The one shaken is me. I’ll never be inside a warehouse again and not feel like throwing up.
“Oh come on,” Hawk is saying to a guy I’ve never seen before. Another huge, tank-shaped guy with a scar on his cheek. “That’s all you got? ‘You’re dead?’ How about ‘Suck my big hairy dick,’ or at the very least, ‘Eat shit and die’?”
I smile at that. That’s the parting shot I had chosen for him. Feels like weeks have passed since then.
“I would challenge you to a battle of wits,” Hawk drawls, “but I see you are unarmed.”
“You think you’re so smart,” the guy spits and kicks at Hawk who rolls, hopefully out of reach.
“Shakespeare thought so.”
“Shut up. Boss wants to see you.”
“Thank you for letting me know. I’ll see if I can make time in my busy schedule. Wait… oh no. Sandivar isn’t the real boss, is he? I bet nobody knows who the real boss is, least of all you.”
The thug kicks at him again, and this time his boot connects with Hawk’s side because he lets out a pained grunt.
God, he’s pushing it again. Pushing for information, I know that now, but it doesn’t make watching any easier.
“You’ll never meet the Big Boss,” the thug hisses so low I’m not even sure Hawk can hear him where he’s curled on the floor, turned away, his face a mask of pain.
“I bet you don’t know who he is,” Hawk mutters.
/> “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? I’m Sandivar’s right hand, he tells me everything.”
“His right hand, huh? The one holding his dick?”
Oh crap. Seriously, I can’t look. I peek through my fingers.
The thug grabs Hawk and lifts him to his feet. “You think I’m stupid, that I’ll give you names? That I don’t know that’s how you got your dad to confess and put him in prison?”
Hawk grunts, grabs the man’s arms and glares are him through his filthy hair. “I have no recording device here.”
“That so?” another voice asks and awesome, the Boss, Sandivar, is here. He’s holding… a watch? “And what about this?”
“That’s my father’s watch,” Hawk says, trying to shove the thug off him and failing. “He gave it to me when I was twelve. Family heirloom.”
“Funny he didn’t explain to you the use of these buttons here. See, I have a similar watch. It can record, both video and audio, and… see this? It has a GPS function, too, that can be used with a timer. Quite nifty, right?”
The thug releases Hawk who stumbles backward, then catches himself, his face white. “Fuck.”
“Well, since you betrayed your father, the one who gave you this watch… you don’t mind if I smash it, do you?”
Hawk flinches when the watch crashes to the ground, and the Boss nods at the huge guy with the scar to step on it.
And oh boy he does, shattering it under his heavy boots, again and again.
The GPS signal he talked about.
Gone.
“Now that we got this out of the way… The transaction you told your lawyers to rush didn’t come through.”
“It takes fucking time for such a transaction to—”
“Don’t bullshit me anymore. You think you have secrets from me, Jamie Fleming? I know everything about you. I know things about you that you don’t even know. I know how to hit your friends and make them bleed. You can’t hide anything from me, and I have you in the palm of my fucking hand.”
Hawk curses, and he fists his hands like he’s two seconds away from launching himself at Sandivar.