Prologue
Before
Iwoke with a start to see Angelo leaning over me, his hand on my shoulder. “Hey, Babyface,” he said tenderly, and leaned in to kiss my nose. He’d taken to calling me ‘Babyface’ again recently because, he said, no matter how big my muscles got, my face stayed young.
He also called me that because he knew it made me scowl. I scowled then. “Time is it?” I mumbled.
“Early. But we need to blow.”
That made me come to right away, and I sat up in bed. We weresupposedto be sanctioned visitors while we were staying in Sonny Vegas’s city. “Someone’s coming for us?”
“No.” When he hesitated, my heart only beat faster.
“You got a new lead?”
We’d been chasing an ex-Clemenza Family Enforcer around the West Coast for a long time. Donnie Greco wasn’t exactly a ghost—he was the kind of man who couldn’t help making trouble wherever he went—but he had a lot of old friends and a lot of available cash, which made him difficult to pin down.
Greco was also an ex-informant who had been put into witness protection after a convincingly faked “death” in New York. He’d found the lifestyle dull, though, and when the law enforcement officer who’d arranged his immunity had been assassinated, Greco had skipped out fast, preferring to take his chances.
Most importantly, we had reason to believe Donnie Greco was the one man who could clear my name, and Angelo’s, and back up our story about who the Central Park shooter hadreallybeen.
I’d been ready to catch this asshole for a long, long time. I shoved the bedclothes aside and got up to stretch.
“Bax,” Angelo said gently, although his eyes couldn’t stop themselves from playing over my body, “it’s not Greco.”
It was the tone in his voice that warned me. I stopped mid-stretch, my arms crooked behind my head, my chest straining up toward the ceiling. “Then what is it?”
He said the one thing that I’d always known was coming, but still made my heart drop. “It’s the Boss.”
So. Today was the day.
I’d always figured the Morelli Family Don had kept a hook in his old Underboss. Angelo Messina was Luca D’Amato’s most effective, most connected, most respected Family member. It had been a long stretch of fishing line D’Amato had spooled out, letting us drift all the way across America, but Angelo had always been there on the end of that line, caught on the barbed snare of the vows he’d made.
Today, it seemed, was the day D’Amato had decided to reel him back in.
“When do we go?” I asked, dropping my arms. I knew the answer already.
“I’m going now.” He’d already pulled out his bag, which I saw when I glanced behind him. “The Boss missed his check-in,” he added, by way of explanation. “And the news coming out of the City isn’t good. But you don’t have to—”
“Don’t even,” I told him, moving to grab my own go-bag from where we’d stored them in the walk-in closet. Angelo was always prepared, and these days I was, too. We had backup plans for our backup plans. I packed a few extra items automatically, quickly, and double-checked that my most prized possession was still there at the bottom of the bag: a photo album with pictures of my late family. I was done in under a minute.
I didn’t want to go back to New York. I’d been dreading it since the day we left. Once upon a time, New York had been my home, a city I loved and wanted to make safe, the place I’d grown up in and that I hoped would provide my big career break. These days when I thought about the Big Apple, all I could see was the rotten core and the maggots wriggling their way through, sucking up all the goodness. And I didn’t even mean the Mob; it was my own experiences with the FBI that had made me sour.
I dumped my bag next to Angelo’s on the foot of the bed. “Do I have time for a shower?”
“Sure. I need to get travel plans in place. Make it fast, and then we’ll set out for the City.”
There it was again: the City. There was only one city that counted in Angelo’s mind, even now. When our mission was complete, would he want to return there? Return to his Family?
I knew something about missing your family. If I’d ever had the chance to be with mine again, I would have taken it in a heartbeat. Angelo had told me more than once that he was free from the Morellis, that Luca D’Amato had pushed him out of the nest. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe Angelo, it was just that I didn’t trust D’Amato not to pull him back in anytime it suited him.
And more: I didn’t know if it really suitedAngeloto be away from the Morellis for so long. He’d grown up in the Mob, sacrificed his whole life to them. Was itreallypossible for him to change after forty years of conditioning?
“Are we coming back here after?” I asked, keeping my voice as even as I could.
Angelo gave a little scoff and a smile. “You like Vegas that much?”
Sonny Vegas, still the King of Sin City, hadn’t been pleased to see us when we turned up, but he’d hidden it well. Angelo had spent some time cultivating that relationship, as well as setting up eyes and ears for the Morellis, while I had searched for signs of Donnie Greco.
