Irish Throwdown (What Happens In Vegas Book 4) by Matt Lincoln (short books for teens .TXT) 📕

“I did,” Nelson chuckled. “Poor Wallace has been up to his neck trying to deal with everything since this case started. Things are so different now than when we were on the force. With everyone having smartphones and computers now, the entire world always knows what’s happened as soon as it happens.”

“Sometimes even before we do,” I grumbled as I got up from my chair. “So, what did Wallace say?”

“He’s having Castillo and Patel come back ASAP,” Nelson replied. “Though I’m sure Brennan Gallagher will be long gone by then.”

“Yeah,” I nodded bitterly. “Anyway, I’m going to get back to work so I can get Charlie and Junior the info they need.”

I headed back into my office and fell into my desk chair as I tried to figure out how to find O’Sullivan. The only clue I had was that he was somewhere in Northern Ireland, a completely independent country from the Republic of Ireland and about a fourth as big. The area was pretty small, which narrowed down the search parameters a little, but that still left thousands of addresses to sift through.

Nothing had come up registered to a Liam O’Sullivan, but that wasn’t surprising. It would be too obvious to put a house under your own name. Several dozen places were owned by other people named O’Sullivan, but without something else to narrow it down further, nothing could indicate any of those properties connected to Liam O’Sullivan.

“Hello?” Miranda’s high-pitched voice called as she burst through the door and into the bullpen. “Are you guys okay? The keypad isn't working!”

“Hey!” I called from my office. I heard feet shuffling outside, then Miranda and Naomi were both at the door. “We’re both fine. The guy didn’t actually do anything, aside from breaking the keypad.”

“That’s how he got in?” Miranda asked as she sat down next to me in one of the empty chairs in my office, her eyes narrowed in concern.

“I guess,” I nodded. “I was really shocked when it beeped and the door opened. I thought it was one of you coming back to grab something. He must have done something to override it.”

“That’s concerning,” Naomi frowned as she crossed her arms and leaned against the wall opposite to where Miranda and I were sitting. “It’s a pretty high-tech security system. Short of installing a retina scanner or something, it’s about as secure as you can get for this kind of office.”

“Yeah, well, he obviously wasn’t messing around,” I replied.

“Well, what did he want?” Miranda demanded.

I hesitated before answering, unsure how much detail I should go into. If I admitted that I’d agreed to a deal with him, they’d probably both scream at me and panic, and Miranda would go crazy and try to hunt him down or something.

“He said he wanted to help us,” I finally replied. “Apparently, the guy who’s behind all this new drug stuff has gone rogue, and the rest of the organization isn’t happy about it. He said they would cooperate with us to bring him down.”

“Really?” Naomi asked skeptically. “They’re going to work with the feds just out of the kindness of their hearts? I don’t buy it.”

“Me neither,” Miranda scowled. “He’s up to something. He didn’t say anything else? Make any threats?”

“Not really,” I replied. Technically, it wasn’t a lie. As terrified as I’d been, he’d never actually directly threatened me. On the contrary, he’d been pretty calm and polite the entire time.

“I’m going to go talk to Nelson,” Naomi frowned. “The office obviously isn’t secure, and you and he aren’t as experienced in combat as the rest of us. It’s a serious safety issue.”

My heart sank a little as she stalked off. I knew that she wasn’t wrong about me being less experienced, but I’d held my own against Brennan just fine, and with only one arm at that. I didn’t need to be treated like a helpless little kid.

“I’m going to go too,” Miranda growled. “We can’t just sit around after one of our agents was harassed by a mobster in our own office.”

My office felt unnaturally silent after both of them left, and I sighed heavily before turning back to my computer screen.

“Brennan said that the family wanted to stop him as much as we did,” I mumbled to myself. I knew that “family” was probably referring to the mafia family, but that didn’t mean they weren’t actually related. Mafias tended to be family-run organizations, which was why they were called families to begin with.

With that in mind, I ran a search for people named Gallagher married to people named O'Sullivan located in Ireland. After all, there had to be some kind of connection if someone with a different surname was so high up within the ranks. Several results came up.

O’Sullivan probably wouldn’t hide somewhere so closely related to a Gallagher, though, since it would be easier for the family to find him, and then they obviously wouldn’t need to rely on me to do it for them. On the contrary, the smartest thing to do would be to stay somewhere completely unrelated to the mafia, like someone with a completely different last name who had married into the family.

With that in mind, I focused instead on the extended family members of the couples. It was slow going since I had to check for children, cousins, and siblings and then check to see if any of them had married someone with a name other than Gallagher or O'Sullivan.

Two hours had passed before I finally hit something that seemed promising. Alissa O’Sullivan was a distant relative of Liam O’Sullivan’s, the granddaughter of one of his cousins. She had married a man named Jeremy Martin, and their home, located in Northern Ireland, was registered to a Jeremy and Alissa Martin, which is why it hadn’t come up during my initial search.

So far, all the mafia members we’d encountered had shared the surname Gallagher or O’Sullivan. Finnian likely suspected that we would zero in our