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.
We controlled that explosion.
It also didn’t hurt that Heather and Devon hit it off, and he’s been very protective of both of them ever since. No one was going to be able to get near her or her daughter.
“What does this mean for Heather and Sadie?” I ask Amy now. “Will they head back to Tulsa?”
“She likes Phoenix. It wouldn’t surprise me if they stayed there. The fresh start has been good for them.” Amy grins and turns to Devon. “I heard you may be relocating to Phoenix too.”
“Maybe,” Devon says with a shrug, but the smile gives him away.
Once Heather and Sadie were out of immediate danger, Amy relocated to Atlanta, where she would act wild and unstable. Mr. Smith would be left with only one option—send someone to retrieve what Amy had.
Our biggest risk was assuming that I would be given the job. We timed Amy going rogue to coincide with me just finishing a job, so I was available. And truth be told, I was one of the best he had working for him. We had a contingency in place in case he didn’t send me, but thankfully the job was mine.
And while Mr. Smith had people there to watch me watch Amy, they didn’t look closely enough at the bartender who served Amy her drinks or notice that Devon didn’t put any alcohol in them. It didn’t strike them as odd that every time Amy screamed at me, making sure to let critical information slip at the precise moment we needed it to, it was always in a very public setting—which guaranteed it would trickle back to him.
Or that Amy chose Atlanta to ride out this storm she created, which was also home to one of my oldest and most famous friends, who would happily supply me with an alibi. Tyron made sure we knew Tuesday nights worked best for him.
Amy played her part perfectly. She was on a dozen security cameras when she left the bar and walked across the street into that hotel. Staggering the whole way. It was no stretch that she would have been careless with her cigarette in that state. I pushed Amy out of that hotel room in the housekeeping cart, then Devon took over as she continued her escape to the parking garage and into the car we had waiting there. She’s been hiding in this cabin ever since.
I wanted Mr. Smith suspicious of me, but I wasn’t prepared for him having hard evidence that would implicate me in her murder.