“Smart,” the guy said. He removed Walter’s gun and stood up.
A second figure — taller than the first, and thinner — appeared in the open doorframe and walked over. Walter lay still, too tired to get up. He spent the next few seconds processing how to proceed.
The tall man crouched next to him. “Walter, I’m Monroe. We talked on the phone? The handsome guy over there is Barnes.”
“That’s Walter?” the man named Barnes said.
Monroe produced his cell phone and showed it to Walter. His employee picture was on the screen. “Yup.”
“Shit, I almost blew his head off,” Barnes said.
Monroe chuckled. “Good thing you didn’t.”
“Close call…”
“Good help is hard to find,” Monroe said, smiling down at Walter. Then he stood up and extended his hand. Walter grabbed it and let the man pull him up. “We heard two shots, thought you were in trouble,” Monroe said. “Sorry about the door.”
Walter looked over at the window, but Allie was gone.
Of course she was gone. She’d seen him murder Jack right before her eyes. He’d run too if the woman he was dating did that. There was no telling how long she’d been standing out there before he noticed her. How much had she heard?
“What happened to your head?” Monroe was saying.
Walter nodded at Jack’s body.
“What’d he do, tune you up?” Monroe asked.
“He sliced off half of my left ear.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
Just mentioning the ear made it tingle, and he touched the bandage over it, grimacing from the contact. It had stopped bleeding, but it still hurt — even more so when he paid attention to it. There had been surprisingly little blood after Jack first cut off the piece, but the pain had been unbelievable. He had screamed and, at one point, cried like a child. He would have been ashamed of it if Lucy and Allie had seen or heard him, but thank God they weren’t at the house when Jack decided to “incentivize” him into working.
Walter focused back on the window. “She was outside…”
“Who?” Monroe asked.
“Allie.”
“Your girlfriend,” Monroe said. He flicked at his cell phone’s screen with his forefinger and showed Allie’s employee picture to Walter. “She was inside the house, too.”
Walter stared disbelieving at him.
Allie? Inside the house earlier? But wasn’t that when it sounded like all hell was breaking loose?
“Inside?” Walter said. “When was Allie inside?”
“The shooting earlier. That was her. She and the dog popped out of the basement. Killed two of my guys before they ran off.”
“Allie killed two of your guys?”
Monroe nodded and narrowed his eyes at him. “You didn’t know she was capable of something like that?”
“Allie’s a secretary…”
“Maybe, but the woman I saw back there knew how to handle a gun. Shot one of my guys point-blank while he was trying to zip up his pants, if you can believe it, then shot another one when he chased her into the basement.”
“You let her go?”
Monroe jerked a thumb at Barnes. “I’m all out of fresh bodies, except for that guy. She could stay down in the basement the entire night, for all I care. You were always the priority, even more so now after our little chat. But it looked like she climbed out, snuck around the house.” He looked almost impressed when he added, “That’s a hell of a woman you got there, Walt.”
Walter turned back to the window, replaying the look on Allie’s face after she saw him kill Jack. She’d looked shocked and confused. He wondered if her expression was anything like what was on his face at the moment.
“I gotta tell you, Walt, I’m not someone who changes sides in the middle of a job,” Monroe was saying behind him, “but if you’re not bullshitting me about the money involved…”
“I’m not,” Walter said.
“I believe you, because you definitely wouldn’t want to lie to me, or Barnes here.”
“It’s just money,” Walter said. “There’s more than enough to go around.”
“Good to hear it.” Monroe nodded at the laptop, lying in pieces on the floor. “I take it that doesn’t matter anymore?”
“Not anymore…”
He could feel Monroe’s and Barnes’s eyes on him as Walter walked over and picked up the handgun he had dropped.
How much did they really know, he wondered. They were mercenaries, which was exactly why he knew he could convince them to see things his way. Men who slaved for the Almighty Dollar were easy to sway, especially when the numbers were this high.
Walter felt better with the gun in his hand, something he never thought he’d say in a million years until tonight. Not that he was delusional enough to think he could shoot it out with the two of them, but there was something to be said for not being completely helpless. And he had proven to them, with Jack, that he was fully capable of violence, too.
“Where is it?” Monroe asked. “Where’s the money?”
“Cyberspace,” Walter said. “Every cent that I took from Gorman and Smith.”
“And you can get your hands on it again?”
Half of it, because the other half belongs to someone else, someone who would probably shoot me if he finds out what I’m doing right now, Walter thought, but he said instead, “Absolutely.”
If he thought the guest bedroom was a mess, the living room was like a war zone. Most of the furniture was overturned and shredded, there were bullet holes in the walls and floor and ceiling, and glass was sprinkled everywhere, crunching under his shoes as he walked out of the bedroom hallway and through the house. Red splatters covered the floor and walls and furniture, and Walter gagged slightly at the unmistakable smell of blood in the air.
“Sorry about the mess,” Monroe said.
“What happened?” Walter asked.
“Your girlfriend and the dog happened. I think I nicked it, but it managed to escape through the front door when this moron opened it.”
“Hey,” Barnes said. “I didn’t know it was waiting on the other side.”
“That’s one smart dog,” Monroe said to Walter.
He nodded. The dog’s name was Apollo, and it was Allie’s. They’d come as a package deal, though of course he didn’t know she had a dog until the third date. Walter had a hard time believing the animal that always slept in a corner of Allie’s apartment and barely acknowledged his presence whenever he stayed overnight was capable of turning his house into…this. But he’d seen what Apollo had done to Jones, one of Jack’s people, because the body was still in the other guest bedroom when he had walked past earlier.
“Who is she?” Monroe asked.
“Who?” he said.
“Allie.”
“She was my friend’s secretary at Gorman and Smith. We started dating five months ago.”
“That’s it? Her résumé didn’t say anything about being a gun pro?”
Walter shook his head.
Monroe didn’t look as if he believed him, but he didn’t push the subject.
“How did she get into the basement?” Walter asked.
“Through the back window,” Barnes said. “I wanted to go in after her, but boss man here said to hold back.”
“You were the prize,” Monroe said.
You mean the money I stole from Gorman and Smith, Walter thought, but he said, “I have to find her.”
“Later,” Monroe said. “First, let’s talk turkey. How much are we really talking about here, and how does it work? How do you access the money?”