Page 33 of Sebastian
“It would go a lot easier on you if you’d just tell us everything you know. Anything that could be helpful.”
The woman folded her arms over her chest, stubbornly refusing any assistance. For an old bird, she definitely wasn’t easily intimidated.
“What’s with you, lady? You’re caught. You don’t get a free pass out of jail because you’re old. They’re going to try and convict you.”
“I don’t care,” she said, jutting her chin out.
“Maybe you should,” frowned Hex.
“She doesn’t care because they helped her,” said the man called Joey.
“Shut up!”
“You shut up, Anne! They helped her when she was about to lose her house. She’d put everything she had into helping her loser son and didn’t have a dime to her name. The bank was going to take her house, and he sure didn’t give a fuck.
“Willie was able to find the tax records and wiped them clean, making it look as though the tax payments were paid for the next ten years. Helen made sure that she had enough to live on, while Jeffrey made sure the loser son gave her back some of the money.”
“He’s not a loser,” she scowled.
“He is. He’s your son, but he’s still a loser, Anne.”
“How did Jeffrey make that happen?” asked Chief. The man looked at Anne, who was pleading with her eyes, begging him not to say another word.
“Jeffrey and Ryan are half-brothers. The loser son and the cop. What a combination, right?”
“Your son is Jeffrey Banks?” growled Hex. She looked away, not wanting to give anything away, although it was already done.
“What kind of shit is her son into?” asked Chief.
“He’s the boss of a gang. The Silencers.”
“The Silencers? Your son is the fucking boss of The Silencers? Do you have any idea what kind of people they are? Jesus, lady, you’re something else. So your cop son, Jeffrey, helps his deranged criminal brother, Ryan, all the while robbing banks to help you and other senior citizens.”
“You guys need to come see this,” said one of the agents, walking back out front from the main meeting space.
“Watch these three. Especially her,” said Hex. “If she moves, put a bullet in her head.” The agent stared at him, then back at the old woman.
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you have?” asked Chief.
The agent pointed to a pair of double doors leading to what should have been a storage room. Instead, inside were dozens of maps pinned to the walls, marked with routes and check-in points. They even had little cars glued to the maps.
“Well, I guess with only one of them being the tech expert, they had to have something old school, didn’t they? Get pictures of all of this so we can double-check and be sure that these were already hit. If there’s something new on there, we need to know where it is.”
“Yes, sir. Our tech guy got into the computer system as well. They’re definitely not very stealth. There is a folder titled Help, and it’s not help for the computer system. It looks like it’s filled with requests for assistance from the elderly. Dozens of scanned e-mails, letters, cards, everything you can imagine, begging for assistance of some kind. There must be some sort of secret network they all know about, and we don’t.”
“Great. Just fucking great,” muttered Hex. “Send that file to us, and we’ll start sifting through to see if there’s anything we can do.”
“Yes, sir. What do we do about the three out front?” Hex looked at Chief, and they both knew what they had to do.
“Arrest them.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Emelia’s condo was buzzing with activity as everyone was sifting through the evidence they’d collected. So far, they’d found nothing on traffic cameras, but Hiro and the others believed it was because Jeffrey was able to freeze the cameras from inside their vehicle. As he approached, one after another would be frozen until they were a safe distance away. They knew it was possible because it was an older technology that they’d used once upon a time.
“The Silencers. Brother, this puts a spin on things we didn’t want,” said Chief, staring at his friends. “Old people and a fucking gang, that’s quite possibly one of the worst in the entire country.”