“I don’t know. All I know is you can’t trust any of them,” Meadows said through clenched teeth. He did know that the minute he walked through Cosmo Cricket’s front door, he was a dead man. He corrected the thought—two minutes, maybe three, because Santiago would have to take the bag and count the money in it. Yeah, yeah, three minutes and he was a dead man. There wasn’t going to be any trip to a private airport, not if Javier Vincente Rodriguez was calling the shots. The man was the most evil, repulsive deviant walking the planet. With that thought in mind, Meadows decided his fate was better left in the hands of the people staring at him than the Scorpions and Javier Vincente Rodriguez.

“All right. I’ll do whatever you want. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

“Hold on, everybody. There’s another text coming in on Meadows’s phone,” Dennis said. “Uh-oh! He wants to know what the other job is and how much you’ll be paying. If they accept whatever job it is, they want the money up front. Do you have that much with you?”

“Well of course he does.” Maggie giggled.

“What’s the job?” Charles demanded in a voice none of them had ever heard before. Even Cyrus tilted his head and looked up at the big man towering over all of them.

“Kill Javier Vincente Rodriguez. Then Santiago can take control of the local Lobos chapter and bring his members into the fold. That’s been his goal from the beginning. He just couldn’t make it happen. A cool million. It’s all in the bag,” Meadows said.

“Someone google Javier Vincente Rodriguez,” Fergus said.

“On it,” Ted responded.

Dennis flexed his fingers as he itched to fire off a response as soon as Charles gave the okay. When he nodded, Dennis’s fingers flew over the keys. “Done!” he said triumphantly.

Zack Meadows’s eyes misted over. Then he closed them. Might as well practice what it felt like to be dead. His thoughts took him through his life as he wondered how he had gotten to this place in time. Once he’d been a decent, upstanding guy like Cosmo Cricket. Once. And then the glitz and the glamour of Vegas took hold, and he embraced it along with all that money could buy. He let his mind roll call all the people he’d cheated and stolen from and the lives he’d ruined before he stepped down into the bowels of hell. This was Vegas. If you lived and worked here, you knew the rules. If you played, you ended up paying. It was that simple. Before he allowed himself to fall asleep, he wondered what it would be like, living in hell.

“Now what?” Jack asked.

“Now we plan,” Charles said. “Gather round, boys and one girl. We need to talk.”