“Jade.” I spat out her name.
Jade was my ex-girlfriend, the one who betrayed me. Betrayal was too kind of a word for what she’d done. Attempted murder was more accurate. I didn’t know if she’d ever given a shit about me, or if she’d just been Coker’s lackey from the very beginning. Coker knew I was too paranoid for him to do something to me himself, so he’d used her. She was the one who’d slipped me something at the fight, laced my drink.
Jade could go to hell as far as I was concerned.
“She’s nowhere, you know,” he said. “Fell off the radar. She's probably out in the desert somewhere.”
I already knew that much. Jade had disappeared after that fight, months ago. I'd tried to get a handle on where she'd gone before I left, but I couldn't. I didn’t know if Coker was protecting her or if she was dead. To be honest, after what she’d done to me, I hoped it was the latter.
“Good riddance,” I said. "The same shit should happen to Coker. We could leave him out in the desert."
Trigg looked over at me from the passenger seat, a grin on his face. "Yeah, sure, we'll just kill him and leave him out there. No problem." He paused for a beat. "A pretty boy like you should do well in prison."
"Shut the hell up before I punch that fucking smile off your face," I said.
"Seriously, though," Trigg said. "A couple of friends of mine are with a biker club out here that does some fighting, run bets and stuff for some of the rich folks out here. The Inferno MC. I'm sure they could make Coker disappear."
"Or we could do it ourselves."
"Have you ever disposed of a body?" Trigg asked. "It's not that fucking easy. This isn't a damn TV show. Do you know how much forensic shit there is to think about?"
I laughed. "You've been watching too much CSI."
"I'm not joking, man," he said. "You're the fucking genius. You should know that."
"Why do you think I haven't taken care of him?" I asked.
Trigg shrugged. "I don't know what you got going on in that big fat brain of yours," he said. “I really just thought you'd up and left Vegas for West Bend."
"I need to go back," I said. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, thinking about all the crap I needed to deal with back home.
"Yeah. What happened with your mom was some bad juju," he said, shaking his head.
"I guess so." I didn't have anything else to say about it. I'd been pondering my mother's suicide since it happened. Overdose by pills and booze just didn't seem like her style. It wasn't that I doubted she was capable of killing herself. But there were reasons she wouldn't. Like the fact that my abusive asshole of a father was finally out of the picture. It made no sense to kill herself now, after her tormentor was finally dead.
"We'll get some beers, dude. Take your mind off things." Trigg's voice broke through my thoughts. "Tonight. One of the guys from my gym has a girl that's bartending at one of the fancy hotels here. She'll hook us up - we won't even have to pay."
"All right," I agreed. "Tonight. Hey, did you ask around about the girl that was with Coker at the fight?"
Trigg chomped on another chip. "Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you," he said. "She's been into some of the gyms around town. A television producer, deals with Chinese fights or some shit like that. A private channel. Maggie something. James? Jameson. Maggie Jameson."
"Chinese fights," I said.
Trigg brushed chip crumbs off his lap and onto the floor. I made a mental note to get the car detailed before Elias saw it and had a heart attack. I could already see him, clutching at his chest before keeling over at the very thought of crumbs in the seats of his car. "I don't know," he said. "Middle Eastern maybe? Something like that. Who knows? Foreign channels - I mean, really, who the hell cares?"
So Tempest was calling herself Maggie. She was an international television producer. Or posing as one, more likely. The thought almost made me laugh. What a bunch of bullshit.
Elias had called earlier, undoubtedly wanting to know where the hell his car was, but I ignored it. I hadn't checked in with Luke or Killian, either. I didn't even know if they were still in town. I needed to go home. Nothing was keeping me here now that the fight was done.
Except Tempest.
She was running some kind of scam. She had to be. And if she was scamming Coker, I sure as hell wanted to know what she was doing.
And I sure as hell wanted in on it.
I handed Coker the slip of paper with the account numbers written on it.
He took it, the tremor in his hand betraying his nervousness. "This is it, then," he said.