Milo rises, dusting off his coat. “Cartel pigs.”
“You okay, Mr. Marcello?” One big guy asks, shooting someone who starts moving on the ground.
“Fine.” He looks around, shaking his head.
“Call in the cleaners?” the man asks.
“Leave it. Make the other call. Send the fucks a message.”
Cal kicks one of the bodies, bending down to take in the tattoo. “This one’s Roja.”
“This one is, too,” I say, and then I see another tattoo on one of the others. “Cinco.”
“Fucking scum.” Milo looks around, picking up some things, and motioning to his men to take the heroin. He leaves the brick and gestures to the coke.
“You can take it if you want, but it’s not good,” Cal says.
Milo smiles. “I know the gang. Leave it. The remnants of that gang will feel the heat.”
It’s brutal, but Cal doesn’t change expression. “We’ll talk?”
“Did they change teams?” I ask no one in particular. “Are Cinco and Roja interchangeable? Or did one move up and across?” Right now, though, I don’t even know if it matters.
Sirens pierce the tense silence.
“We need to get the fuck out of here,” Milo says, eyeing me. “You saved me. I won’t forget it. We’ll talk, Callahan. Next week at the fundraiser?”
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but before he leaves, I stop him. “Did you come for information?”
“Someone stole some heroin from me. We traced it here. Gregor might have had information on Mario.” He spits again at the dead cartel man at his feet, and the sirens are louder now. “Too fucking bad.”
We need to get out of here immediately, if not sooner.
As we leave, I glance at Cal. A million questions flood my mind from territories to mam, but I settle on the easiest one. “What fundraiser?”
“That’s the thing I wanted to talk to you about. Lucie Joy’s mother’s on the board of that ballet company. Looks like we’re going back to our roots.”
“Mam?”
My brother sighs. “Mam’s family once had enemies. The Marcello family was one of them. But we’re not those people, and things have been fine between us. Except there’s now some real estate that falls on territory lines. I’ve been waiting to find the right way to approach it with Marcello. I don’t want to look overly aggressive. And I definitely don’t want him as an enemy, or to see us as weak. And now…”
“It’s been approached.”
“We’re Murphys. Mam gave all her family shit up decades back. Any sins still gathering dust aren’t ours or hers. This real estate… We’ll see. It’s not big. But that’s why I wanted to talk to him. Okay?”
“The thing is, Cal,” I say, “I don’t mind alittle mystery, it gets the old blood pumping, but I do mind when it doesn’t make sense.”
“You mean the stuff about mam and her family?”
“Not the mam thing. I just wanted to ask why you gave those drugs to Marcello?”
He swears under his breath. “I told you, I was never going to sell them. And that got you off whatever hook you put yourself on.”
I nod. “Okay. Now, about Marlowe,” I say.
“What?”
I look at my phone. “Seamus here says there was another package left. This time some old costume of Molly—Marlowe’s. Delivered. By a messenger. So, while we’re trying to track it, I’m not sure what it means. Another stalker? The one I killed having the foresight to reach out beyond the grave?”
