It annoyed me when he called mekid, like I was some wide-eyed ingénue. “I don’t know. I thought I was quiet, but he must’ve heard me, because he turned around in the middle of the yard and just…started shooting. So I ran like hell.”
“It was the smart play. He could’ve been anyone. Anyone except Colin O’Sullivan, anyway.” Angelo tapped on the steering wheel with an irritated finger. “So, was the intruder there intending to kill O’Sullivan? Or was he an Irish soldier doing a bad job of guarding his lieutenant?”
“He wasn’t a guard,” I said decisively. “This guy was wearing a balaclava. And he wasn’t a great shot, was he? Because I’m still alive.”
Angelo subsided into silence for the rest of the ride, but I could tell he was thinking things over. So was I. I was beginning to think this whole thing had been a really bad idea.
And notjustbecause I’d thrown myself mouth-first at the Monster of the Morellis. Although I had to admit, that also had a lot to do with the way I was feeling.
He’d kissed me back, though. That hadn’t escaped my attention.
* * *
The one goodthing about that night was that Angelo abandoned his efforts to keep me in the dark as to the whereabouts of the safe house. If he’d been any other man, I would have assumed he was too distracted by the shooting, that the blindfold had slipped his mind—but Angelo Messina was not the kind of man to forget such things.
Still, the way he blinked at me when he pulled into a garage under a defunct box-making factory in Brooklyn suggested that maybe ithadbeen an oversight.
“Don’t kill me,” I said instinctively, and grinned. “I’ll forget all the streets.”
He studied me for a moment in the eerie blue light of the overhead. We sat there in the car unmoving and I wondered what he was thinking.
“Doesn’t really matter if you know where we are,” he said in the end. “These places are a one-use deal. Once we’re done here, I’ll get rid of it.”
I didn’t know exactly how much I believed him. Sure, Messina was rich as hell, but it seemed like a lot of effort to go to, to destroy it because an ex-Fed had found out where it was.
There I was, thinking of myself as an ex-Fed already.
We had a disappointing dinner of canned ravioli, and even Angelo couldn’t bring himself to finish his. “Tomorrow we’ll get something decent,” he sighed.
When it was time for bed, I wondered if I’d be relegated to the couch as punishment for my inability to obey orders, but Angelo merely waved his hand in invitation when I hesitated. I slid in next to him and rolled over, staring into the darkness.
* * *
I slept heavily,comfortably, and woke refreshed. Angelo was already up and looked the same as ever until I took in the tightness around his eyes, the lines that I hadn’t noticed until then.
It was after lunch by the time I woke. All this late-night work was messing with my circadian rhythms, but I didn’t want to say that. And evidently Angelo had been out and about while I snored on—there was a stack of clothes waiting for me on the couch. Underwear, new jeans, track pants, tees and two new hoodies—all black, even the damn briefs. I had an uncomfortable vision of Angelo Messina peeling back my underwear to see the sizing label while I slept on unaware.
Maybe he was just a good guesser.
“What next?” I asked over a depressing breakfast of stale cereal and shelf-stable milk. “We can’t just go around staking out every suspect your leads turn up. We don’t have the same numbers as the task force, and it’s not smart detective work.”
“Please don’t talk with your mouth full,” Angelo said. He was scanning the news headlines on his laptop. He glanced up. “But you’re right. I had doubts myself about O’Sullivan, but I was asked to check it out.”
I paused with my dripping spoon halfway to my mouth. “Asked by who?”
“Whom. And whom do you think?” he countered mildly. “Either way, we learned something. But I still have a feeling we’re missing something. We’re looking in the wrong place.”
I felt strangely guilty, as though he was accusing me of something. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I think this must be one of your friends.”
By “your friends” I assumed he meant the task force. “I disagree,” I said, because I felt I should in principle. “Anyway, even if it is, what could we do? We can’t spy on them any easier than we can go around sitting on mobsters.”
Angelo stretched his arms up and behind his head. It was the first real sign of tiredness I’d seen in the man, the first thing that made me think perhaps he wasn’t completely invincible after all. “We need to figure out what they have on us, for one thing, but I can’t do that myself. I’ll reach out to an associate for that. In the meantime, I want you to give me the name of every person on that task force. I’ll run background checks, look into their financials. If one of them is working with or for someone, it should turn up.”
“I can’t do that,” I protested.
“Are you telling me you don’t know the names of your own colleagues?”
