“You did?” Meredith asked in surprise.
“I did,” I confirmed. “Emory’s new to town, and it’s a holiday.”
“I’m not sure what I have planned yet,” Kyle told me. “I usually have dinner at my folks’ house…”
“Please don’t feel like you need to change your traditions,” I told him. “I just felt like extending the invitation. I’ll make enough food for an army, and you can stop over if you wish. No pressure.”
“I’ll think about it,” Kyle said. “Thank you, Josh. That’s very nice of you.”
“Nice is his middle name,” Meredith said in a saccharine-sweet voice.
“I got to get going,” Kyle said. “I never know who’ll drop by to smell my soap.”
“Body wash,” I corrected. I heard Kyle chuckling as he left the salon and jogged down the porch steps. There was a definite pep to his step as he headed to his truck.
“Chaz is going to kill you,” Meredith hissed, pulling my attention to her.
I rolled my eyes. “So let’s not tell Chaz.” I grimaced because I couldn’t believe what I’d just done either. “Let’s go find him and see if we can calm him down.”
After a long pep talk and several hugs later, we coaxed Chaz out of the mixing room that was about the size of a coat closet. Any other time, I might’ve made a closet joke, but it wasn’t the right moment. I needed to spend my energy coming up with a plan should Kyle accept my offer and show up for dinner on Sunday.
HARRIS CALLED WHILE WEwere on our way to Cincinnati to inform us that a judge signed off on a warrant to wire Silver for sound to meet with Spizer. I had already been in a hippy-skippy good mood before taking the call, but I tipped over to the euphoric zone on the mood meter at hearing the good news.
“We’re close, Dorchester,” I said. “I can feel it.”
“Me too, Gabe. We’re going to nail that bastard,” he said emphatically.
My call to Silver’s cellphone went to voicemail, but I didn’t expect anything different since he most likely had only been home a few hours after closing the club. I was confident he’d call me back when he woke up and listened to my message.
In the meantime, we needed to devise a game plan for when and where the meeting between the guys would take place, and we needed to do it before the task force interviewed the members of McCarren Consortium. It made the most sense that we should go in there surprised to see him. Therefore, we had to walk a fine line and come up with questions for Silver to ask and we needed to prepare him for the interview. I needed to make it clear that we were running the show and that he was nothing more than an extension of us.
The last thing I wanted, or needed, was for him to go all vigilante and take matters into his hands and fuck it up. Call me a judgmental asshole, but Silver came across as a guy who didn’t want to take instructions from another. It was too fucking bad because I was in charge. If I could’ve avoided sending him into the interview, I would’ve, but he was my best bet at catching Spizer unaware.
“Where do we want the interview to go down? Where will Spizer feel most confident, other than his office,” I amended. If the man was really into bad shit, he might have equipment in his office to scramble the signal. “The club?”
“It depends on where they typically meet,” Dorchester remarked. “Anything outside the norm could tip Spizer off. Although, I’m pretty confident that Silver can sell anything.” I thought Dorchester was right and that it was possible that I was overthinking things.
“Let’s talk strategy,” I told the group. “I think our best ploy is for Silver to drop the bomb that we’ve connected Nate’s death to the casino. We can have Silver give false information and see what Spizer does with it.”
“That’s a good suggestion,” Harris said. “The other approach is to make it look like everyone involved with the casino is at risk of being hunted down and killed. That should rattle everyone and maybe pit them against one another.”
“Great idea, Harris. That’s the tactic we’ll use to at least get ourselves in the door at McCarren,” I said. “What else do we have?”
We continued discussing the different strategies we could use and began putting a plan A and plan B together. So much of it hinged on whatever Silver could get from Spizer. We walked a fine line, which the judge reminded us when she signed the warrant for the wire. Nate’s attorney/client privileges died with him, but Spizer remained the legal counsel for others associated with Nate. We wouldn’t be able to use the information he gave us about the other clients since privilege protected them. We also couldn’t put him in a situation that could get him disbarred. The more I turned it over in my mind, the more I worried about the many ways it could blow up in our faces.
Silver returned my call at noon and said that he’d already had an appointment to meet with Spizer about a revitalization project he wanted to undertake. “I’m meeting him for dinner tomorrow night. Will that work or will there be too much noise?”
“Depends on the restaurant,” I replied. Silver rattled off the name of the restaurant where I first saw him days ago, even though it felt like years. “That’ll work,” I told him. “We need to go over the questions we want you to ask and explain just how tight of a rope we’re all walking.”
“I won’t let you down, Detective.” We decided to meet him in a hotel room a few hours before he went upstairs to the fancy restaurant on the top floor. We’d have time to wire him up for sound and video, rehearse what we wanted him to ask, and how to avoid stepping on a landmine with a question we didn’t want asked.
“We’ll see what we get from Spizer tomorrow before we set up meetings with McCarren Consortium,” I told the group. There wasn’t anything else for us to do that day, so I congratulated them on a great day and sent them all home. “Let’s meet here at noon tomorrow since we’ll be working late.”
I had several errands I wanted to run before I went home because I knew I wouldn’t want to go back out once I got there. I stopped by Marabeth’s first to see if she had a bath oil or something that would help Josh sleep. It was adorable how he played off sleeping well that morning, but I knew better. My guy was many wonderful things, but an actor wasn’t one of them. I didn’t get all pissy when he lied to me because I knew his reasons were well-meaning. Besides, it was more of an exaggeration than a lie.
Marabeth recommended a chamomile and spice bath oil that I thought Josh and I would both like. I wasn’t much of a bath guy until he came into my life. I enjoyed any activity that included Josh naked against me. My next stop was Harry’s Hardware. He’d been in business for forty years, and I did my part to make sure he wasn’t gobbled up by the large chain home improvement stores that were close. I was pretty sure I saw some loose screws at the base of Josh’s pole where it screwed into the floor in the attic. Not only that, I found the perfect trees in Josh’s—our—back yard to hang my hammock.
I had grabbed what I needed and was headed to the front of the store to pay when a guy stepped out of another aisle and nearly collided with me. Emory Jackson clutched his chest and offered me a sheepish smile.
