“It’s a very slippery slope.”
She rolled her eyes as I bent to grab Charlie’s feet, and the two of us loaded him into the trunk of his car. Vero dusted off her hands as I slammed the lid. She raised an eyebrow at the triangle of spandex framed by Pokey’s chaps. “It’s looking a little cold out here. You should probablygo inside.” Pokey blushed under the streetlamp. His eyes dipped to the .357 in Vero’s pants, and he wisely chose to keep his own mouth shut.
“Can we all agree not to say anything to anyone about this?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t feel a need to report this to anyone. I really didn’t want to have to wrestle him into the trunk, too.
He gestured to his lone boot. “You think I want to tell anyone?” He dusted alley grime from his fringe, wincing at the weeping road rash on his thighs. “I’m going home. After tonight, I’ll probably get fired anyway.”
“You could just quit,” Vero pointed out. “Marco’s book is gone. It’s not like you need to worry about paying him back the money.”
Pokey straightened his cowboy hat as he limped bare-assed to the corner. “You two don’t know how shit works around here, do you?” he called over his shoulder. “That book is Marco’s business, and Marco’s business is valuable. That ledger won’t just disappear because someone walked off with it. It’ll turn up somewhere. Secrets always do.”
For all our sakes, I hoped he wasn’t right.
CHAPTER 17
“Where to now?” Vero asked, hands on her hips as she frowned at the Cadillac.
“We can’t take Charlie’s car back to the hotel.”
“He’s going to be pissed when he wakes up.”
“Hopefully by the time he makes it out of this trunk, we’ll have found Javi and the car and be on our way back to Virginia.”
“What are you going to tell Nick?” she asked.
“As little as possible.” I thumbed open Charlie’s phone and found the long string of text messages the two of them had been exchanging all day. “All we have to do is respond when Nick checks in. If we keep our responses short and sweet, he probably won’t suspect anything.” Sure enough, Nick and Charlie had last messaged each other an hour ago.
Charlie:How’s the manhunt going?
Nick had responded with a poop emoji.How was Finn’s meeting with her agent?
Charlie had answered that with a series of surreptitious photos he’d taken at Chubbies. There was one of me passing cash to a scantily cladserver. There was one of Vero, pointing and shouting, standing on a chair in an audience of cheering, thirsty women. There was even one of my mother, eyes wide and covered in glitter, with Steele Johnson sitting on her lap. Every photo looked perfectly incriminating and yet somehow altogether harmless, like we were actually having a good time. I squinted at the caption.
I’ll let Finlay tell you all about her meeting later. The ladies wanted to do some manhunting of their own. Looks like we’ll be out late. You owe me for this, partner.
Nick had replied with a laughing emoji.I’ll buy you a beer when I get back to the hotel.
“That duplicitous bastard!” I said, tipping the screen toward Vero so she could see the photos Charlie had taken of us.
“At least now you won’t have to lie to Nick about where you went. What else is on Charlie’s phone?”
I sifted through his other calls and messages, then his email account, searching for any incriminating messages between Charlie and his mob contacts—anything to prove he’d been working for Feliks Zhirov.
Nothing. It was as if Charlie had compartmentalized his two identities entirely, and this phone bore no evidence at all of his other life. I opened his camera, not surprised to find he’d snapped a few pictures of Sylvia and me during dinner. It was as if he were building a case for himself, documenting evidence he’d done exactly what Nick had asked him to do tonight. I sighed, defeated. “There’s nothing here.”
“There has to be something,” Vero said, taking the phone to look for herself before handing it back to me. “He’s probably using fake names in his contact lists. You know, making dummy email accounts and using forwarded numbers to hide what he’s up to from Nick. I bet if we gave that phone to Cam, he could find something in it.”
“Maybe,” I agreed. “But for now, we just need to keep Nick from suspecting anything.” I crossed my arms over my sweater, wishing I had my coat. “We should go find my mother and take her back to the hotel.”
“Then what?” Vero cocked an eyebrow. “Nick’s expecting us to be out late, thanks to Charlie’s texts.”
“What do you have in mind?”
Vero thought about that. She stared at Charlie’s trunk as she spun his key fob around her finger. “Remember what Pokey said, about Marco’s book? That ledger is like the car,” she explained. “It has value. Lots of people might want to buy a fancy car, but only one kind of person would be interested in a little black book listing all the names of people who took out markers from a loan shark, and that’s another loan shark. And I’m willing to bet Marco Toscano wasn’t the only loan shark in this town. In a city with this many casinos, there must be others.”
“Meaning what?”
“Whoever stole that ledger knew it was valuable. And it was taken from the crime scene, so they’d probably want to get rid of it fast.”
