Storm (Sex and Bullets 1)

“On his shoulder. So it’s actually a snake, only you don’t see—”

“No.” He leans back, rubs both hands over his face.

“No, what?”

“No, this is a coincidence. Fucking coincidence, is what it is.”

“Dammit, Hawk, my head is killing me, my arm is fucking misery, and you wanna talk in riddles?” I wave the letter in the air, and Raylin snatches it and smooths it down on her lap. “Fuck.”

He stays silent for a bit, and then exhales and shoves both hands into his hair, raking his fingers through it. “My dad,” he says.

“Your dad what?” Raylin is clutching the letter as if she doesn’t know if she wants to rip it apart or kiss it.

I feel the same way.

“My dad has a tattoo like that. On his shoulder. A fucking circle.”

The engines whir. Between the three of us, the silence is deafening.

No reason to ask if he’s sure. He wouldn’t have said it if he wasn’t. The white lines around his mouth, the paleness of his face tells me he knows what it could mean.

“So what happened?” Raylin asks after a while. “Did your uncle transfer the money from Jordan Enterprises to pay off their debt to the Organization? And why did he save you? Wasn’t he better off keeping everything?”

The letter doesn’t really say, not as far as I can see. So I shake my head. “I don’t know. He only says they weren’t pleased with him.”

“And what changed?” At my blank look, she clarifies. “Why did they come after him and after you now, after all this time? How many years since they killed your parents?”

“Fifteen,” Hawk says.

Why would they come after us both after fifteen years? My uncle had obviously done one thing the Organization didn’t like: he kept me alive. Not only that, but he protected me and taught me to protect myself every single day of my life, until I left home. But I was already gone more than two years when he was killed.

What changed?

“The letter,” I whisper. “I turned twenty-one, the time when I would know the truth, because my uncle set it up this way. The fact that this letter would be waiting for me, with this key. Somebody else must have known my uncle was planning it.”

“The lawyers?”

“They could have conveniently lost it. Opened the enveloped and gotten the key. I don’t think so.”

“He told someone about it. Who did he talk to before he died?”

“The police must know. We should talk to the detective in charge of your uncle’s case.”

“There was no case. They thought he died of an overdose.”

“A man like your uncle, handling your company and all that money?” Hawk wipes at his mouth, not looking at me. “I bet they looked into it more carefully than if it were any average person.”

Right. “You think they made a timetable of who he met with the hours or days before his death?”

Sounds like a script from a movie. Then again, the hidden, sealed envelope stuck to the top of the drawer sounded that way, too.

“Let me make some phone calls,” Hawk says and all but turns his back to us, cell in hand, dialing. “I’ll find that out.”

***

Finding out takes time. Long enough time that we land back in Baltimore, catch Hawk’s chopper and arrive at the heliport of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Only God knows what strings Hawk pulled to be allowed there, but by now I’d saw off my ow

n arm if it meant it’d stop the pain. I even tried putting back the sling, with Raylin’s help, but it’s not doing much.