36
Eric
“He’s not here Eric,” Aiden says, and I fume. “The guys said they can’t find him down at the club either.”
All the men are out, and we’ve all split up across the last three locations I placed Robert in. A house in Long Beach, a warehouse at the docks, and a club in Echo Park.
We’re standing outside the house in Long Beach. Alejandro is with us. The only people here are drug addicts and a pregnant woman who speaks French.
We’ve been searching all fucking day and I felt for sure we’d find him already. But something is off because we should have.
It’s also hard as fuck to track someone down without having something trackable like a phone or the reg. plates of a car. Even so we should have found Robert by now and Micah if he’s with him.
By now Robert will know his device isn’t working. It will just be a dead machine to him. He’ll also know it could only have been me who fucked it up in such a way.
“What do we do now?” Alejandro asks.
“My bots would have notified me if they’d tracked anything. Nothing’s come through,” I reply.
“I’ll get men to stay at both places just in case he comes back,” Aiden says. “Then we’ll continue to try and locate him and Micah.”
I’m sure the two fuckers are together, wherever the hell they are.
My phone rings and when I look at it and see the unrecognized number I tense up. This isn’t going to be anybody I want calling me because only a limited number of people have this number, and they wouldn’t hide their number from me.
“Who is this?” I ask when I answer the phone.
“Hello friend, long time no speak,” Robert’s cold voice replies in my ear, and I could be back in Brazil chained to those poles again with the electricity convulsing through my body.
“Robert Carson.”
Aiden and Alejandro straighten up when they hear me say his name.
“Yes, my friend. Except I haven’t gone by that name in years. It feels weird hearing it.”
“How’d you get this number Robert?”
“It’s amazing what can buy a man’s betrayal. Although, I have to say this guy was really loyal to you, it’s important you know that.”
Fuck… what’s happened?
I think of Summer instantly because I sent my most loyal men with her. I would have left them at the apartment with her even if she hadn’t gone to her father’s house.
“What did you do Robert?”
“Not that much. The price of Oleg’s betrayal was his mother’s death and the threat of his wife’s life.”
Jesus Christ.Oleg. And this motherfucker killed his mother and took his wife. “You motherfucking dog.”
“I keep telling you I’m not the one who’s the dog. It’s you. And you’re going to do as your told.”
“I’m not doing shit, friend.”
“I think you will from how I hear it. You have a new love interest. I don’t know how you knew about my device, but I give you credit for outsmarting me. It was one thing to screw with my device but imagine my surprise when Oleg informed me that the woman I thought I killed is very much alive and in your care. He sang like a canary to save what’s left of his wife, understandable as he was watching her being tortured. Every time he stalled, I chopped off one more finger.”
This could have only have happened sometime today and it explains why we couldn’t find Robert. But Oleg is with Summer.
“He didn’t know I was going to kill her anyway after I got what I wanted. Now he’s dead too.”