“Inside from who?”
“The feds.”
“What makes you think that?”
“They were already inside my business. How do you think I avoided arrest all those years? Sure, I was good at that shit, but some of them are good too and eventually, no matter how smart you think you are, you run out of luck.”
“You were a snitch?”
“I prefer to call it a marketer of information.”
“I’d call it a snitch.”
“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t be wrong.”
“I wish you’d never hired me.”
“That didn’t work out for either of us and it really didn’t work out for Katrina.”
“Especially since you were the one banging a cocktail waitress. Kind of a double standard you’ve got going.”
“It's not like that. I really like Jennifer. If Katrina was seeing somebody, I wouldn’t have done anything.”
“You just wanted a clear conscience for your own infidelity?”
“Yeah, in my business I don’t get to have a clear conscience very often.”
“None of this changes the fact Jennifer and Chrissie would be safer with the police. We could leave the feds out of it and you could come in as well. Whatever happened at Jennifer’s, it sure looks like self-defense.”
“It was. You got somebody you can trust that much?”
“Yeah, I think I do,” Margot said thinking about Radcliff and Ames.
Ames didn’t like her, but there was no question he was a straight shooter. If Stone could convince him the Feds had a part in Katrina’s death, he’d do his best to keep Stone out of their hands. Stone seemed to be thinking about it when Margot’s phone buzzed. She saw it was Doreen and went ahead and answered.
“We got lucky and they used the same fake I.D.,” Doreen told her. “They picked up a 2018 Chevrolet Impala last night.”
“Silver?”
“Yeah, how did you know?”
“I saw them,” Margot said as she left the room and headed for the window. Outside was a silver Chevrolet Impala. No one was inside.
“What’s going on, Margot?”
“I’m going to give you an address, send somebody fast.”
Margot was reciting Dandridge’s address as she went back to the living room.
“What’s going on?” Stone asked.
“Trouble,” Margot told him as she ended the call and picked up the shotgun. She pumped a shell into the chamber and then moved around towards the back door. She got there just as somebody used a steel card much like hers to flip the lock on the sliding glass door. Behind him was another man carrying a pistol with a long suppressor screwed into the end.
Margot raised the shotgun. She was going to yell freeze and tell them to drop their weapons, but the back guy was already raising his gun. She fired a split second before he did. Her shot took off the top of the gunman's shoulder and his shot went wild. She worked the pump-action and fired again as the guy who jimmied the door drew his own gun. He took the blast in the chest and went down for good.
The other gunman was still alive. With a huge chunk of his shoulder missing he couldn’t raise his arm to shoot so he switched the gun into his left.
Margot worked the pump again before she said, “Don’t even think about it.”