But it was personal now—Ice understood that. The girl had betrayed Cyrus in a big way. She deserved her fate. And there would be collateral damage, Ice could see that already. The Feds were obviously trying to hide her. She would be guarded. None of that mattered to Ice. He’d track her down and take care of the problem. He’d worked for too long with Cyrus. Failure was not an option.

Ice opened a beer. Cyrus had sounded more agitated than Ice had ever heard him. Sitting on the bed, he muted the sound on the television to think, watching the screen but not really seeing it. His thoughts took him back over the years to when he and Cyrus had met. It was through Boss Cross, the man who had literally pulled him up out of the gutter. Ice had grown up as Royal Redd. As the son of two drug addicts, he’d never really known his parents. They’d surrendered their parental rights when he was three years old. For six years he lived with his alcoholic maternal grandmother. But her death to cancer when he was nine was the end of any charade of stability.

It was also the end of his conscience. Tossed into a foster home with the first name Royal and the last name Redd, he was teased mercilessly. He learned to fight and steal to survive. A boy named Sue had nothing on a boy named Royal Redd.

He bounced from foster home to foster home until he turned seventeen. By then he’d learned to support himself by theft and con. Con especially energized Royal. He’d honed his ability to sell any illusion he tried and to make people believe him. The most important discovery he made was that his looks got him things from women. At eighteen he’d had three women strung out and turning tricks for him. That was where he’d met Cross.

Cross had pulled up in a stretch limo looking for girls. Girls, not women. Royal found him one, and a partnership was born. Royal learned to do whatever Cross asked: procure girls, deal with problems, anything. Then he’d been sent to find a witness, and he thought his way out of a difficult situation, and Royal earned his nickname Ice.

“You are Ice.” Cross had beamed. “I don’t think Devo could have thought on his feet like that.” The girl had slipped through his fingers, but Cross was certain she’d surface sooner or later. But in twenty-five years, that hadn’t happened.

Ice never dwelled on his first failure. She was probably dead in a gutter, he thought now, brushing away any regret. Thinking about the one who’d gotten away made Ice renew his vow to find Chevy by whatever means necessary.