First Lie Wins(91)

“Have you ever told him no on a job? Ever refused to do something he asked you to do?”

I shake my head. “No. I haven’t.”

She looks off, giving me a frustrated laugh. “You have no idea what he will do if he finds out what you’re planning.”

I’m a little worried she didn’t say what we’re planning, but she hasn’t walked away. Yet.

“He’ll try to wreck us but if we get in front of it, it could be like one of those controlled explosions,” I finally say. “Like when the only way to get rid of a bomb is to detonate it. We’ll control as much as we can, so when things explode, like we know they will, the fallout won’t be as bad.”

She laughs again as if I’m naive. And maybe I am.

“So you’re really doing this,” Amy says a bit later.

“I don’t think we have any other option,” I answer.





Chapter 26


In my line of work, there are the short cons and there are long cons, and I’ve just finished the longest one of my life. I’m feeling a bit out of sorts now that it’s over.

I was only slightly joking when I said I was going to sleep for three days, since I slept for most of two. Devon and Amy tiptoed around me, making sure there was food close by and not peppering me with questions like I know they wanted to.

Because this was a long job for them too.

“You’re finally awake,” Devon says as he sinks down in the chair next to the couch.

“Barely,” I say. “It’s like a hangover but without the fun of getting one.”

He laughs. “So too early to bust out the champagne?”

“It’s never too early for that,” Amy calls out as she enters the room, taking the chair next to Devon. “Morning.”

“If you say so.” Just as I’m thinking about how badly I need coffee, Amy sets a mug down in front of me.

We’re quiet for a moment, then Amy says, “Wish I could have seen his face in the bank vault when he opened the safe deposit box.”

Devon laughs. “I said the same thing.”

Shrugging, I say, “I wanted a jaw-dropping look of astonishment that I had bested him, but I only got a raised eyebrow.”

For the next half hour, I fill them in on all the details of the meeting with the detectives, since Devon wasn’t listening in for that.

“God, you’re lucky he basically sent your twin or you would have been toast,” Amy says. “Even with the alibi from Tyron, it would have been hard to convince them that wasn’t you.”

I shrug. “We could always have risen you from the dead if prison loomed too close. I’m not actually a murderer.”

Amy laughs. “Well, yeah, there’s that too.”

“It was a good thing Amy was already in that laundry basket before the filming started. I checked that building right before I delivered the body from the morgue, and the room directly across from hers was empty.” Devon frowned then added, “I hate when someone gets the jump on me like that.”

I push my foot against his. “Don’t beat yourself up. You’ve saved our asses more times than either of us would like to admit. Can’t be perfect all the time.”

I thought I had asked Devon for everything until I asked him to get me a dead body. A very specific dead body. Newly dead. White. Female. A Jane Doe who no one would miss. Approximately five foot seven inches with long blondish hair that we dressed in that unmistakable red coat.

For our plan to work, Amy Holder needed to die in a big splashy way.

When we first started preparing for this day, the day we would be free from Mr. Smith, none of us knew just how long it would take to get here.

Although the execution took longer than any of us wanted, the plan itself was fairly simple. While we worked through our own jobs, we would look for proof that he was double-crossing any of his own clients. Something big enough that he would fear for his own well-being if it got out. And most importantly, we had to discover his real identity.

Amy was right, though. We had no idea what he would do when he started questioning our loyalty.

We had to flush out anything he had on us early on so we could adapt our plan accordingly. Amy stumbled on the Connolly double-cross, and that was all we needed. So Amy became the sacrificial lamb. She would be the disgruntled employee who would go rogue on a job. If Mr. Smith was holding something in his back pocket that could bring her to heel, he’d be forced to use what he had on her.

And he didn’t disappoint.

It took Amy a long time to tell me about her sister, Heather. They had both been put into the foster-care system when they were young, just after their mom overdosed and no other family showed up to take them in. They were sent to separate families and lost touch. Amy found Heather after she started working for Mr. Smith, using the same resources available to us to do our jobs. We both knew that if Amy had found her, Mr. Smith probably had too.

And that’s where he hit her. Mr. Smith had evidence ready to go that would result in Heather’s arrest for drug use and distribution, and her young daughter, Sadie, would be placed in the foster system. Amy’s and Heather’s worst nightmare.

Devon pulled Heather and Sadie, relocating them to a different state under different names, just after Mr. Smith delivered his first threat against them. This was a temporary fix, but a fix all the same.