“Something’s not right,” said Scott.

“Why’d you say that?” asked the tech.

“Burnham didn’t give a reason why he was there. McGrath knows we’ve had him in custody. It’d be the first thing Burnham would cover so McGrath wouldn’t think he was being set up. And if he didn’t think he was being set up, he wouldn’t have been all ‘Mister Burnham this, Mister Burnham that.’ He would have been like ‘What the fuck are you doing here, Spencer?’”

Chris drove the rental down Martin Luther, searching.

Spencer crashed backward through the door into the loading bay. Before he could get up, he took a kick in the ribs, ribs that hadn’t healed since the last beating. Blood began to pool in his liver. He rolled protectively onto his front. He could only exhale if he forced the air out with a loud moan.

“Hey now,” said Cal, grabbing his shoulders and flipping him onto his back again. “What’s that? Not like you not to have some wiseass shit ready?”

Spencer struggled to speak. “For fuck’s sake, Cal, it wasn’t me who brought the cops to the drop-off.”

Cal scrunched Spencer’s shirt up in his fists and pulled him up close. “Since you got here, everything’s gone to rat shit.”

“I just brought back all the money—”

“I hated your face from day one, the way you talk, the way you drive.”

Cal wasn’t going to let up. Spencer reached up, embraced him tightly, and then used his weight to pull back. Unbalanced, Cal fell forward and went mad. But at least they were on the same level.

As they rolled on the floor, Cal’s phone fell out of his pocket and went skittering across the ground into a corner. Neither man noticed.

Cal was strong and madder than a wrongly shot hog. Soon he was punching the hell out of Spencer’s face and Spencer had no moves left.

Inside the ops truck, Scott was facing a small rebellion.

“You do this with backup,” the tech was saying. “Or a SWAT team on call. These guys, they’ve killed a cop.”

“We’ve got two unmarked close by, that’s another three guns,” said Scott.

“Wow! This isn’t my op so just excuse me if I’m saying something you don’t want to hear. But why did your Burnham guy want to know where we’d be? ’Cause he’s gonna make a deal with them. CPS has taken his kid for Chrissakes! The guy’s got nothing!”

There was a knock at the back of the truck. They looked at each other.

“Oh, sweet Jesus, I hate being right,” said the tech.

Both cleared leather.

Johnny Boy looked down at Spencer and Cal.

“What the hell is it with you two? The cops are waiting for him, Cal. If you kill him, I think they may suspect foul play.”