Free Needing by Sarah Masters Page A

sarcastic response.
    “Fuck you, man.”
    “Tonight?” Oliver flushed at his forwardness. That one word had tumbled out before he’d got his brain into gear.
    “Uh, are you serious or fucking me about?”
    Bolder now, Oliver said, “I’ll fuck you about, if you like. Any time.” Where the hell did that come from?
    Langham momentarily lost control of the car, and it swerved to the middle of the road. “Shit, don’t tell me stuff like that when I’m driving!”
    “Sorry.”
    “You will be. Especially if we crash and you break another finger.”
    Oliver absently rubbed the bandage keeping his broken finger strapped to the one beside it. It ached like a motherfucker, but he hadn’t had much time to feel sorry for himself or wallow in the pain.
    “My brother came for lunch.”
    “Pardon?” Oliver said, unsure whether he’d heard the voice in his head right.
    Langham sighed. “I said you will be if we crash and you break—”
    “No, I wasn’t talking to you.”
    “Right. Okay, I’ll keep quiet.” Langham gripped the wheel tighter.
    Oliver prayed Mark hadn’t just managed to make a connection with one lousy sentence that told him jack shit. He closed his eyes and waited.
    “My brother. Alex came to lunch where I work. I’m—I was an accountant. That’s why… Louise, that’s her name… That’s why Louise was filing, why she found the notes. They were in PrivoLabs’ papers. She showed them to me, and I rang Privo, let them know we had something that didn’t belong in their account file.”
    “And?”
    “I went back to work and did a bit of digging. Asked this lab technician I know at Privo to keep an eye out, see what was going on. Told him what was on the note. He said it was about a new drug he’d been testing. That it wasn’t ready yet.”
    “Oh, God.”
    “Next day, some guy I hadn’t seen before, from Privo, turned up when I was eating lunch in the courtyard outside my work with Alex. The guy, he said he needed the note, and I gave it to him—had it in my inside pocket, didn’t I. Anyway, after he’d gone, Alex started asking questions. I told him what the note had said, what the lab guy said, and…”
    “And what?”
    “He wanted to blackmail them. Said he’d make some money out of them. That he’d threaten to go to the papers. So after he left, I went back inside and rang the lab technician again, but…”
    “But what? Mark? Mark? Shit. You still there? Tell me what happened then?”
    “I guess they got to Alex. Fed him those meds.”
    “Yeah, that much is pretty damn obvious. Fuck, I didn’t mean that to sound so nasty. Who’s the technician?”
    “Ronan Dougherty, lives in the flats above the corner shop on Kater Road, but I can’t—couldn’t—get hold of him. His phone rang off the hook.”
    “Fuck.”
    “I think—”
    “Yep, me too.”
    “Alex…”
    “Yep, he’s probably paid the tech a visit already.”
    “He wasn’t like that before. Not mean like he is now.”
    Oliver shielded his thoughts. If Alex was willing to resort to blackmail, he wasn’t your average kind of guy. Anyone who could hatch a plan pretty damn quick like that and go off to make it happen… Yeah, Alex was a bad lot, no mistaking that—the drugs had just made him worse. Privo had him under their control, offing everyone who knew about what they were doing. It was only a matter of time before Alex got to him and Langham.
    “Anything else?” he asked Mark.
    Silence.
    “Mark?” Oliver waited.
    No response.
    “Well?” Langham demanded.
    “We’re next on the damn list. Got to be.”
    “What, Alex’s list?”
    “Yeah, and after we’ve been to Privo, we need to go back to Louise’s field. Mark’s body is still there, remember?”
    Langham handed Oliver the radio. “Sorry to do this to you, but ask for Shields. If he can’t come to the phone, we know he’s been bitten.”
    Oliver stifled a smirk. “So I’m telling him, or whoever, where Mark is?”
    “Yeah, make out