Peter Stone had warned Vicky Driscoll to not contact him unless it was an emergency and stressed that all communication needed to go through his encrypted email. An hour earlier she had sent up an email flare saying they needed to talk, and Stone had responded by telling her when to expect his call. In addition to having an encrypted phone line, Stone took the extra precaution of making the return call using a voice changer.
“You said we needed to talk.”
“Your voice?” she said, put off by his strange-sounding speech.
“Don’t worry about it,” Stone said. The app he was using gave him the voice of Darth Vader.
“Papers arrived today from a lawyer,” she said, her voice shrill. “Legal papers. Lots and lots of pages. They look like trouble, bad trouble.”
“You’re being sued?”
She whispered her answer. “Yes. In the papers there is the name Karina Boyko everywhere. They know she was one of my H2B workers, and they say I’m responsible for wrongful death. When her body turned up in the ocean, I was afraid bad things would happen. Her spirit won’t rest.”
“It’s her lawyer you need to worry about, not some spirit. Who is suing you?”
“Michael Carey is the name of the lawyer.”
“Does he represent the US government, or the state of Florida?”
“Papers say he works for Bergman/Deketomis.”
“Main office is in Spanish Trace, Florida.”
“That’s good. He sounds like some local-yokel scum-sucking lawyer who thought he could make easy money by shaking you down for your whore’s death.”
“Karina Boyko isn’t the only name in the papers. How does this lawyer know about Nataliya Nahorny?”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Nataliya was a close friend of Karina’s.”
“Was?”
“She went away a few months ago.”
“Where?”
Vicky paused before saying, “I don’t know.”
Stone got the sense that Vicky didn’t want to know, at least not officially. The whore was definitely worried.
“You need to relax. In the next hour or two, I’ll make sure you get contacted by a lawyer I know. He will make all your problems disappear. Understood?”
“Yes,” she said.
Stone clicked off. And then he spat out an expletive. His curse sounded a lot harsher and uglier in his own voice than in Darth Vader’s.
The whore was scared. She was worried about someone discovering all the skeletons in her closet. He didn’t care about that. But he had to make sure her problems didn’t become his problems.
That’s where the Big Bad Wolf would come in.
BB Wolf—Barry Benjamin Wolf—was an attorney renowned for his scorched-earth tactics. If anyone could shut down the lawsuit, BB could. Ostensibly, he’d be serving the interests of Mrs. Driscoll, all the while reporting to his true client.
He hoped Mrs. Driscoll wasn’t going to prove too much of a problem. Stone didn’t like problems.