Insatiable (Steel Brothers Saga #12) - Helen Hardt Page 0,76

for him with the city, and he offered me a large ‘finder’s fee’ if I let him know how to get in touch with Colin.”

“How large?” I asked.

“Really large. Seven figures.”

“Sounds like a finder’s fee for his next plaything.” Joe said.

“I honestly didn’t know—”

“What a crock,” Joe said. “Didn’t you wonder how the mayor of Snow Creek had access to that amount of cash?”

“I didn’t think about it! You really think I’d sell my own son out?”

“For the right price?” I scoffed. “Hell, yeah.”

“It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t—”

“What did you tell Booker?” I demanded. “About Colin?”

“Nothing. Not a thing. After what happened the first time, do you really think I’d accept money for information on my son?”

I looked to Joe. “Do you believe him?”

“Fuck no. No one pays a seven-figure finder’s fee for a job with a small town.”

My initial instinct was to agree with Joe. After all, it gave me a certain constancy to think there might be another father on the planet who was horrid like mine. But Ted Morse wasn’t Tom Simpson. He was more like Mills and Johnson than my father, if he was telling the truth. He liked money and would do just about anything for it. Perhaps he truly thought he was getting a finder’s fee for my father offering his son a job. My father was the mayor of Snow Creek and a respected attorney, after all. Ted could have convinced himself my father was on the up-and-up, so he had an excuse to take the money. “For God’s sake, Bryce. You’re not buying this horseshit, are you?”

“I’m not buying into anything,” I said, still poking my gun into Morse’s forehead. “But we need to find Booker. Does Colin ever go off by himself?” I asked Morse.

“I don’t know. He’s an adult.”

“If he went somewhere alone, where would it be?”

“We have a place in Glenwood Springs,” Morse said. “This condo here in Grand Junction, although he’s not here, obviously.”

“Anything else?”

“We have some rentals here and in Montana and Florida, but they’re all currently leased.”

“Glenwood Springs, then. What’s the address? And is there a landline there?”

“Yeah, yeah. You’ll have to untie me so I can write down the information for you.”

“Nice try,” Joe said, pulling out his phone. “Give it to me.”

Morse sighed as he recited an address and telephone number and Joe typed the information into his phone.

“Anything else?” I said. “How well do you know Booker? Where would he go?”

“I don’t know.” A tear slid from Morse’s eye. “I truly don’t know.”

“Damned cry baby,” Joe said. “I don’t believe you.”

“He only wanted to know about Colin,” Morse said. “And he told me the story about your father and the two of you.”

Joe sighed. “Fine. Now, how much is it going to cost me for you to forget we ever had this conversation?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Right,” I scoffed.

“No. Nothing. Truly. I’ve learned my lesson after what happened to Colin. I didn’t take any money from Booker, and I tried to warn you. I did. Why do you think I got in touch with the two of you in the first place?”

“Money,” Joe and I said in unison.

Morse sighed. “I can understand why you’d think that. But I tried to warn you. I said all I could without putting my son’s and my life in jeopardy.” He shook his head. “My son is wrong about me. I did a lot of things wrong as a father. I know that. I was way too hard on him, and I thought he’d have the strength to stand up to me about marrying Jade. Everything I did was to try to make him stronger. But I never intentionally gave him to your father. I didn’t know who your father was at the time.”

“Whatever,” I said. “What’s done is done, and there’s nothing you can do to change it. Now answer Joe’s question. How much is it going to take?”

“Nothing,” he said again.

“And we should trust you because…” Joe said.

“You shouldn’t,” he said. “But you can.”

I put my gun away and started to unwrap the duct tape around Morse’s chest.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“What else can we do? We have to go after Colin and Booker. We can’t just leave him here stewing in his own piss.”

“Sure we can.”

“Leave me if you want,” he said. “It’s no less than I deserve.”

“For once we agree,” Joe said.

I quickly unwrapped the tape from Morse’s ankles. “There. If you care about your son as you say, you’ll let us do