It hadn’t been the code response.
I found an empty blackjack table manned by a bored looking dealer and sat down to play. After I’d lost a bit of money, I jerked my chin toward the woman as she made the rounds through the various tables.
“New pit boss?” I asked. “I haven’t seen her here before.”
The dealer’s uninterested eyes followed the gesture. “Oh, yeah. Not just her, either. New ownership came in last week and took a broom to the entire management team—swept ’em right out the door.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s pretty crazy. Hit me again, please.”
He dealt me a six, for a total of eighteen.
“Stand,” I said.
The dealer flipped over the hole card, revealing two tens.
After a couple more games, I tipped the guy and headed out.
“Well?” Alex asked, when I climbed into the Jeep and slammed the door shut.
“We’re in the shit,” I said without preamble. “Someone’s taking out the underground in Montreal a piece at a time. They’re cutting deep and fast. My guess is they must have inside knowledge.”
* * *
Beckett’s third meetingwas always going to be more of a challenge to deal with—another reason we’d put it off till last. This was the high-level stuff, where we assumed he’d been planning to discuss what Leo and Kam might be able to offer the underground thanks to the international diplomatic contacts they’d made over the years.
We didn’t have a name. We didn’t even have a location. Ironically, we might have been able to get that information from the person he’d intended to contact through the casino, but that approach was fucked, now.
“We need to go lower down the ladder, not higher,” Alex said. “Find out what the foot soldiers know about the sweeps that are taking out the higher-ups.”
I grunted acknowledgement. “Try The Jackal first?”
“Might as well start there,” she agreed.
The Jackal was a dive bar at the edge of La Petite-Patrie, an unassuming working-class neighborhood situated south of Avenue Papineau and north of the railroad tracks. The owner wasn’t a member of the underground as far as I knew, but she’d raised ‘not giving a shit about what her patrons got up to in her bar’to an art form. That made it a popular place for sympathizers to gather and discuss low-level business, and it meant we were likely to find a familiar face or two there.
The place was a squat brick building on the corner of two unremarkable streets, clinging like a grungy barnacle to a much larger building next to it. The neighborhood was a dump with cracks and potholes in the roads, not to mention a pervasive air of sketchiness. The view from the row of tiny, flyspecked windows along the side of the bar wall overlooked the loading dock at the back of a grocery store on the next block.
“You take me to all the nicest places,” I told Alex. “Have I mentioned that lately?”
She shot me a glare and didn’t reply.
Our entrance hadn’t garnered much in the way of interest from the other patrons. The place was busy enough, with people getting off from their nine-to-five jobs and stopping by for a drink on their way home. I scanned the crowd, aware of Alex doing the same beside me. She touched my arm and jerked her chin toward a rat-faced man nursing a beer at the end of the bar.
His gaze flew up to us as we approached, his expression startled and wary. He looked vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t anyone I knew personally. Alex apparently did, though.
“Étienne,” she greeted.
The man’s eyes grew wide. “Alex—what thehellare you doing here?”
“Good to see you, too,” she said, deadpan. “I need information. Something big is going down, and we’re out of the loop. We need to get back in the loop fast so we can figure out what’s happening.”
The guy looked like he was about to have an aneurysm. “What you need is to get thefuck out of Montreal. Are you crazy? Beckett got his name plastered all over the newspapers for breaking an unregistered omega out of police custody last month, and you’re one of his alpha lapdogs. Think they’re not after you, too?”
“Beckett’s missing,” Alex said flatly. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Oh,shit.” Étienne pushed his beer away. “How long has he been gone for?”
“A few days. He came to Montreal for a series of meetings and didn’t come back when he was supposed to. Didn’t leave a message with the usual go-between, either.” Alex leaned closer. “We’ve been following a trail of busted businesses and casinos. What the hell is going on in this city?”
