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the story, but Will Sinnott did. He’d been waiting for such a news report to make the papers, or appear somewhere online, ever since Andy Baumhower had told his Class Act partners about the car accident he’d had immediately after dumping Gillis Rainey’s body in the river. Like Ben Clarke, Sinnott had recognized the accident, and Andy’s mishandling of it, as a catastrophe rife with danger. If Rainey’s body were ever discovered and identified, and this guy Andy had crashed into – Joseph Reddick – heard about it, and put two and two together . . . the cops would be knocking on Andy’s door within hours. And after that?
    End game.
    Oh, Cross talked like he didn’t believe it, like Ben was just overreacting to the most remote of all possible outcomes, but Sinnott knew better. There were only so many blunders a group of amateur criminals could make before their incompetence finally caught up with them, and Sinnott and his friends had already committed more than their fair share.
    Rainey’s body turning up now, less than a week after Baumhower had disposed of it, had been all but inevitable, and Sinnott had little doubt it was the harbinger of even worse things to come.
    As bad as the news was, however, he knew it wasn’t going to warrant anyone’s full attention, because the boys behind Class Act Productions had a much more immediate problem on their hands.
    In eight days, they were due to pay Ben’s psychotic friend Ruben Lizama a quarter million dollars, and they were still trying to figure out how the hell they could scrape up that kind of cash in so short a period of time.
    Unlike his three spineless business partners, Ben Clarke actually relished the idea of becoming a serious criminal.
    At this stage in his young life, with no felony arrests to his credit, the twenty-four-year-old Stanford grad with the lumberjack build and gravel pit voice was merely a bully who aspired to the next level; he could talk the talk, but he had yet to walk the walk. Clarke found this deeply annoying, and he was bound and determined to change it.
    Though he had no practical experience in serious crime himself, he had many casual acquaintances who did. It was a natural byproduct of the business he was in. Clarke’s end of the Class Act consortium consisted of three highly profitable Los Angeles area nightclubs – McCullough’s out in Westwood, where Gillis Rainey had died, Nightshades in Santa Monica, and Primo Joe’s, just around the corner from Cross’s office in Century City – and all were popular hangouts for the most beautiful young gangsters Los Angeles had to offer. Pimps, dealers, call girls, and gangbangers – Clarke entertained them all, and was thrilled to do so.
    But no one intrigued him more than Ruben.
    A regular guest of all of Clarke’s establishments, Ruben was rich, beautiful, and effervescent, everything Clarke demanded to see in his clientele, and the man drew desirable women to him like a magnet. Clarke liked to think that the LA nightlife began and ended with his three clubs, and that never seemed a more justifiable conceit than when Ruben and his tiny entourage were somewhere in attendance, igniting the room with light and laughter.
    Of course, Clarke had recognized Ruben as a drug trafficker immediately, but this only added to his allure. Ruben was living the life Clarke dreamed of having himself someday, one unaffected by the moral and ethical constraints smaller men were forced to adhere to, and Clarke considered every minute spent in Ruben’s company an education he couldn’t get anywhere else.
    It was with this kind of fawning admiration that Clarke eventually offered Ruben entree into the Class Act inner circle. He was hoping that, merely by linking his own fortunes with Ruben’s, some of the Mexican national’s magic might somehow rub off on him. Clarke and his three partners had been looking for seed money at the time, struggling to get the fourth and last segment of their combined