He looked at me then, the anger and scorn back on his face.
“I assume I had something to do with that change?” I said.
“Oh yes.”
“Care to explain?”
“Do you remember Errol Malvin?”
I pause, twisted my wrists against the tight cuffs as I thought. “Fed. Was on the payroll. Murdered after he got caught,” I said.
“I’m impressed,” he replied, though his expression didn’t match the words he spoke. He looked on the verge of exploding with his anger.
“Did I get the story right?” I asked blandly, knowing my description didn’t begin to match the emotion Benton felt, knowing that my nonchalance would get deep under his skin, and happy about that fact.
“The big parts, but you forgot the details.”
“Which you will now fill in for me,” I said.
“You said he was murdered. He wasn’t. He killed himself.”
“He was facing a long sentence as I recall. Some people aren’t designed for confinement.” The idea of long years in a cage was too much for many, so it wasn’t uncommon for those confronting a long sentence to take the alternative.
“Malvin wasn’t. He definitely wasn’t. He definitely wasn’t designed to be a criminal either, but that’s exactly what you made him,” Benton said, jabbing a finger in the air.
“How?” I asked.
“How?” he said scornfully.
“Yes,” I said. “How.”
“You fucking knew he had a weakness and you exploited it. That’s how!”
“I offered him money for information. He didn’t have to take it,” I said.
Benton stood, completely enraged now. “Is that how you see it? You were just a simple courier? Gave money in exchange for information? You have no other role to play?”
“Yes, that how I see it,” I said. And that was how it was, a simple business exchange and nothing more.
Benton clearly disagreed.
He moved with lightning speed, and the impact of his booted foot against my jaw set my head reeling. My jaw throbbed, and my ears began to ring. I fought back against the dizziness, though my head still swam.
“You’re wrong,” he said as he loomed in front of me.
I braced myself for the next kick.
Thirty-Two
Milan
“Can I offer you anything? Anything at all? Maybe just water?”
I sat rigid in what I knew was an expensive leather chair, my feet padded by an equally expensive rug, the rest of the room also tastefully furnished and giving off the air of an accountant’s office, or maybe a very expensive therapist’s office. Not that I was really able to take any of it in.
“Would you like water?”
The woman, Senna, had asked that question three times in the fifteen minutes I had been here, and each time I had told her no. It finally occurred to me that perhaps it wasn’t a question.
“Water would be nice,” I said.
My stomach rebelled at the thought of putting anything in it, even water, but I watched her as she walked across the expensive rug and went to a small shelf of beverages.
The inside of this building couldn’t have been more different than the outside, which confirmed that the neglected outside was intentional. Everything inside screamed “expensive” and appeared to be a business of some sort, though I had no clue what kind.
Senna returned to me, glass in hand, and I took it and drank the water down heartily.
“Thank you,” I said after I finished. “I didn’t even know I needed that.”
“You’re welcome,” she replied, smiling.
“You saw me on the camera?” I asked.
“No. But I saw Adrian leaving, so I followed him.”
Something in her voice made me pause.
“I assume that’s a good thing for me that you followed him,” I said.
She said nothing, just smiled again, but that was answer enough.
What would have happened had she not followed Adrian, who I still hadn’t actually seen head-on, was no mystery to me.
But many other things were, including how she’d gotten here, and where here even was, because I doubted an ordinary business was running out of a building that had been staged to look dilapidated on the outside but was opulent inside.
But all of those were secondary, because I needed to help Priest.
“How much longer?” I asked.
Senna shrugged. “I called him.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to rush you, but I have to. It’s important.”
“I told him it was urgent,” she said, then she smiled softly again and patted my leg.
“Who’s ‘him’?” I asked.
She frowned with disbelief and then said, “You don’t know him?”