I snatched the phone and put it away.
Ghost just couldn’t let it go. Forming a pretend phone with his pinky and thumb, he held it up to his face. “You better get a doctor over here stat or I’ll put you in the hospital, then come visit and unplug your life support to charge my phone.” He repeated—rather dramatically—what I’d said to him when I called him last night.
What? Hazard was unconscious.
Besides, it worked. He was here in twenty minutes with Doc.
“You done?” I asked when he put away his finger phone.
“I deal with a lot in the name of friendship,” he mourned as if he were some gift from the heavens.
I didn’t bother to remind him that we weren’t friends, which was just more proof of my new marshmallow spine. Instead, Isaid, “The last time you left town, you abandoned some creepy one-eyed doll with a crack in its head and a missing foot at my front door with a note that said,It’s your problem now.”
“What’d you do with that anyway?” Ghost glanced around, then whispered, “Is she here? You got rid of her, right?”
“Are you scared?” I mused.
Leaning in, he whispered, “I’ve seen things.”
This conversation was getting me nowhere. “Can we please get back to the reason I called you over here?”
“Oh, you mean that the mob wants your man dead and expects you to do it?”
Why did he sound entertained? “Yes,” I replied, cold. “That.”
“So what’d half-pint do to piss off the most powerful people in the region?” he asked, finishing off his beer and discarding the empty bottle on the countertop.
I pointed to the trash can.
“Yes, Mom,” he muttered and carried it over.
As he was about to dump it, I made a sound. “The recycle bin is next to it.”
He snorted and tossed it in the proper can. “You trying to balance out all the murder you do with saving the earth?”
I gave him the finger. Humanity was shit, but Earth didn’t need to suffer for it.
“I’m going to go to Salvatore,” I announced.
Ghost made a face. “You can’t.”
Matteo Salvatore was the head of one of the largest crime families in this country. He ran the entire city of Buffalo and additional territory that crossed into Canada. He’d earned the reputation of being shrewd, resourceful, and unforgiving. He had his hands in more businesses than even I knew, some legitimate and most a front for his less-than-legal activities.
He had cops and judges in his pockets and was rumored to have helped the most recent senator get elected. In short, youdidn’t fuck around with Matteo Salvatore, and if you did, you didn’t live to tell about it.
Nicholas Grimaldi was Salvatore’s right-hand man.
“I can, and I am,” I said, completely serious. As I said before, these men didn’t fuck around, but I didn’t either. They started something. I would finish it. “If Salvatore told Grimaldi to order the hit?—”
Ghost cut me off. “Matteo Salvatore is dead.”
I reared back, completely caught off guard. “What?”
“You really didn’t know?” I guess the look on my face answered that because Ghost shook his head. “What kind of hitman are you to not know what’s going on in your own town? On your turf?”
“I was out of the country for over three weeks.” I reminded him. And since I’d gotten home, I’d been distracted. That ended now.
“You gotta start looking at the news, my guy.”
