“Seat’s taken,” he says. “I’m meeting someone.”
I put down my coffee and tap the screen on my phone. His buzzes in response immediately.
He looks baffled. He doesn’t get it. I try not to roll my eyes. In real life, there are no Lex Luthors.
“That’s me,” I tell him. “I’m your meeting.”
He covers pretty well. He doesn’t ask how I knew him, even as he fumbles to shut down the phone. It’s a burner. That headset in his ears? It leads down to his personal phone, keeping a direct line open to his buddy up on the roof. If this conversation doesn’t end with them substantially richer, he only has to say one word and his friend will blow my head off my shoulders.
So he still thinks he’s got the upper hand in this conversation.
“Fine,” he says. “Let’s get to it.”
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“We don’t need to get into that.”
I’m already bored. Donnie here has gotten all his moves from TV and movies. He’s an amateur who thought he’d stumbled into his own personal IPO when he met my client’s daughter in a club two nights ago.
At least I can see why she went with him. He’s got catalog-model good looks and, from what I’ve learned, a ready supply of drugs that he sells at all the right places. She probably thought he was no worse than her last two boyfriends.
But as the gulf between the One Percent and everyone else grows wider, kidnapping idle rich kids has become a minor epidemic in L.A.
Guys like Donnie and his partner—can’t quite snag his name yet, but he’s still there, watching through the scope—lure one of the many Kardashian or Hilton wannabes away from their friends, drug them up, then lock them down until they get a ransom. The parents pay, and the kids usually come home with little more than a bad hangover. The police are almost never involved.
You haven’t heard about this because the parents know people who own major chunks of stock in CNN and Fox. They don’t want the idea going viral, and they know who to call to kill a story.
But they also know who to call when they want something like this handled.
My client, Armin Sadeghi, is a wealthy man who had to flee Iran as a child when a group of religious madmen took over his country. That sort of thing leaves a mark. He doesn’t particularly trust the police or the government, especially when it comes to family.
“We need to make sure she’s alive and unharmed,” I say, sipping my coffee.
“She’s fine,” Donnie says.
I get a glimpse of Sadeghi’s daughter, skirt bunched up over her waist, snoring heavily, facedown on a soiled mattress. Well, at least she’s alive.
“So here’s how it’s going to work,” he begins.
I cut him off. “Where is she?”
“What?” The location appears behind his eyes like it’s on Google Maps. A hotel stuck on Skid Row, one of the last pockets of downtown to resist coffee shops and condos.
I lift my phone and start dialing. He looks stunned. “Sorry, this won’t take long.”
“What the hell do you think you’re—”
I hold up a finger to my lips while the call connects to Sadeghi. When he picks up, I tell him, “She’s at a hotel in downtown Los Angeles,” and recite the address from Donnie’s memory. He’s got a group of well-paid and trusted security personnel waiting to retrieve his daughter.
“Hold on a second,” I say as he’s thanking me and God, in that order. “What room?” I ask Donnie.
It pops into his head even as he says, “Fuck you.”
“Room 427,” I say into the phone. “You can go get her now.”
I disconnect the call and look back at Donnie. His confusion has bloomed into bewilderment and anger. “How the hell did you do that?” he demands.
He’s desperately trying to maintain some control here, torn between running to the hotel and doing some violence to me. I can feel his legs twitch and his pulse jumping.
I can sense the same anger, the same need to do harm, coming down from above. The scope is still on me.
“I know your buddy can hear me,” I say, as calmly as I can. “What’s his name?”
“Go fuck yourself,” Donnie says.
With that, a jumble of memories sort themselves into a highlight reel of Donnie and Brody, both of their lives coming into sharper focus. Donnie: the club kid, the dealer. Brody: one of the thousands back from the military, no job, no real family, no marketable skills outside of combat training. A partnership forms. Donnie likes having a badass on his side. Brody likes being the badass. They both like the money.
I hope they can both be smarter than they’ve been up until now.
“All right. Donnie. Brody. You need to recognize that this is over. You can walk away right now, as long as you never get within a thousand yards of the girl or her family again.”
I boost the words with as much authority and power as I’ve got, pushing them into their skulls, trying to make them see it for themselves.
Donnie hunches down. Even if I weren’t in his head, I’d see that he’s gone from angry to mean. I’m maybe five years older than him, but he’s hearing his parents, every teacher, and every cop who ever told him what to do. His anxiety has a sharp and jagged edge now, like a broken bottle in the hand of an angry drunk.
“Yeah?” he says. “And what if we just kill you, instead?”
Not my first choice, admittedly. Out loud, I say, “You spend the rest of your lives running. And you still won’t get paid.”
I can sense some hesitation from Brody twenty stories up. But he keeps the rifle pointed at my head.
This close up, a little empathy for these morons seeps in around the edges. Neither of them was raised by anybody who gave anything close to a damn. They’re scared by my spook show, torn between the need to run and the need to punish. It could go either way. I push harder, trying to steer them onto the right path. I’m working against years of bad habits and ingrained attitude.
But surely they are not stupid enough to try to kill me in the middle of downtown Los Angeles in broad daylight. They just can’t be that dumb.
I try to help them make the right decision.
Donnie stands up. “Fuck it,” he says.
I relax, just a little.
Then he makes his choice, like a motorcycle veering suddenly down an off-ramp.
“You tell that bitch and her old man we’ll be seeing them,” he says. “Never mind. I’ll tell them myself.”
Triumph spreads through his head like the shit-eating grin on his face. I don’t know exactly what he’s got in store for the Sadeghis. All I see in his mind is a knife and bare flesh.
And blood. Lots of blood.
“Do it,” Donnie says. Talking to his partner, not to me.
I feel Brody begin to squeeze the trigger.
Idiots.
AVAILABLE IN EBOOK AND PAPERBACK NOW
First published in the USA as ‘Flashmob’ in 2017 by William Morrow Books
This ebook edition published in 2017 by
Zaffre Publishing
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Copyright © Christopher Farnsworth, 2017
Cover design © Nick Venables
Cover photographs © Arcangel Images / Stephen Mulcahey (figure);
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The moral right of Christopher Farnsworth to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-1-78576-309-0
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Hunt You Down Page 33
