When the Man Comes Around: A Gripping Crime Thriller (Lawson Raines, Book 1)

by Bradley Wright

  The Pink Kitten was the largest strip club in Las Vegas. Its reputation for the “extra” benefits a patron can receive was legendary. Lawson knew of it from all the chatter in prison. Mostly from De Luca’s own men. Nero had figured out that letting his men have their own prostitutes to run as a side business kept them happy. That way they made plenty of extra money while still doing all the things he needed for his breadwinner, drug sales.

  The women were a perfect way to sell a lot of the drugs as well. Even if they weren’t selling themselves every time they went out, it was easy for them to push the party drug, Molly, to partiers in clubs. They could make as much money or more, selling drugs than when prostituting most nights, and didn’t have to let someone have sex with them. Lawson had heard of Nero building offices of sorts in the two stories above the Pink Kitten. He had also heard, on more than one occasion, that it was crawling with security. The rumor was that Nero kept lots of cash hidden in the walls of his office. Prison is a lonely and boring place. A few well-timed questions and normally non-talkative thugs can become quite the Chatty Cathys. Especially if you just saved them from an anal assault in the showers. How much truth there was in those rumors, no one really knew. But usually if you hear something more than once, you could bet there was probably something to it. Smoke; fire.

  Lawson parked across the street from the Pink Kitten. It was early, but places like these had a steady clientele all day in Vegas. Lawson picked up his phone and dialed Cassie for the third time. Even though he knew how capable she was, he was beginning to worry.

  Finally she answered. “Do you want me to see what’s on this flash drive or not?”

  “Oh, am I disturbing you?”

  “Lawson Raines, if I didn’t know better, I would think you were worried about me.”

  “Hardly. I just need to know what’s on the flash drive.”

  “Right.” Cassie paused. “So does that mean you are reconsidering taking this matter into your own hands?”

  “No. I just don’t want to be surprised. Johnny mentioned something else was on there. I need to know what that is.”

  “Hold your horses. I’m pulling it up now. This would have been a lot easier if I could have gone into headquarters. But I’m just as wanted as you are now thanks to the party we threw in Sokolov’s suite.”

  Lawson watched as several scantily clad women walked toward the back of the club, while a few groups of rowdy men walked in the front entrance. His biggest obstacle would be getting in. His mind processed the options. They were few. Lawson would most likely be persona non grata, whether Nero believed the text message from Johnny’s phone or not. A text message that was never returned. And that gave Lawson an idea.

  “Damn it,” Cassie blurted just as Lawson was formulating a plan.

  Lawson’s stomach dropped. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “It’s passcode protected. Smart of Johnny, but he died with the code.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  “I’m not at the office, but I think it’s only a small roadblock. Our tech guy owes me a favor.”

  Lawson said, “Can you trust him not to turn you in?”

  “Like I said, he owes me. I’ll have him come see if he can crack it. Hold tight, I’ll call you as soon as I’m in. Don’t do anything until—”

  “Hurry up.” Lawson ended the call. Frustrated. He knew he was going to have to go in regardless of whether the evidence was there or not, so he put the flash drive out of his mind completely.

  Several minutes of tapping on the steering wheel, waiting impatiently for Cassie to get back to him, and Lawson’s patience had run out. He couldn’t wait any longer to do something—anything—even if it was wrong. He reached over to the passenger seat and picked up Johnny’s phone. It wouldn’t be long before Nero got word about what really happened in Sokolov’s hotel suite. Lawson needed to take advantage of that now, if he was ever going to get the chance. He swiped until he found the option to call Nero and pressed the button to do so.

  It only rang once before Nero answered.

  “Hello, Mr. Raines.”

  33

  Lawson was taken aback for a moment. He wasn’t ready for Nero to know already that Johnny was dead. It had only been a little over an hour. But then again, the chief of police was on his payroll.

  Lawson recovered. “Looks like your plan has failed miserably, Nero. You got your own son killed.”

  “You think you have this all figured out, don’t you, Lawson?”

  Lawson wasn’t sure where Nero was going with this, so he said nothing.

  “You think you are smarter than me,” Nero continued. “You think manipulating my naive son to give you incriminating evidence would be enough to bury me?”

  “I don’t think, I know.”

  “That was sloppy of my head of security. But a man like me always has a backup plan.”

  Lawson didn’t like the sound of that.

  “It’s been a busy twenty-four hours, Mr. Raines. For both of us, I’m sure. I must admit, I didn’t see it coming, you turning Johnny on me. But when Evelyn Delaney’s ignorant attempt to have you killed failed, I knew if you hadn’t already put all of us together, that you soon would. So I had to be prepared for something like this.”

  “Am I supposed to be taking notes, Nero?”

  Lawson could feel that his breathing had become labored. He didn’t know where all of this was headed, but he knew wherever it ended up wasn’t going to be good.

  “No, no notes. I think you’ll be able to remember this. You see, Johnny is—was—a smart kid. But he was soft. His mother sheltered him far too much.”

  “This is heartwarming, Nero, but get to the point.”

  “The point, Mr. Raines, is that you have no evidence against me. Your friend at the bureau will be notifying you of this fact at any moment.”

  Lawson reached over and checked his phone.

  “You see, I bought Johnny those flash drives that he uses. They are made by a company called IronKey.”

  On the phone’s lock screen, it showed a missed call from Cassie and a text message.

  Nero continued. “The special thing about an IronKey flash drive, Lawson, is that when an unauthorized computer attempts to unlock the passcode, it automatically alerts the administrator, and all I have to do is press one button to wipe the data from the flash drive.”

  As he heard Nero tell him this, Lawson was reading confirmation of it from Cassie’s text message.

  “Clever little devices, no? It also tells me where the computer is that the flash drive was inserted into, that’s how I know it was your FBI friend who has it. She tried to unlock it from her government-issued laptop. From a Starbucks.”

  Lawson didn’t know what to say. Nero knew it too, so he just let silence fall between them.

  Another text came in from Cassie: I’m sorry, Lawson. Our tech says there is no way to recover it. But we are reverse tracing where the command to erase it was sent from. This is the first time the tech has done something like this, so it could take some time. Don’t move. Hopefully I’ll know where Nero is shortly.

  Lawson took a deep breath. The fact that he would never spend another moment with his daughter washed over him. The fact that no matter what happened, he would never outrun what has happened in the last twenty-four hours settled in. Without that evidence, he was going back to prison. So there was only one thing left to do before the police came for him.

  “Mr. Raines, I know that was hard to hear. But I still haven’t gotten to the good part. I have an even better story to tell you.”

  Lawson was through listening to Nero feel proud of himself. “Story time is over, De Luca. And I’m about to make sure that there’s no chance you’ll live happily ever after.”

  Lawson ended the call and got out of his car. He stalked toward the entrance of De Luca’s strip club. The big man at the door held up his hand. “I need to see your ID.”

  Lawson walked right by him and through t
he entrance of the strip club. The bass was thumping, the all-open, oversized room was dark, except for the spotlights shining down on the massive square stage where all of the women were dancing. Lawson felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “I told you I need to see your—”

  Lawson wheeled around and bludgeoned the man in the mouth with a straight right hand. The man dropped to the floor. Lawson scanned the room, then walked over to the bar on his right. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw two more security guards moving toward him. They had seen him knock the doorman out.

  “Can I get you a drink?” the bottle-blonde bartender with obnoxiously fake breasts asked Lawson as he approached.

  “Where is De Luca’s office?”

  She raised her painted-on eyebrow. “I just work here, buddy.” She noticed the two security guards coming his way in a hurry. Then she pointed at Lawson.

  Lawson turned away from the bar and squared up to the oncoming muscle. The first bouncer threw his tree-trunk arm in a slow right hook toward Lawson’s face. Lawson stepped in, parried the punch with his left arm, and punched the man directly in the throat. The other security guard, even bigger than the first, grabbed Lawson by the lapels of his jacket and brought his big bald head forward, slamming Lawson in the forehead. This knocked both men backward. The force of the blow was like few Lawson had taken. He saw purple stars shooting in front of his eyes, and he nearly blacked out. The music in the club swirled in his ears, taking on a swimming sound.

  Lawson shook his head left and right to clear the cobwebs and stumbled left as he did so. When he put his hand down to catch himself, it landed in an ice bucket that was chilling a bottle of liquor. When he looked up, the bald man was already coming at him again, this time with a punch. Lawson brought the bucket up in a defensive move, and the man’s hand slammed into its metal bottom. The man staggered back, and Lawson windmilled the bucket around and slammed it down on his head, knocking the man out. When Lawson looked up, two more bouncers were right in front of him. He went to pull his pistol from his waistline, but someone caught his arm from behind. Lawson turned, bringing a left hook around with him. It found the temple of a short, round man, but as the man went to the ground, he took the sleeve of Lawson’s suit jacket with him.

  One of the two bouncers was on him now and threw the first punch. Lawson’s right arm came free of the jacket, but his left was still tangled, so he spun and used the part of the jacket that was coming off to catch the bouncer’s punch. He squeezed with his left arm around the bouncer, holding him in place while delivering a right hand to the man’s jaw, then immediately front-kicked the stomach of the second bouncer coming at him. This backed him up. Lawson freed himself of the suit jacket completely with one more 180-degree turn, picked up a chair, wheeled around, and smashed it over that second bouncer’s head.

  By this time, most of the club was dialed in on Lawson and the Pink Kitten staff. Lawson was on fire. From the inside out. There was something burning in him at that moment, a rage that was so hot nothing short of a bullet to the head was going to stop him. He took two steps over to the bar, where the bartender quickly extended a handful of napkins to him.

  “For your head,” she shouted over the music that had yet to stop.

  Lawson hadn’t realized he was bleeding. Must have been from the head butt. He took the napkins and pressed them to his forehead. When he pulled them away, the napkins were soaked in crimson.

  “De Luca’s office is through that door on the back wall,” the bartender pointed. “There’s a stairway back there. It’s all the way at the top. You’ve got some set of balls coming in here like this . . .”

  Lawson didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. He was already halfway to the door she had pointed out. Every eye in the bar was on him now. The people at the tables looked on in fear. But Lawson never saw one of them.

  All he could see was red.

  34

  Lawson knocked on the metal door that the bartender said led to the stairway up to De Luca’s office. Yet another large meathead of a man opened the door, and Lawson greeted him with a stiff hand around his throat. When Lawson pushed forward, the man was caught so off guard that he was easily driven back against the wall. Lawson slammed him in the stomach with a hard right, then stood him back up and once again grabbed him by the throat.

  Lawson growled, “Tell me what I want to know or I rip out your Adam’s apple.”

  The man knew this wasn’t the time to act tough, probably because of the strength he felt in Lawson’s grip. So he nodded emphatically.

  “How many men are upstairs?”

  Lawson relaxed his grip so the man could answer.

  “Two at the door, that’s it.”

  Lawson grabbed him by the back of the neck and forced him out the door, locking it behind him. Two men? With everything Lawson had heard over the years about the notorious security here, something was off. It made him wonder whether all of this was for nothing and De Luca wasn’t there. He should have waited for Cassie. He knew that. But he couldn’t sit in that car and listen to that smug son of a bitch any longer.

  Regardless, Lawson had to know for sure, so he started up the stairs. As he was coming to the top, he slowed, trying to see over the last step. Down a long hallway, he could see the two men he was told would be there, and both of them were already running toward him. They stopped to pull their guns when they saw the top of Lawson’s head. Lawson went back down a few steps and let the men fire off their warning shots. Bits of the concrete block wall were dropping on him from the bullets landing over his head. He waited until the shooting stopped, then walked right up the stairs, firing straight in front of him.

  One of the men had already swapped out his magazine and began firing back. The bullets were hitting the ceiling, however, because Lawson had already shot him twice in the torso, and he was falling backward. The other man dove into a room to his left, immediately pleading for his life.

  “Please don’t kill me! I just started here, I’m an ex-cop!”

  Lawson walked forward and swung around the open door with his gun out in front of him.

  “Please don’t shoot!”

  But the man didn’t have his hands up, he was sliding a fresh magazine into his pistol. And Lawson recognized his face immediately. He was the man standing next to De Luca at the meeting at STK. Lawson knew because he had a long scar running vertically down his left eye. This man was no ex-cop. He was just another of De Luca’s cronies. Lawson squeezed off two shots, stopping the man as he cocked his pistol.

  He turned toward the door the two men were guarding. A moment ago, he had it figured that Nero wasn’t there. But these two men were guarding this door for some reason. And Lawson couldn’t help but hope it was for Nero.

  Lawson looked down at his Glock, the slide was locked back. He was out of bullets. He pried the pistol from the dead man’s hand, chambered a round, and walked toward the now-unguarded door. He didn’t know what he expected to be on the other side, but there was no sense in waiting. He walked up and put his hand on the knob. It wasn’t locked. Two armed gunmen must have figured they would be enough. He pushed the door open and nothing on earth could ever have prepared him for what he saw.

  Lexi.

  35

  Lexi stood from behind the desk where she was sitting. Pure terror on her face. There were two reasons Lawson recognized his daughter immediately after all those years. Of course, from the picture that Cassie had given him the day before. But he wouldn’t have even needed that to know it was her, because standing there before him was a younger version of his wife, and instantly he fell in love with her.

  “Lexi? I . . .” Lawson didn’t have words.

  Lexi backpedaled slowly until her back was against the wall. She was horrified. But did she even know who she was afraid of?

  “D-Dad?”

  The word Dad from her sweet trembling lips brought a wave of emotion that nearly took Lawson to his knees. He stepped forward, slowly. Lexi had nowhere t
o go, but she did her best to sink further into the wall behind her.

  So many things to say, but so many things he couldn’t. All he wanted to do was run to her and squeeze her, hold her, for the first time in ten years. But he couldn’t.

  “Are you all right?” It was the only thing he could think to say.

  Lexi visibly swallowed her rising emotions. “Am I all right? Am I all right?”

  Apparently, that was the wrong starter.

  Lexi pushed off the wall and stood up straight. “Of course I’m not all right. Yesterday, I’m in my room, writing a new song, and here I am today, all the way across the country, the only mother I’ve ever known taken away by some scary guys with guns, and I’m left here all by myself with armed guards at my door. Oh, and the father I’ve never met, who murdered my real mother, is standing in front of me with blood running down his face. No, I am not all right!”

  Apparently she was twelve going on twenty-five. And she writes songs?

  Lawson took a step toward the desk. “I didn’t kill your mother. I loved her more than anything in the world . . . other than you, of course.”

  Lawson could see emotion rising up inside his daughter. But she choked it back.

  “Just stay away from me, okay? Just stay away!”

  “I can’t stay away, Lexi. I have to get you out of here. It isn’t safe.”

  “It’s not?” Her face held an incredulous look, her tone saturated in sarcasm. “I thought with all the gunshots, surely everything was fine.”

  She was her mother’s daughter. All the way down to the smart-ass. She was feigning strength in the face of fear. A coping mechanism hardwired in her DNA. It was a Lauren Raines specialty.

  “It’s okay to be scared, but I’m going to get you out of here safely.”