“What the fuck could possibly cheer me up about this?”
“You were right.”
“Right? Aboutwhat? According to you, Greco isdead. If that’s true, he’s definitely not the Central Park Slayer.”
“Sure, but it’s quite a coincidence that he’s been killed,” I said, slipping the laptop into my bag and scanning the room. “And in this business, there’s no such thing.” He was still staring down at the street, and my temper slipped out again as I snapped, “Comeon. I’m not sitting around here while you mourn a Clemenza.”
Without looking at me, Bax moved away from the window and continued packing.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Baxter
It was a singularly unpleasant experience to drive back to the safe house with a furious Angelo Messina. His fury did not escape him in words. It was much worse than that: a cold but simultaneously fiery silence that suggested he might at any moment pull over somewhere and do something terrible to me.
Because despite his silence, it was obvious that he considered this whole mess my fault.
Maybe it was, I reflected, as we pulled into the safe house garage. Ihadfollowed him through Central Park. I’d gotten myself shot at, and then I’d turned up on his doorstep after being put on leave, wheedled my way in, made it almost impossible for himnotto take me with him…
I was so lost in my thoughts that I was still sitting in the car after Angelo had gotten out. A sharp knock on my window and a short “Get out,” jerked me back to reality.
Was this my new reality now, living in hiding? Driving back and forth from shitty rooms to shitty safe houses with the Monster of the Morellis?
I unloaded my gear from the car trunk and followed Angelo into the safe house, where I dumped it on the sofa. I was definitely sleeping on the sofa from now on, I figured.
“I need to shower,” I said. I really did. I was covered in my own dried spunk.
“Why don’t you do that,” Angelo said, with the fake calmness of someone who is completely enraged. “And then we’d better talk.”
Fuck. It was worse than I’d thought.
“Sure,” I said. “I think that would be a great idea.”
* * *
I tookmy time in the shower, just like he had in his. Probably a good thing we’d had to come back to the safe house anyway, since at the hotel I’d been starting to worry he’d used up all the hot water. While I washed all the sex off my body, I tried to think about the case, about how I could prove my own innocence, get out of this nightmare situation, but I found myself incapable of thinking about anything except Angelo Messina.
I lifted my face into the stream of water and said, “Fuck,” very softly but very firmly. “Fuck, fuck,fuck.”
Messina was, as he’d pointed out himself, a Bad Guy. He had the eternal charm of the bad boy going for him, not to mention his fucking face and body, his extreme competence—was there anything sexier?—and the whole Daddy-vibe he gave off sometimes. But one thing he definitely wasn’t was the asshole with a heart of gold who’d come good in the end.
He was a killer, a criminal, and a danger to the city as a whole.
And me, for all my faults and despite the current misunderstandings—I was a Good Guy. Wasn’t I?
It was time to take another personal inventory, sort out all my feelings, file them into neatly-organized boxes in my brain. Every now and then I liked to take a look at all those urges, all those taboo feelings that we all have, every one of us, and consider them objectively. I’d turn them over in my mind, remind myself there was no point feeling shame for thoughts and feelings that every single human being has. No point feeling guilty about fantasies.
But being in Angelo’s vicinity these last few days had jumbled up all my neat boxes, as though he’d opened them all up and dumped the contents out in a pile in my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates self-control and decision making.
Because right then, my DLPFC surefeltlike a pile of junk.
To top it off, I didn’t even feel as bad about my bad decisions as I should. I was asworn federal agent. I was supposed to remove criminals like Angelo Messina from society, and what had I done instead?
Sucked his dick for him.
Without a condom, even.
“Fuck,” I muttered again, as my own dick stirred. I ignored it, scrubbed myself down again, and wondered how a wanted fugitive might go about getting tested for STDs.
