“Maybe longer.” Fuck, itbetternot take longer. “I’ll just stay off-line until it’s fixed.”
“Seemed pretty standard to me. Losing our magic touch, are we?”
I rub a knuckle across my lower lip. “Gee, I wasgoingto ask if you’d take on a few other files for me while I was tied up, but—”
“Which ones?”
She’s not one for small talk, Miranda, but she sure as hell loves the prospect of billable hours. By the time I leave the office, I’ve managed to clear my schedule—mostly—for the week. I’ll still have to bill a lot of hours to the Morellis while I’m running around with Nicky trying to figure things out, so I’m going to have to get creative with my time descriptions. But Nick was right; we need to get it sorted out ASAP.
There’s too much at stake to let it ride.
In the car home I think about how hard I came with Nick this afternoon, about how he makes me feel just like I do in court when I know I have a witness on the ropes and the judge and jury are both behind me, wanting me to hit harder, probe further, really dig in. It’s not a feeling I’ve ever had with another lover. And it’s the same feeling that keeps me married to the law, because I never thought I’d feel more alive than I did in those moments. With Nicky, somehow, I do.
But of course, Nick and I are just a dirty little secret. I need to stop thinking about him. He fucks like a champ and I’m cock-struck. That’s all it is, and I need to stop making more of it.
I turn my mind to the real problem: who sent that letter? What if itwasonly a fishing expedition and running around New York kicking heads will only prove they hit on the right guy? What if it’s the Giulianos throwing a rock in the pond, watching how the ripples fan out?
What if, what if… There are too many possibilities. I settle my head back against the seat and watch New York go by in a flurry of lights and noise. I’m tired, my ass hurts, and my mind isn’t turning over as fast as it usually does. I need sleep. I need to reset my brain.
Tomorrow, Nick and I can write up a list of suspects. We’ll start with that.
* * *
“List?I got the list in my head,” Nick tells me the next morning as he picks me up in his BMW. “There are very few people in this town who’d try to fuck around with me, and I’m just gonna go visit them and see which one of them spills.”
“Uh, okay,” I say, pulling my tie a little tighter. I check my face in the mirror on the back of the visor and add, “Or we could, you know, be smart about it.”
“Iambeing smart. I’m telling you, Bianchi, no one comes after me unless they’ve got a death wish. I’m happy to fulfill their dreams.”
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter at my reflection. I slide the mirror shut, flip the visor back up, wince at the bright morning sun pouring into my eyes, and look at Nick. “Stop talking like that. And what am I here for, backup?”
He laughs like I’ve made the most hilarious joke. “Shyeah,” he chuckles heartily. “No, Harvard, you’re here to keep my ass out of the cop shop if we run into any trouble.”
“Yeah, that’s not really—”
“You keep your head down, too,” he says, serious now. “I don’t want anyone taking a free hit at you if they see you sitting there in the car. Understand?” He’s heading out to Brooklyn. I hate Brooklyn. To be fair, I hate anywhere that’s not the twenty-odd-square-mile radius of Manhattan—unless it’s the south of France or the Adriatic coast.
“Why the fuck would anyone try to killme? I mean, any more than usual,” I add, putting on my sunglasses and pulling up my work emails on my phone. I couldn’t get rid ofeverything, so I still need to keep an eye on my inbox this week, although Nick has assured me one day will be enough. We’ll see. “The Families usually leave us legal types alone.”
“Usually. But you’reourlawyer, and people ain’t keen on the Morellis right now. Plus you got that I’m-smarter-than-you attitude, and you got a mouth on you that hurts feelings sometimes, and when people like the Cees and Gees get their feelings hurt, they tend to hurt back out of proportion. And because…” He hesitates.
“Because?” I prompt, glancing up from my phone.
“Well, maybe somebody already did try.” He looks the other way, checking for traffic before turning, so I can’t read his expression.
“I don’t follow.” I’ve lost interest in my emails, though, that’s for sure.
Nick pulls out into traffic and we hit the bridge before he replies. “I was thinking last night about Gatti. You know who he was? I mean, his job?” He continues before I can admit to anything I might not be supposed to know. The secrecy aspect of dealing with the Mob is second nature to me now. Yeah, I knew who Gatti was, but I had the good sense to keep it to myself. “He was the Giulianos’ hitman,” Nick is saying. “I mean, they got a few, but Gatti was one of them. So like I said, it was on my mind last night and it just seemed strange he was so…sopissedat you. Pissed enough to kill you? At his own wedding? He wasn’t bright, but he had a cooler head most of the time, and hemust’veknown a Morelli lawyer ending up dead that weekend wouldn’t go down great. He was taking a risk.”
Truth be told, everything Nick said about my mouth and my attitude is true, and that’s what made Gatti’s overreaction make a weird kind of sense to me at the time. I wasn’t really supposed tobeat the wedding, for one thing. I’d assumed someone else scrawled my name on the original invitation—Sophia, maybe. So when Gatti was so mad at me for no particular reason, it hadn’t seemed all that strange.
Plus we hadn’t exactly ended up on good terms. When Gatti was at his worst chasing me, I just started avoiding him. Iwantedto tell him to go fuck himself, but I was also smart enough not to say that to a Mob hitman. And Gatti had, eventually, stopped turning up at the places I liked to frequent, and I could return to them.
“I mean,” I said slowly, “I can be annoying when I try. It’s kind of a pastime for me. I just assumed he’d been drinking a lot at the wedding and, you know. Lost his temper at seeing my beautiful face out there in the crowd, knowing he’d never have the privilege of sleeping with me.”
“Sure, you’re a dick,” Nick says, instead of agreeing that sleeping with me is the bomb. “But is hereallygonna take you out? Not just on that weekend, butduringthe meeting where we all agreed to—” He broke off.
I’m not really supposed to know, but I do. It’s an open secret. “Where you all agreed to put your blood debts behind you until the Irish Freedom Fighters are dealt with,” I finish for him. At his sidelong glance, I add, “It doesn’t take a genius, Nicky. Don Morelli’s smart and he wouldn’t be buddying up to the Cees and Gees if he didn’t have a purpose behind it.”
