Breaking Meredith (Disciples 4)

“Able to find?” Lucifer turns serious. “How much are we missing?”

“One point two million…” I say as I look back to Eugene. “Two hundred thousand of that went to gambling in Vegas and a long weekend of coked out crack whores.”

“Jesus Christ. How the fuck do you blow through two hundred thousand dollars on crack whores in Vegas?” Andrew bursts out laughing.

Eugene begins to scream through his gag at the three of us, but it’s silenced as soon as James walks into the room.

As usual the damnable playboy is fashionably late as he calls it. If Lucifer didn’t have such a soft spot for the lazy man, I would have strung him up long ago.

James slaps the butt of his gun against the side of Eugene’s head before walking over to the desk to sit beside Lucifer. “What did I miss?”

Grunting his displeasure, Lucifer says, “Simon was just telling us how Eugene here spent two hundred thousand dollars on a coke-fueled long weekend in Vegas with, as he put it, crack whores.”

“Three hundred and twenty thousand,” James says dead faced to us all.

I know I’m blinking in confusion as I ask, “Three hundred and twenty thousand what?”

“Oh, fuck me…” Andrew groans.

“Are you serious, James?” Lucifer asks in genuine amazement.

“What are you all talking about?” I ask harshly. I hate when they pull this kind of shit.

There is no possible way that James has found the money I haven’t been able to track down yet. I know it’s been working its way through a very complex system of funnels. So far I’ve tracked down fifty-two different banks it has be routed through. That this pile of human excrement has caused me three sleepless nights of searching through countless statements and business transactions….

He’s crafty, I will give him that.

But it’s now only a matter of time until the tracer bots running through my computer systems locate the final destination. I don’t worry about that. It’s James spitting out such a random number that is annoying me. He doesn’t deal with this side of the business.

“Three hundred and twenty thousand dollars… I thought we were comparing weekends of regret,” James says with a shrug.

Eugene groans loudly from his chair and a red trail of blood leaks down the side of his neck from where James hit him.

“How in the bloody hell did you spend three hundred and twenty thousand dollars on a long weekend?” I ask, and for once I find myself speechless at the playboy’s idiocy.

“She called it the girlfriend experience,” he says with another shrug, as if that’s supposed to explain everything.

“Oh, for shit’s sake, James,” Andrew rumbles with laughter.

“James…” Lucifer says with almost fatherly patience. “What in the world were you thinking? And when was this?”

Looking up at the ceiling, James thinks to himself. “About four weeks before those girls we pulled away from the Russian’s slave ring got grabbed up.”

“Are you serious? I was expecting this to happen a couple of years ago, when you were still young and stupid,” Lucifer laughs as he slaps James on the back of the head.

“Hey, I’m still young, and probably, stupid. At the end of the weekend, I proposed to her,” James says with a weak grin.

No one says a word for a solid minute. All of us are staring at him in absolute shock.

“What did she say?” Andrew asks, finally breaking the silence.

“She didn’t. She took the rock and disappeared in the middle of the night.”

Running his hand down his face, Lucifer begins to chuckle. “And this, Simon, is why we love our dear James so much.”

“Thank the gods he isn’t dumb enough to ever procreate,” Andrew laughs as he looks to me. “He’s going to die in an old fuck’s home with you, Simon. Alone and miserable!”

Rolling my eyes, I turn away from the neanderthals before I’m tempted to shoot one of them. Self-control is the key to my job. If I didn’t have it, I would be in deep shit. Not that I’m not already in over my head.

“So, what are we doing with fuckstick?” James asks.

Setting the molds of Eugene’s hands carefully into the black bag I brought and pulling off my latex gloves, I look over my shoulder at him. “Lucifer wants a message to be sent to any and all.”

“Yes, we’re going to be going back to an oldie but goodie, boys,” Lucifer says with a grin.

“Ride with me, Simon. Andrew can drive your SUV to the site,” Lucifer says as we walk out of the old sheet metal warehouse.

Grunting loudly as he walks towards James’s black BMW, Andrew says, “Yeah, but I’ll put this pile of shit in James’s trunk. No need for him to be kicking around in the back of an SUV.”

“Asshole,” James grouses at Andrew.

“Shouldn’t have been late, little buddy,” Andrew laughs out loudly.