“You’re having a gun, and that’s that,” he said calmly. “Now come here and let me show you how to use it.”
I was just wasting my glares on him, I figured at last. So I gave in and came closer to watch him as he demonstrated how to put the safety off and on.
It wasn’t as though I’d everneedit, anyway.
CHAPTER23
MILLER
As soon as Jack left,I snooped my fill of his apartment. I hit the jackpot—I snickered to myself at the pun—on my first try: in the drawer of the stand by the front door was the first picture I’d sketched of him on a Beartrap Bar paper napkin. And then under it, to my surprise, I found the taped-together sketches from my art book that I’d ripped up in his face on the night of the pool party.
He’d kept them?
I was so touched that I almost thought twice about going through the rest of his things.
Almost.
I replaced the sketches carefully and kept going, but there wasn’t much else to find; no pictures, no letters, not even any old bills to tell me anything about the man.
There was lube in the nightstand, but nothing else.
And there were several gun cases in the closet, but I knew better than to open them up.
Apart from that, Jack kept the apartment so empty I figured it had to be on purpose. As for his laptop, everything that looked interesting was locked down with a password.
I didn’t know much about organized crime in LA, and even the few internet searches I tried didn’t turn up much about the Mob here. The Castellani Family had plenty of hits, but mostly rumors rather than facts. I spent more time than I needed to on Teddy’sCute Crimssite. I couldn’t find Jack on the site at all—but Teddy had told me at the pool party that anyone on the site had to have a photo, while futilely begging me to send him one of Jack.
The websitedidshowcase an Alessandro Castellani. The mugshot was old, but he was smoking hot. There was something weirdly familiar about him and I had to stare a while before the memory came back in a sick, hazy flood.
This was the guy who’d scared me the first night I’d talked to Jack. The man with the scar who’d materialized out of the shadow. His face was unscarred in the mugshot, which was why it had taken me a minute to place him.
I read all the information the site had about him. The son of the current Castellani Don and heir apparent…educated in Italy…his record since that one arrest here in LA had been scrupulously clean, although he’d been suspected in a number of Mob-related massacres around town.
No intel on where the scar had come from.
Intel? I snorted at myself. Jack was rubbing off on me. And then my mind drifted happily back to last night, to the way he’d encouraged me to rub against his hand until every nerve-ending in my body was begging for more…
But when my gaze fell on the screen again, I gave a shiver.Whyhad Alessandro Castellani been skulking around near the Beartrap? Had he been waiting for Jack?
And why had he warned me off?You follow around a man like that, you’ll end up with a face like mine.
Another thought hit me, and I tried a different search. But there were no results at all for the Castellani Family in conjunction with my father’s name.
* * *
Jack came back at noon with exactly what I’d ordered from Cali Corn Grill, which surprised me again. He’d bought some milk and sugar as well, and a bottle of the caramel creamer I liked best. I had no idea how he knew about that. Maybe it was a lucky guess. Whatever it was, it made me feel warmer toward him. Warm enough to jump up and give him a casualthank youkiss on the cheek.
He let me do it, too.
“So, there was this weird thing I found out while you were gone,” I said as we sat down to eat. “Do you know Alessandro Castellani?”
He paused with his burrito halfway to his mouth, set it down, and repeated, “Do I know Alessandro Castellani?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I explained about my run-in with him, and the things he’d said, but Jack’s face stayed so blank that I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
