“Don’t call that place my home,” I groused. “None of this is helping. We’re just driving around different places, notdoinganything—”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Angelo told me, and threw a flash drive into my lap. “You wanted checks on Family members? Here they are.” He reached over into the back seat for the laptop, and his cologne wafted into my nose as he did.
Trust Angelo Messina to consider cologne an essential for a safe house.
He settled back into his seat with the laptop, entered the password, and then handed it to me. “Well?”
Astonished, I stuck the flash drive in and began to look through. It was neatly arranged in folders and subfolders, and one thing became apparent very quickly. “There are no Morelli Family members in this file.”
“Of course not. Because this is not a Morelli Family job. I thought you and I agreed on that.”
“It doesn’t matter if weagreeor not, what matters is that wedo the work. We could be wrong.” We weren’t wrong. I knew it in my gut, but I wanted hard evidence of it, too.
And I didn’t like that Messina was holding back.
“There really is no pleasing you, kid, is there?” he said, with the first hint of humor he’d had all day.
I could not smile back. It was his use of that word—kid. It brought me back immediately to the night before, to his hand on me, to his hot breath on my neck, to him calling me a stupid little boy just before he pulled an orgasm out of me as powerful as any I’d had.
I said nothing and resumed looking through the files. Perhaps therewouldbe something in there to help.
After a moment, Angelo restarted the car and drove off.
At first I stayed silent because I wanted him to understand my displeasure at his not having the Morelli Family members included in the file. Cold shoulders and the guilt they provoked could occasionally be effective psychological tools. Mostly, I was just pissed off. But as I read on, I became engrossed. I’d expected nothing more than the brief, surface-level checks that Angelo had completed so far. That was not the case.
Laid out in the folder was everything we would need. Financials were just the start. Alibis and whereabouts for various shootings were noted where available, and those alone whittled the viable suspects fast.
“There’s no way your associate could have put these together so quickly,” I said, looking up. To my surprise, we were back in the garage.
“She didn’t. I regularly have her run intel on the other Families.”
I sifted through the pages again. “There are still too many for us to manage.”
Angelo looked faintly vexed.
“But we can work with this,” I allowed. The truth was, we couldn’t work harder or wider, so we had to work smarter instead.
“You tell me where you want to start, and we’ll start there.”
“Why? So you can blame me when whoever I pick isn’t our guy?” Angelo sounded like he was stifling a sigh, so I glanced up at him. “Come on,” I argued. “It’s not like you think anything I say is legit.”
He said nothing more until we were back underground in the safe house. “You work the case your way, and I’ll work it mine. Maybe we can meet in the middle.”
“Whatever.”
The rest of the day we spent in silence again, although Angelo went out to pick up gyros for dinner. That was the highlight of the evening for me. I tried to focus on the case, to draw conclusions from the arrest records of a dozen mobsters, to weed out viable lone wolves from a whole pack whose core value wasbelonging. But all the while half my mind was distracted. When Angelo shifted in his seat, I looked up. When he sighed, I heard it. When he went to put on coffee, I followed his movements with my eyes until I had to turn my head to keep watching.
“Here,” he’d said at one point, setting down an espresso for me. The hairs on my arm stood up as he leaned by to set the cup down by my hand. That one syllable was more than he’d said to me for hours.
By the time I was ready to call it quits on the day, I had a thumping headache, and the TV news didn’t help. My picture there again, right next to Angelo’s, and soundbites from Captain Walsh about how Operation Safe Center would not rest until they’d caught the criminals who were terrorizing the citizens of New York City.
“Fuck this,” I said at last, and snapped off the television. “I’m going to bed.” At least I knew I’d sleep, given how exhausted I was.
Chapter Eighteen
Baxter
Icouldn’t sleep.
