Miss No One by Mark Ayre (interesting books to read TXT) 📕

the handguns she had acquired during the dealership battle. Neither did she offer to Gary, slipping one into her waistband, covered by her top, and one into her jacket.

Straightening up, closing the door and locking the car, she saw Gary staring at her, as though he could not quite believe what he'd seen.

"Not so experienced with guns, huh?" she said. "If we exclude from the conversation water pistols."

Gary flushed again. said nothing.

"That's my detour done," said Abbie. "Why don't you lead on."

Over the space of a few seconds, Gary managed to gather himself. With a nod, he turned on his heel, found his bearings, and walked.

Abbie let him plod along in silence for a while before re-raising her question. Pressing the point.

"Tell me everything you know about Isabella's kidnap. Tell me how you know. Most importantly, I need you to reveal why you think she's where she is and who you think might be with her. I need to know what I'm getting myself into."

Was that true? Some deep part of Abbie accused her of being less analytical than usual. She was demanding answers of Gary, but only once they had already set off towards his destination.

She needed a distraction. Was she risking walking into a trap for the sake of forgetting Ben and what life would be like from now on?

A valid question. Worth examining. Abbie pushed it away, turned to Gary, nudged him.

"Start talking."

Gary didn't look sure of himself. Didn't look ready to talk, but the glance he gave Abbie indicated he was a little scared of her. That was good. That was more likely than anything to get him to open up.

To encourage this fear, Abbie gave her most menacing eyes. A second later, his resistance crumbled.

“Like I said, I started dealing when I was 12 or 13. I was the lowest of the low back then and I’ve not really climbed the ranks since, but I’ve been around a few years. Over time, you meet people higher up the chain, get a little more responsibility.”

His fingers tangled with each other as he walked—a sign of his nerves. Another sign was the way he continued to look at his boots. More than once, Abbie had to take his arm to ensure he didn't fall off a curb or walk into the road.

“One group runs most the organised crime in town. The owners of the local casino: Lucky Draw. As well as drug dealing they also make money from loan sharks, protection rackets, and a load of other bits. But the thing what makes them the most cash, their main business, is money laundering.”

Gary looked from his feet to Abbie as though expecting so see her face creased with confusion. Actually, it made sense. More and more these days, people were using card and other electronic forms of payment. Fewer people carried cash. Some never used physical money. In such a world, casinos offered the perfect solution for crooks looking to turn dirty, illicitly gained money into usable notes or numbers on a screen.

“So they run their illegal earnings through the casino,” said Abbie, "but also offer laundering as a service for other criminal outfits?”

Gary nodded. "That's their big thing. What they're known for in criminal circles. They've got loads of clients."

This wasn't surprising either. Money laundry was no cakewalk. Easy to get wrong and difficult to set up, and there were only so many cash-heavy businesses to go around. Many criminals making enough money to need it cleaned outsourced the task. With Lucky Draw, it would be simple. A criminal outfit would hand over a lump sum of dirty cash. A representativee of this outfit would then enter the casino as a punter, purchase a small quantity of chips, and head to a specific poker table. They would enjoy an extraordinary run of luck, winning the amount of cash they’d handed to the casino for laundering, minus a commission. A neat system.

"A place like that," Abbie mused, "what with cash on hand plus client money... we could be talking a lot of money on the premises at any given time."

Gary nodded but didn't comment. Abbie considered her statement.

The previous summer, following a police raid that left her daughter imprisoned and her youngest son dead, Margaret Becker had hunted down the traitor who gave the police the location of Margaret's hideout with torture and revenge on her mind.

Unfortunately for mother Becker, Abbie had got in the matriarch's way. There had been an altercation, a disagreement. Always a sad state of affairs but far worse when guns are involved.

Abbie had killed Margaret and her small team.

The police never apprehended Orion, the remaining Becker. Having imprisoned the majority of his crew and seized a huge chunk of the family funds, and with his mother and younger brother dead, the cops were prepared to rest on the laurels of their success. Especially considering they never expected Orion to reemerge.

The day she died, Orion would have learned of his mother's death. But he had never met Abbie, and there was no reason to believe he had discovered it was she who ended Margaret's life. Abbie had never appeared on the Becker radar.

Still, Abbie considered Orion as something of a loose end. She didn't pursue him because that wasn't what she was about. Instead, Abbie used her savings and downtime between missions to compile an extensively researched Becker file. If Abbie ever did encounter Orion, she wanted to be ready.

The file was on Abbie’s phone. Later, she would peruse it again if she had the time. Though she had, as yet, received no confirmation the Orion with which she was dealing was the same Orion whose mother Abbie had killed, it seemed more likely by the minute.

The Becker gang had committed numerous bloodstained armed robberies, hitting both legitimate and illegitimate enterprises. Anything that offered a decent bounty. They were as indiscriminate in picking targets as they were in choosing victims. Old and young, male and female, psycho and saint; the Beckers murdered anyone who stood