Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 02 - The Hustle Read Free Page A

her all these years? No. This was all just a means to a blatant end—money. “How much do you want?”
    The caller chuckled. “How much is your daughter worth to you?”
    “Quit playing and give me a number.”
    “Well, she is damaged goods. So I guess that warrants a discount.”
    Oh, man, I was going to kill him. And kill him. And kill him some more. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. All that would pour from my mouth were more empty threats. But if I did end up meeting this fucker, I planned on reloading every one of those threats and opening fire on his sorry ass.
    Then I drew myself back. I had let my emotions get the better of me. Mr. Breather had pushed every right button to send me into the red zone, where instinct instead of intellect made the rules.
    “This is a con,” I said.
    “You don’t sound so sure.”
    “Child molesters don’t make confessions over the phone before demanding a ransom.”
    Another stupid chortle. “I never said I molested your daughter.”
    “You implied it. To get a rise out of me, I’d guess.” I took a deep breath and tilted my chair back. “I’m not biting. You want money, get a fucking job.” Then I slammed the phone down and yanked the cord out of the back.
    I splayed my hands flat on my desk to stop them from shaking. I saw the wreckage of my doodle and laughed. A laugh I didn’t believe, but needed at the moment like a breath of fresh air. The guy had played me like a six-string and a wa-wa pedal. I didn’t know how he knew about my daughter and what had happened to her. I did know, however, that he didn’t have her like he claimed.
    I left my office and went downstairs to the bar. Helped myself to some straight gin. It tasted flat and bitter without the tonic, but the burn going down did the trick I expected. My nerves straightened a bit. I poured another two fingers, threw it back, and returned the bottle to the shelf.
    I left the glass on the bar. Paul would bitch about that when he came in. I wasn’t in the mood to care.
    I retrieved my coat and headed out to my car, the Beemer that came with my parents’ estate. I started driving without a conscious destination. My good old subconscious had this. I ended up at the Hawthorne Public Library. The internet is cool and all, but sometimes I like to roll old school. Besides, what I’d come to look for—now that my subconscious had shared his plan with my conscious—probably couldn’t be found online. I needed newspapers. Old newspapers.

    I sat down at the microfiche machine, feeling like Indiana Jones before an ancient and powerful relic. Kids in school these days would probably laugh at the contraption. But when they hit college and had to do a serious research paper, they would leave their computer keyboards behind and come crying back to the microfiche. That is, if they could find one. I was lucky enough that Hawthorne’s library had one of the machines. Seemed most libraries had fazed them out, under the same delusion that all the world’s answers could be found on the World Wide Web.
    Enough of the back-in-my-day spiel. I had work to do.
    It didn’t take long to find the articles I was looking for. The first one was only a three-inch paragraph of vague speculation. Police investigate deaths of Hawthorne family. That’s all they knew at the time. The next article had the full outline of the story, with more speculation to fill the gaps left by police. A follow up article in the Hawthorne Tribune bordered on tabloid exuberance. They detailed a narrative, introducing Eddie for the first time in any of the papers, how he discovered his mother and brother murdered, and his father killed by his own hand with the weapon he used to erase his family. They portrayed Eddie as a sad victim, paving the way for all the other news stories and local gossip to run a game of telephone, each telling more lurid than the last, dripping with pity for Eddie and bald contempt for his father.
    What I didn’t find in the