at his penthouse sipping Dom out of some chicks navel," I said, shrugging. "Seeley took a bullet, but he's fine. But we don't have much to go on for the car that did it."
"Not much to go on. That's what I specialize in," Arty said, nodding. "What do you have?" he asked. "That's it?" he said a moment later, leaning back in his chair that groaned as he moved.
"That's it. Seeley was the only one awake."
"And I am guessing you never put that security system up that Booker has been telling you to," he said, tssking his tongue.
It was no secret in our circle of misfits that Arty had a hetero crush on Ayanna's man, Booker. So anything that Booker said was practically the fucking word of God in Arty's mind.
"Haven't been able to find a time that works for us and Booker's team. So, here we are," I said, shrugging. "You got time for us?"
"Always," he agreed, nodding. "I owe you."
"You don't owe me shit," I told him, like I'd been telling him since he was a kid in the gutter that I