“The Philistines, who are the bad guys in the story, put Sampson in prison. Eventually his hair grows back and he brings down the pillars of the temple with his tremendous strength, crushing himself and a whole bunch of Philistines.”

“What happens with Delilah?” I ask.

“The Bible doesn’t specifically say.”

I lean back in my chair and cross my arms.

“I believe I can speak for all of us here in saying thank you so much, Flint, for the uplifting, cliffhanger story. My day would have felt incomplete without it. Rocco, slide that bottle of whiskey over this way. I need a fucking drink. Or two.”

Rocco pushes the whiskey over to me and I take a long swig and then another.

Jesse laughs and grabs the whiskey bottle from me to take a drink, too.

“I feel sorry for little Josh,” Jesse says. “For having to listen to Flint’s stupid shit stories every day of his life.”

“You’re all going to feel sorry for Sam and for the MC when this thing goes south,” Flint replies. “Can we at least talk about what he should be doing to help things out? Besides sliding between her legs. We need to get ahead of this situation.”

“What do you have in mind?” Jesse asks.

“Sam should check Lila’s cell phone and see who she is calling and how often. Is she reporting in to the ATF every day? Once a week? How much time do we have left to turn this around? Read her text messages. Does she have a computer?”

“A laptop,” I answer.

“Try to get into it.”

“She’s a hacker,” I remind him. “There’s no way I’m getting into her computer.”

“She never leaves it open?”

“Not unless she wants me to read what’s on the screen.”

“Like what?”

“A fake magazine article she’s supposedly writing.”

Flint raises his eyebrows. “And you think she’s not playing you?”

There’s nothing I can say to that, so I take another swig of whiskey.

“We need to find out more about her personal life,” Flint says. “Like where she lives in Atlanta, who her friends are, and all about her family.”

I don’t like the sound of this. “Why do we need to know about her family?”

Jesse and Flint both look away from me.

“What are you two thinking?”

“We might need some kind of leverage with her down the road,” Jesse says, still refusing to look me in the eyes.

“You would threaten her family?” I ask. “Like her parents?”

All she has in the world are two old parents, and the MC wants to find them.

The whiskey is beginning to burn a hole in my gut.