Midnight Vengeance Read Free

been a tattooed and pierced monk these past four months for all the tail he got.
    And the reason was right in this room.
    Jacko tracked Lauren as she made the rounds, speaking briefly with a few people when they spoke to her, then moving on. In the room full of trendy women dressed in bright peacock colors tottering on stiletto heels, she was low key in a midnight-blue dress with ballerina slippers. Jacko couldn’t even see the other women while she was in the room.
    They all seemed overblown and shrill. Sharp laughing voices crackling. Lauren’s voice was never sharp. It was soft, with an underlying tone like music, only not.
    She was sweeping the room with her eyes and Jacko felt a change in the air when she saw him. Her face went from slightly sad to joyous in one second, and his heart nearly exploded out of his chest when she veered course immediately, making a beeline for him. He could feel himself stiffening in every sense.
    “Incoming,” Senior muttered. “You’re on your own here, son. I’m going to my own woman.”
    Palm Beach, Florida
    “Go on in,” the muscle said, waving toward the door with his .44, a weapon that probably cost more than he did.
    Frederick Rydell stifled a sigh. The quality of Guttierez goonhood had declined sadly since the death two years ago of that thuggish, though stylish, mobster Alfonso Guttierez. The organization had fallen to his moron nephew, Jorge Guttierez. Alfonso had had discreet, well-dressed security at the gate. Frederick passed through a metal detector and that had been that.
    Jorge’s muscle had actually frisked him, rumpling Frederick’s Hugo Boss jacket, and had taken entirely too much pleasure in touching his private parts and between his buttocks.
    Really.
    Alfonso would never have hired this outlandish man-child with a backward baseball cap and oversized jeans with the dropped crotch.
    Morgan, Alfonso’s personal bodyguard, had always been impeccably dressed, able to serve tea or shoot you between the eyes without breaking a sweat. This goon looked incapable of thought, let alone style.
    Frederick opened the door to the suite of rooms Alfonso had used as a study and had to work hard to hide his shock. The two rooms were high ceilinged and elegantly decorated. Alfonso’s late wife had been a bitch of the highest order but a bitch with exquisite taste. And Alfonso himself was a thug with social ambitions. It didn’t really make any difference in Floridian high society if you made your money running drugs and arms and trafficking in humans. As long as you made a lot of it, you were in. Alfonso had had a lot of it and Chantal, the new wife, knew how to spend it.
    Alfonso’s study wouldn’t have been out of place in a lord’s palace. It had been filled with superb antiques, exquisite rugs, decent art on the walls. And Chantal managed the staff like a general. Frederick had never seen the mansion less than perfect. Never even a fallen petal from the numerous floral arrangements.
    Now it looked like pigs had rooted through the rooms, followed by the Huns.
    After the deaths of Alfonso and Chantal, the staff had kept things going but Jorge had let the staff go, one by one, replacing the maids with the girls he fucked and who had no desire to pick up after themselves.
    Frederick stopped on the threshold, willing his stomach not to rise. This was the worst he’d seen the rooms, a physical manifestation of the disintegration of Jorge’s personality.
    The rooms smelled of sex, expensive whiskey and overwhelming perfume. Someone had vomited and someone had shat and not flushed, so there was an overlay of that coupled with disgusting smells of fast food. The French chef had been the first member of the staff to go.
    Two of the sofas had been pulled askew, cushions on the ground. Pizza and takeout boxes littered the marble floor. One of the antique mirrors—fashioned by the same craftsmen who’d made the mirrors in Versailles, Chantal had told him—was