Bad Boy's Last Race Read Free Page B

crew’s little sister, then Drazic is our father, or the closest thing most of us have ever had. Salt and pepper dark hair, well-tanned Mediterranean skin, and an expression that can go in an instant from warm and friendly to cold and lethal. I do my best to stay on his friendly side. Doesn’t always work. “You gonna let me race her Saturday?”
    “Don’t see why not, if Elena says she’s good.” Drazic claps me on the shoulder. “With the McManuses more or less eliminated, should be a few extra slots open.”
    “Me, too?” Elena asks, practically bouncing on the balls of her steel-toed boots.
    “Lennox, Nash, Elena, Jagger . . . sounds like a damned fine roster to me.” His fingers dig further into my shoulder, then he steps away. “Jag, I got some fresh inventory for you to load, if you’re done pulling my niece off her paying jobs.”
    “Sure thing, boss.” I follow him back to the office, crammed with banker’s boxes full of receipts, catalogs, invoices, and the random spare part. “We’re running pretty low, though. Shipments have been backed up . . .”
    Drazic closes the door and folded his arms. “Not those parts.”
    Oh. Right. “Yeah, I got it handled. Found a couple buyers on one of the darkweb depots. They’re paranoid as hell, though. And they want to pay in bitcoins.”
    “The fuck is a bitcoin?” Drazic crinkles his face.
    “Untraceable currency. Here, I’ll show you.” I rouse his ancient computer to life and load us into the deep web. “Cyrus has it all figured out. Mostly it’s drug dealers who use it, but I figure, why try to offload our chop by word of mouth when we can find buyers online . . .”
    “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re advertising our chopped parts online?”
    “On the dark web.” I frown. “It’s secure. No one can trace us.”
    Drazic pinches the bridge of his nose. “Jesus Christ, Jag. You and Cyrus take a couple classes at the junior college and now you think you’re some fucking hacker—”
    “Look, D, you paid for those classes coz you wanted me to make something of myself. Prove I was good for something more than just ripping off cars.” I gesture to the dark web auto parts forum as it loads. Buy, sell, trade. All manner of ill-gotten goods, from entire vintage vehicles hotwired out of their Malibu mansions to the usual array of stolen stereos, engine blocks, and more. “You said yourself that aside from getting caught, the hardest part of working our gig is finding people willing to buy. So, look—they’re all right here.”
    “But they could be cops,” Drazic says, his voice still sour.
    “Could be. But this forum is pretty stringent about vetting people. They know how to weed out a rat.”
    “And you can move all our stuff on there? You really think so?”
    My grin widens. “I’ve got buyers interested in a good eighty, eighty-five percent of our last haul. We stay smart, keep this up . . .” I raise my eyebrows at him. “Our only problem is going to be whether we can steal enough .”

    * * *
    L ennox , Elena, and I head down to the circuits with Cyrus as soon as he gets off work at the scrapyard. Late winter in Ridgecrest is a funny thing—not cold enough to really feel like winter, except for maybe at the top of the mountain ridge, but also not warm enough to match that dried-out stretch of earth in the valley. The sun hangs low over the racetracks as I drill the circuits over and over, Cyrus on a Bluetooth earpiece talking me through each turn.
    Maybe that’s all I’m missing. The way I feel my limbs lift up and away with each tight turn. That moment like I’m floating, like I might just become unmoored, and it might not be so bad if I were to just drift away. But there’s the seatbelt, tugging me back down to earth, and then the hard slam of these woefully underpadded seats. I’m not free. And I’m still not where I need to be.
    I’m in third place, behind Lennox and Elena both.
    For our trials, that’s dead last.
    We pull