Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 121887 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121887 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
No, I didn’t know if those bullets connected with anybody.
Yes, I was totally freaked out about that.
Yes, in a weird way, I was glad Willow wasn’t alone with whatever was going on here.
No, it still totally sucked we’d both been kidnapped.
“She jumped on my back. Aaron told me to tase her,” Goon One said.
Goon Two (or Driver Goon) smacked him upside the head and bit, “Don’t say my name, you moron.”
Goon One didn’t like getting smacked in the head and reared on Goon Two.
Goon Two dodged and kept biting. “I told you to tase her, not shove her in the car.”
Mastermind, or the guy I didn’t know but semi-kinda recognized, sighed loudly and snapped, “Stop it.”
The Two Goons glowered at each other, and this lasted a good long while.
“Stop it!” Mastermind clipped.
The Two Goons kept glowering, just not at each other.
Mastermind looked to me. “I’m sorry they involved you.”
Did he expect me to shrug and say, “Hey, that’s okay”?
I did not.
I glared at him.
“I think you might understand why I’ve gone to these extreme measures,” he said.
“Uh, we don’t even know who you are,” I replied.
He seemed surprised by that. He then seemed annoyed by that. He then seemed to ponder his options regarding that.
And then he came to a decision.
“This is how this is going to go,” he began.
I glanced at Willow.
I didn’t know what I expected to see. Her cowering or crying, maybe. Her looking as terrified as I felt, possibly.
Her looking pissed enough to tear someone’s head off?
No.
“I apologize it’s gotten to this point, but rest assured, I’ll make it worth your while,” Mastermind went on.
“Make what worth our while?” Willow asked, or more like, whipped out at him like a lash.
Dang.
She was so totally an Angel, and more the Raye-Angel variety, and not the Harlow-Angel variety, like I thought.
“This”—he swung a hand out in front of him to indicate us sitting zip-tied on chairs in his garage—“unfortunate turn of events.”
“We’re listening,” I said.
Mastermind nodded. “Trevor Clampitt met my daughter on the Stung dating app about four months ago.”
Well…
There you go.
“When she shared with me what was happening, at first, I tried to handle it in a civilized manner. That, I assure you,” he said.
And we were looking at whoever put together Sun Dial LLC.
Onward from that, considering he was a millionaire daddy, this explained why he could bury that shell company so deep Arthur couldn’t find out who was behind it.
“I’m afraid Mr. Clampitt felt he’d discovered his whale and made acting civilized extremely difficult,” Mastermind continued.
No doubt.
Stupid Trev.
“I sent some associates to try to reason with him,” Mastermind carried on. “Lamentably, this had an unforeseen conclusion.”
“In other words, Trev was thinking ten grand a month wasn’t enough, he should get a raise, and he communicated this to you,” I deduced, and kept right on deducing. “You weren’t feeling that and sent some henchmen to put an end to his shakedown. They got into a physical fight that somehow ended with Trev face down in a pool of his own blood. But somewhere along the line, Trev dumped his laptop and phone so they not only left a dead body, they left empty-handed.”
Mastermind appeared surprised at how much I knew, but he powered through it.
“The final result of that meeting was an accident,” Mastermind asserted. “That was absolutely not what I intended. And we did get his phone. Alas, we didn’t get his laptop.”
So, there was the intel on the location of Trev’s phone.
I suddenly had a theory about that laptop.
That being, the Hottie Squad weren’t only keeping Kev to keep him safe, they were keeping him because they felt he hadn’t told them everything.
And he hadn’t.
Like, when he found out his best bud was very dead, he’d gone to where his best bud had shared he hid the golden goose of his laptop, something that needed to be kept very secure because it was paying Trev’s bills and putting him in a nice Mazda.
Kev, for some braindead reason (or perhaps he thought he’d pick up where Trev’s blackmailing ended), decided that the laptop needed to be taken out of the equation (or put in the hands of someone who could profit from it, namely his), instead of handing it over to the police so maybe they could use it to help them find Trev’s killer.
As such, he grabbed said laptop, then panicked when things got too hot because Mastermind sent his goons after him, so Kev dumped it. Perhaps somewhere he thought he could retrieve it later. But, more’s the pity, Kev being far from a brainiac, if this was the case, he didn’t choose his hidey-hole very well. It was discovered by a homeless person. Somehow, word got ’round about that homeless person’s score, and the Angels looking for a laptop, so Homer got his hands on it and delivered it to Jessie.