ackie was fairly certain that it wasn’t protocol to allow perps in the holding area to have visitors, but it also wasn’t protocol to have no idea whatsoever why you were holding said perps or what they had been arrested for doing, nor was it protocol for Rodriguez and O’Connell to have abandoned him to their mercies.

“Girls.” Mackie kept his voice low and even. Best not to show fear. “You have a visitor.”

“Is it perhaps a lawyer?” the prim and proper one asked.

“We’ve been thinking of lawyering up,” the drop-dead gorgeous one added, tugging nervously at the tips of her white gloves.

Mackie thought about the kind of lawyer that these girls would have and shuddered. He aimed his next words to the lock picker. To the granddaughter of Lillian Taft.

“I thought you said that if anyone found out you were arrested, you’d be out five hundred thousand dollars.” That was a pretty good shot, if Mackie did say so himself.

Before Miss Taft could reply to the zinger, however, her visitor stepped around the corner.

“I told you to wait,” Mackie said, shooting the boy an aggrieved look.

The boy ignored him. “Half a million?” he said, his voice dry and barbed. “Is that the going rate for selling your soul these days?”

For the first time since Mackie had met the girls, all four of them fell silent. The boy didn’t seem any more inclined to speak. He just stared at them, his expression impossible for Mackie to read.

I am not sure, Mackie thought suddenly, that he is their friend.

The flirt—the troublemaker, the one that Mackie just knew had to be the senator’s daughter—recovered her voice first. It came out in a whisper. “Nick.”