Hard to Let Go Read Free Page A

its right eye in silent answer.
    Nick’s brother Jeremy, who ran the tattoo shop on the first floor, had saved the stray from the wreckage of the other half of the building, where it’d apparently been living. The cat wasn’t mean, but he wasn’t friendly either, and seemed to avoid everyone except for his savior . . . and Beckett.
    Sighing, Beckett slowly crouched down and held out one hand.
    Cy bolted, ultimately finding a hiding place behind a metal shelving unit against the wall.
    No surprise. Beckett was big and intimidating, Or so he’d been told. Hardly the warm, nurturing type. The real surprise was that the cat gave him the time of day at all.
    You think being big makes you such hot shit, but you’re every bit as dumb and ugly . . .
    The memory of his father’s voice—from the night his high school football team had won the game that would send them to the state championships—came so far out of the deep, distant past that Beckett nearly stumbled as he rose to his full height. What the fuck was that ? Since when did he let anything slip around the ancient barriers he’d erected against all the bullshit his old man had thrown at him?
    “You okay, man?”
    Beckett blinked to find Marz standing right in front of him. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
    Marz shrugged, his eyes narrowing on Beckett’s face. “No reason. You got a minute? Or would you rather catch some sleep first?”
    “Got nothing but time,” Beckett said, glad for something else to think about. Something besides figuring out why his father’s voice was echoing inside his head. He followed Marz across the room. The number of computer terminals had expanded in recent days, as Marz had made it possible for more of the team to help comb through the huge number of files they’d discovered on a microchip from their deceased commander. The commander they all believed had betrayed them, sold them out.
    The commander who’d actually died in a deniable undercover operation—meaning he hadn’t been able to say word one to them.
    The fact that they’d all believed Frank Merritt had been dirty felt a lot like having a few badly cracked ribs. It hurt with every breath, but there wasn’t a damn thing you could do to make it better. Beckett would know. He’d had more than a few broken ribs in his time.
    Except, there was something they could do. They could bring Frank’s killers to justice and clear their own names. Beckett glanced to the big white board on the wall by Marz’s desk where they kept a running list of what they knew and questions they’d yet to answer. In Nick’s scrawling handwriting, the crux of their mission was spelled out in red marker:
    Bad guys:
Church Gang
“WCE”/“GW”
Seneka Worldwide Security?
But what/who are WCE/GW?
And are they related to Seneka? If so, how?
    All Beckett’s team knew about WCE was that it had paid their commander twelve million dollars in dirty money during his undercover investigation into counternarcotics corruption in Afghanistan, and all they knew about GW was that their commander had noted those initials as belonging to his WCE contact, who’d had a now-disconnected Seneka phone number. Beyond that . . . asking who WCE and GW were was a seemingly simple question. But it was proving damn hard to answer.
    “I finished piecing together the shipping research that you started yesterday,” Marz said as he dropped into a metal folding chair at his desk. Beckett followed suit. With one hand, Marz fished through a mass of papers—an impressive example of disorganization that only made sense to him. With the other, he kneaded his right thigh.
    Beckett frowned and braced against a wave of gut-punching guilt. His best friend in the world was hurting—had been critically wounded, in fact—because of him . Most of the time, Marz acted like he was totally cool with the below-the-knee amputation that required his use of a prosthetic limb. But for the past week or so, it was clear from the guy’s