Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 126840 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126840 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
I still loved Bree like crazy.
So that whole scene didn’t feel great.
Kyra took off next because she had a date she needed to get ready for, and Marcy and I ordered fresh coffees and tucked ourselves back into the couch in front of the window.
“Are you feeling it?” she asked.
I didn’t have to request she explain.
“I’m feeling it,” I told her.
“Okay then, how would you feel about some recon?”
Now I was lost.
“What?”
“Follow Christos around. Get the goods on him. Evidence. Show Bree before she talks her parents into remortgaging their house because some diamond mafia is after him or something.”
We’d all watched The Tinder Swindler, and clearly, we’d all taken mental notes.
“That’s extreme, Marce.”
“He’s a scam artist, Hell. She works as a PA in a marketing firm, she’s been with him three months, and she’s handed over two months’ rent. This is a situation.”
She was right.
This was a situation.
Because we both knew Bree. And she might have a nest egg, but it probably wasn’t that much.
Seventeen hundred dollars was a weird number. Which meant it was likely all she had left in her savings.
“You brought this up after Kyra took off because…?” I prompted.
“Because Kyra still buys stuffed animals…for herself. We have two cats, but if I let her, we’d have eleven. She’s got more friends than anyone I know because she collects strays of all kinds. She’s a sweetheart. Made of gold. But she is not street smart. It scares the hell out of me, but she’s even worse than Bree. She’d be a nightmare on an operation like this.”
An operation?
“Maybe you should tell me what you’re thinking,” I suggested.
“I’m thinking of following him and seeing what he’s up to,” she repeated.
Hmm.
“Do you know where he lives or works?” I asked, skeptical of this plan, but not entirely against it.
“I know where he lives, I dropped Bree off there once. I don’t know what he does for a living, and that says something, don’t you think?”
I did think.
Oh boy.
“You know what would stop the Tinder swindler?” she asked.
I knew.
“Marce—”
“A friend or a favorite auntie or someone saying, ‘stop giving that jerk your money.’ Someone doing a deep dive into his shit and finding out he’s full of it. I know that Tinder guy on the documentary had a real racket going, but…come on.”
I didn’t want to judge a sister, especially not those who’d fallen for that man’s shit. Truth, he had the con down to an art.
But yeah, someone injecting a little common sense or doing a little leg work, and maybe a lot of heartbreak and debt would have been saved.
Or better, that guy would have been caught a lot earlier.
Good news: part of what she said, I could do.
“Right, I’ll do a deep dive,” I told her. “We’ll reconvene to share what I find and decide from there.”
“I think we should tail him because, my guess, Bree’s small potatoes. He’s gotta have other bitches he’s fleecing. She says he works a lot. At what, she’s vague about, but I’ll press. And she and Kyra are tight. Maybe Kyra knows. Another guess, he’s working and taking other women’s money.”
I would have that same guess.
“Let’s start with the online stuff first. Okay?” I suggested.
She seemed disappointed, sucked down some of her cold brew and plopped back on the couch.
But she nodded.
I thought about Bree. I thought about Christos. I thought about Tall, Dark, Rough and Ready.
And I thought about Bryan.
I thought about him because he’d failed me, but he was smart and sharp and knew the law. I could have told him about Christos, and he’d have good advice. He would also help look after Bree.
But Bryan was out.
So someone had to save Bree.
And she was ours.
So that was going to be Marcy and me.
3
SHITSHOW
Core
“What the fuck are these bitches doing?”
Core asked that question to the windshield of his truck.
It didn’t answer, and apparently it was go time for Hellen Moynihan and her friend to perpetrate some fucked-up shit that Core was going to have to get involved in.
It figured.
This was his last night on Hellen detail.
Weeks ago, Rush, the president of the Chaos Motorcycle Club, had gotten the intel about the issue coming up from Phoenix, and the possibility it could take a direct line to Jagger’s in-laws, Jagger Black being one of Rush’s brothers in Chaos.
Considering what that issue was, and how she’d behaved in the past, it could manifest itself as a niggle of annoyance, or Armageddon.
Jagger loved his wife and dug his in-laws. Consequently, he was super hip on helping them avoid Armageddon, and he wasn’t real excited about them being annoyed either.
Rush decided the best course of action was to cut it off at the pass and send it home.
The Chaos MC was a club that’d had a rough go of it for around thirty years or so.