Elton Newsome jabbed his fingers into the blinds and cracked them less than an inch. He’d left his sister’s house and rented the cheapest room he could find, but the constant sound of sirens was making him paranoid. His conversation and threats to agents Knight and Brewer hadn’t gotten him any more money, so it was time to kick things up a few notches. If they wouldn’t reward him for what he’d tried to do to help them, then it was time to get his old life back.

He’d been just eight short years from retirement, and he’d fucked himself out of his pension to get a little payback when it came to Cain Casey. Really it was her cousin Muriel who’d pissed him off and humiliated him in front of the feds that day Casey’s house had been shot up.

“Fucking bitch,” he said as he drank from the bottle of Southern Comfort he’d purchased, not trusting the glasses in this place. “You were so fucking smug, and that agent was creaming her panties for you. It wasn’t fucking right.” He screamed that through the crack he’d made in the blinds, not caring if anyone heard him.

“No one goddamn well rewards you for playing by the rules. Those Casey fuckers prove that, so why not me?” The whiskey sloshed out of the bottle as he waved it to make his point. “I’ve seen every perverted thing there is to see in that cesspool of a city, and no one paid me big money to keep looking at it.”

The police rolled up and started hassling some guys in the parking lot, so Elton went back to sitting on the bed. “I tried to do what no other cop had the guts to do, and I fucking end up here.” A cockroach the size of a mouse crawled over his foot, and he kicked out, almost falling off the bed. “That ends tonight.”

He took another swig from the bottle and reached for his phone. If those assholes that were working with him weren’t going to help him, then he had no choice but to contact Annabel Hicks and get her to force the police hierarchy to take him back. There was no way they could deny he was a good cop, no way.

“Put Annabel Hicks on the phone,” he demanded when an operator answered. That surprised him since he figured he’d have to navigate his way through one of those automated things.

“Can I ask who’s calling?” The woman sounded like a brick wall who wasn’t about to give him what he wanted.

“Look, she’s going to want to talk to me, considering she’s probably been looking for me for weeks. I’m not going to hold forever.”

“May I place you on a brief hold?”