Sting

“With Panella.”

“And your brother.”

She scoffed at that. “Get over the notion that Josh has the money. Or even that he knows where it is. If he did, he would have surrendered it when he—”

“—bartered his soul by turning snitch?”

“Saved his soul by doing the right thing.”

“Saved his soul, my ass. Everything Saint Josh has done has been self-serving. But now he’s in a real pickle. He’s reneged on his deal with the feds. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, he’s made laughingstocks of them for being taken in.

“If they catch him, they’ll throw the book at him. He’ll spend the rest of his life in federal prison. But he had better hope they catch him before Panella does. Because he’ll tear out your brother’s forked tongue, rip open his belly, throw him into the Gulf, and ring the dinner bell. Either way, Josh is sunk. Unless I get to him first.”

She feared his predictions about her brother’s future weren’t far off the mark. “If you reach him first, what then?”

“I convince him it’s in his best interest to give me a share of all that filthy lucre. He does that, we all go home happy. Well, not home. But you get the gist of it.”

“That’s your idea?”

“Damn good one, you ask me.”

She pressed her fingers to her forehead and rubbed the space between her eyebrows. “It’s a lousy idea, Mr. Kinnard. Based entirely on erroneous speculation. Josh doesn’t have the money, any money. And, say he did, say his pockets are stuffed with it, he could be anywhere in the country. How do you intend to track him down?”

“I won’t have to. He’ll come to me. Because I have you.” He shot her a crocodile’s grin. “Sooner or later he’ll hear about your abduction.”

“He’ll assume I’m dead.”

“Probably. Until you let him know otherwise.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“The same way you’ve been communicating with him all along.”

She actually laughed. “I haven’t had contact with my brother since he was taken into custody. Zero,” she said, forming an O with her fingers. “That was one of the conditions of the pact he made with the government.”

He just stared at her, unblinking, unmoving.

“All right, believe what you want,” she said. “The fact doesn’t change. I don’t know where Josh has been sequestered for the past six months, and I don’t know how to reach him. Period. End of discussion.”

“Like hell it is. We’re discussing the little brother who you protected from slippery stairs and rusty nails. You’re telling me that he hasn’t come crying to you since Tuesday when he ran afoul of big bad Uncle Sam?”

“It’s the truth.”

“You didn’t know he’d escaped?”

“No! Not until you told me.”

He bent down closer. “Even if I believed that he hasn’t contacted you in the past four days, which I don’t, the FBI would have jumped on you like a duck on a June bug. Like Billy Panella did. Want Josh Bennett and can’t find him? Easy. Stay on his sister, his next of kin, the first and only person he would scurry to when in trouble.”

“The FBI didn’t notify me of his escape.”

He stared her down as though trying to intimidate the truth out of her, which made her nervous, because she wasn’t an adept liar. Not that she was lying, exactly.

True, no government agency had officially informed her of Josh’s disappearance. But the authorities might very well have been keeping an eye on her to see if he would show up on her doorstep.

Last night, as she left her house for the bar, she’d noticed headlights in her rearview mirror. They had remained the same distance from her as she drove through town. It might have been perfectly harmless. But she’d been just paranoid enough to deliberately outdistance the other car when she reached the back roads.

She wasn’t about to share that with Shaw Kinnard, however.