Savage Ending (Savage Series #4) - Lisa Renee Jones Page 0,2
me and stay there. But I am not, in fact, Jackie. If I was Jackie, I’d give someone a gun and tell them to shoot me.”
Nicolas blinks at me. “You’re not Jackie?”
“Jesus,” Adam murmurs. “No. He is not Jackie.”
“Oh,” Nicolas states. “Well then, what is your name?”
“Rick Savage and they call me Savage for a reason, Nicolas. Take the purple tuxedo to Barney.”
He purses his lips and without so much as an apology, he walks away. I eye Adam and plop onto a velvet high back chair across from him. “I’m a cranky bitch, right?”
“You are a cranky bitch,” Adam confirms, “but he deserves it. He has crap customer service skills. And you’re the customer, the groom, who’s nervous as fuck.”
“I am,” I admit, scrubbing my jaw. “I just don’t want to screw up with Candace, you know?”
“Candace knows what she’s getting herself into. She’s not going anywhere.”
My cellphone rings and I snatch it from my pocket to find an unknown caller. My Spidey senses tingle. Spidey senses never mean anything good is about to happen. I answer the call with a scowl. “Who is this?”
“Max. It’s Max, Savage.”
And there it is. A problem. A piece of my past, a man I worked with under Tag. A man I killed with, and survived with, for all the wrong reasons. “Why are you calling?”
“You owe me.”
He’s talking about saving my life. I turn away from Adam. “Debt paid,” I remind him softly and add, “Times two.” I’m referencing Walker protecting his wife when he was on the run from Tag, when Tag would have killed him and her, alike. I also killed Tag and solved that problem for him.
“Iraq, Mexico, Washington,” he says. “Three debts. Two down. One to go.”
I curse because he’s right. He saved my ass three fucking times. I walk down the hallway and exit to the alleyway. “What do you want?”
“I wasn’t just hiding from Tag. I made an enemy. A bad enemy.”
I go cold, the promises I’ve made to Candace about who, and what, I am, playing in my head. “You want me to kill him.”
“You won’t have to,” he assures me. “I have a data drive. If you get it to the right person, he’ll kill him for me. Just deliver the data. Debt paid.”
“What’s on the drive?”
“It’s better you don’t know.”
“I need to know.”
“No,” he says. “No, you do not. But if this doesn’t happen soon, me and my wife, we’re dead. He’s closing in on us. I feel it. And I’m running out of money.”
“I know how much money you made because I was right there with you making it. You’re rolling in bucks.”
“And getting to it is risky. You know how that is. I burned through my cash. I’m texting you the pick-up and drop-off details now. Pick-up is at a cabin in Gatlinburg and drop-off about three hours down the road. Call me when you get to Tennessee.”
“Who am I picking up from?”
“No one involved in any of this. It’s complicated, but not messy.”
“All right,” I say. “I can bring you some cash after I deliver. Where are you?”
“You could lead that bastard to me.”
I snort at that. “Come the fuck on, man. This is me you’re talking about. And if this bastard, whoever he is, finds me, I’ll kill him. Which is why you need to tell me who he is.”
His rejection is hard and fast. “I’m not pulling you into this. Just in and out, nice and clean. Invisible.”
I want to push for more, but a cellphone isn’t a safe way to extract information. “Where are you?” I repeat. “I’ll bring you money and we can drink to this being over for you and me.”
He hesitates and then says, “I’m texting the address. Thanks, man. If you pull this off, the story reverses. I owe you.”
“No debt. I’m done after this.” I disconnect and slide my phone back in my pocket, wondering how the fuck I’m going to tell Candace I’m leaving days before our wedding.
My phone buzzes with a text, and I glance down to read the locations Max has sent me. I’m headed to Tennessee and then Colorado. I text the private airport Walker frequents and put a plane on hold.
Once that’s done, I walk back inside the building to find Adam’s big-ass self waiting in the hallway. “What was that?”
“You aren’t my mother, man. Back up.”
“But I’m your damn brother from another mother. What the fuck was that?”