Nick Sterling let out a high-pitched, strangling squeak, his knees completely liquefying beneath his two-thousand-dollar Zegna trousers.
He collapsed sideways onto the floorboards, his hands clawing at Marcus Vance’s boots, weeping with the wet, pathetic, sniveling sobs of an accountant who had finally arrived at the end of the spreadsheet and discovered that the balance was an open grave:
“Officer!
Please!
It was Carter!
Carter told me Aunt Eleanor was going to disinherit us!
Carter told me the Maybach had a mechanical defect!
I didn’t touch the brake lines!
I swear to Almighty God on my mother’s grave, I was just handling the marketing!”
Marcus Vance looked down at Nick with an expression of such cold, absolute, un-diluted disgust that the younger man recoiled as if he had been struck with an iron rod:
