CHAPTER NINETEEN

Chief and Hex walked into the bridge club only to be greeted by the same woman who had greeted Sebastian and Emelia. She must have known they would come back. That or she was the only one guarding the gate. Cocky when they left her, she just didn’t have any idea of how bad it was going to be.

“If you’re here about those bank robbers, we don’t know a thing,” she said, smiling at Hex and Chief.

“Wrong answer,” said Hex, shoving the desk aside and pushing the woman in her wheeled office chair toward the wall. She screeched, and two older men came out, staring at them. Then, they saw that they were not alone. A group of federal agents walked into the building. The yellow logo of the FBI on the back of their jackets. They were armed with crates to remove evidence and weapons that they were not about to test out.

“You lied. You lied about knowing all of them,” said Hex, pointing to the wall. “You lied about knowing Frank. He’s dead now, by the way.” The two men and the woman gasped, looking at one another.

“The funds of this club are now frozen and in federal custody. This club will be shut down, and you will not have access to your banking, this building, or anything else belonging to the club.”

“You can’t do this! Joey, call someone to help!” she yelled at the man.

“Frank was the one that could help, Anne. We’re done. Just shut up.”

“It would go a lot easier on you if you’d just tell us everything you know. Anything that could be helpful.”

The woman folded her arms over her chest, stubbornly refusing any assistance. For an old bird, she definitely wasn’t easily intimidated.

“What’s with you, lady? You’re caught. You don’t get a free pass out of jail because you’re old. They’re going to try and convict you.”

“I don’t care,” she said, jutting her chin out.

“Maybe you should,” frowned Hex.

“She doesn’t care because they helped her,” said the man called Joey.

“Shut up!”

“You shut up, Anne! They helped her when she was about to lose her house. She’d put everything she had into helping her loser son and didn’t have a dime to her name. The bank was going to take her house, and he sure didn’t give a fuck.

“Willie was able to find the tax records and wiped them clean, making it look as though the tax payments were paid for the next ten years. Helen made sure that she had enough to live on, while Jeffrey made sure the loser son gave her back some of the money.”

“He’s not a loser,” she scowled.

“He is. He’s your son, but he’s still a loser, Anne.”

“How did Jeffrey make that happen?” asked Chief. The man looked at Anne, who was pleading with her eyes, begging him not to say another word.

“Jeffrey and Ryan are half-brothers. The loser son and the cop. What a combination, right?”

“Your son is Jeffrey Banks?” growled Hex. She looked away, not wanting to give anything away, although it was already done.

“What kind of shit is her son into?” asked Chief.

“He’s the boss of a gang. The Silencers.”

“The Silencers? Your son is the fucking boss of The Silencers? Do you have any idea what kind of people they are? Jesus, lady, you’re something else. So your cop son, Jeffrey, helps his deranged criminal brother, Ryan, all the while robbing banks to help you and other senior citizens.”

“You guys need to come see this,” said one of the agents, walking back out front from the main meeting space.

“Watch these three. Especially her,” said Hex. “If she moves, put a bullet in her head.” The agent stared at him, then back at the old woman.

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you have?” asked Chief.

The agent pointed to a pair of double doors leading to what should have been a storage room. Instead, inside were dozens of maps pinned to the walls, marked with routes and check-in points. They even had little cars glued to the maps.

“Well, I guess with only one of them being the tech expert, they had to have something old school, didn’t they? Get pictures of all of this so we can double-check and be sure that these were already hit. If there’s something new on there, we need to know where it is.”

“Yes, sir. Our tech guy got into the computer system as well. They’re definitely not very stealth. There is a folder titled Help, and it’s not help for the computer system. It looks like it’s filled with requests for assistance from the elderly. Dozens of scanned e-mails, letters, cards, everything you can imagine, begging for assistance of some kind. There must be some sort of secret network they all know about, and we don’t.”

“Great. Just fucking great,” muttered Hex. “Send that file to us, and we’ll start sifting through to see if there’s anything we can do.”

“Yes, sir. What do we do about the three out front?” Hex looked at Chief, and they both knew what they had to do.

“Arrest them.”