Bad Billionaire (Bad Billionaires 1)

Then I got into the Mercedes, started it up, and backed down the driveway. No one came after me. Ben didn’t come out of the house, shouting. Maybe he hadn’t noticed. Maybe he knew there was no point. Or maybe he wasn’t even surprised.

I backed onto the street, turned the car, and drove out of Diablo.

Twenty-Five

Devon

The man I was supposed to meet didn’t look like a criminal. He didn’t look like he worked for a major drug cartel. They hadn’t sent me the top guy; that would have been bad business. But they sent me a guy who was pretty high up. I could tell.

I was in a café on the harbor, this time in Mission Bay, sitting at a table by the window. I was doing all of my meetings by the ocean today. Because I was thinking about the ocean, and boats. And shipments.

I checked my phone. I had no calls. Not Olivia, not Ben. Not even a text. I couldn’t allow myself to worry, not right now. I had to have my game face on. I put my phone away and looked out the window again.

A man approached my elbow, pulled out a chair next to me, and sat down. “So,” he said in a soft voice. “You got the meeting you wanted. Talk.”

I glanced over at him, but only briefly. He wouldn’t want me to look too close. He was a nondescript man, white, maybe fifty, with dark eyes and still-dark hair that said maybe he was crossed with some other heritage. It didn’t matter.

“I have a proposition for you and your boss,” I said.

The man’s voice was still calm. “I don’t do business with you, friend, and I never have. If you are wasting my time, the men I work for are not going to be happy. You should be very aware of that before you start.”

I sipped my coffee and watched the tourists go by. “I never waste time,” I said. And then I told him what I wanted.

The man was quiet for a minute. “What you’re asking to buy is very expensive,” he said.

“I have the money.”

“It’s a big shipment,” he said. “Quite a bit of merchandise. Very expensive, as I say. And you want to buy the whole thing?”

“All of it.”

“We own the boat, too. And the crew aboard. What about those?”

“I’ll buy the boat and the crew. Name a price.”

The man shook his head. “You are not going to like this number, my friend. I have a feeling we’re going to discover you were wasting my time after all.”

I set my jaw hard. “Name it.”

I heard him sigh. I hadn’t yet seen him look at me, not even once. “In order to hand over the entire shipment,” he said, “including the boat it’s loaded on and the crew driving it, my organization would have to ask for twenty million.”

If it hadn’t been entirely inappropriate—and if it wouldn’t get me killed—I would have laughed. Twenty million. Exactly the amount of cash my banker had said he could raise for me. Liquid capital, I thought.

“I can do it,” I said.

The man sighed again. “If you are lying, my friend, you won’t live to explain it.”

“Name the time and the place,” I said. “I’ll give you your money. I want that boat.”

The man named a place, a closed-down warehouse on the outskirts of town. “You have two hours.” And then he was gone.

I sat staring at the water. Two hours. He was trying to test me, trying to make me fail so they would be justified in killing me. But I would do it. I would meet them and give them their money. And then our business would be done forever.

Or I’d show up with all that money and they’d kill me. Either one.

My heart wasn’t even racing. I thought again of Olivia being thrown down those stairs, calling me from the hospital lobby alone and afraid, her wrist sprained and bruises on her face. I was cool, but the fire still burned. I was still furious. Craig Bastien was going down.

My phone rang, and I pulled it from my pocket. Ben. “What’s up?” I asked, answering it.