“Thank you for joining me on such short notice, Chief,” I say, shaking the cop’s hand with more force than necessary. “Leon Petrovic.” My next stop is the dry bar, where I pour myself a hefty drink, not offering one to our guest.
“Robert Welding, and it’s not like I had much of a choice. I can’t say I appreciate your men picking me up like I’m a common street thug in the middle of the night.” He plasters on a fake smile. Maybe in his mid-thirties, he looks too young to be a deputy chief. He also sports an all-American look, with a buzz-cut, light brown hair, and a clean-shaven face. He’s at least a few inches shorter than I am, but you can see that he works out. Not that it would help him.
“Apologies,” I say, giving him competition in the fake smile department. “I’ll inform the commissioner and the mayor when I find time, but this was an urgency.”
He grits his teeth, knowing I have his bosses by the balls. “An urgency?”
“Yes. I want to know why you have eyes on a person of our interest.” I drop into my seat and cross my arms in front of me.
“Can you be more specific?” Another smile. I was raised to hate cops, but this one is earning his own hate by the minute.
“Alexandra Landers.”
“Oh, her.” There’s something in the way his nostrils flare as he says it that has my fists clenching. “She’s a criminal. We weren’t sure of her whereabouts for a while, but now that she’s back we’re trying to catch her in action.”
“A criminal?” I lower my chin.
“Yeah. She does most of her work in casinos, where she scams innocent men out of their money. Isn’t that why you have eyes on her?”
Dom sends me a look that screams ‘I told you so,’ but I don’t trust this man as far as I can throw him. “Something like that,” I grit out.
“Look, I understand you have your ways of doing things, but we also have ours. Maybe we can help each other out. Share information.”
I focus my gaze on my hands for a second. This man is a rat. But I guess it would be better to have eyes on him while we have eyes on Alex, too. “Deal,” I say, shaking his hand again. “You let us know what you find out, and we’ll do the same thing.”
Dom escorts him out, and I count to ten before getting up and leaving, too. I settle my butt into the seat of my downstairs office when Dom returns.
“What do you think of our friend?” I ask as my head tips up toward upstairs.
“The fact that she does this for a living doesn’t surprise me.”
I roll my lips, nodding my head slowly. His words don’t comeas a shock. He’s made his stance on Alex clear plenty of times before. “I meant the cop.”
“Oh, he’s definitely hiding something. But aren’t they all?” He shrugs.
They definitely are. Getting the police on our side is an easy part of our job. They have so many skeletons in their closets that it’s a piece of cake getting them to cooperate. Matter of fact, I’ve never met a person in the mafia with as little integrity as the ones in a uniform. Still, this man gave me a bad feeling, even excluding the fact that he’s a cop.
“Williams will be here tomorrow morning. He’ll try to get as much information as he can in the short time.”
“Good. Any news on Luka?” My throat constricts saying his name.
“No,šefe. That would be the first thing I’d mention.”
I avert my gaze before bringing it back. “What about the Russians?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Let’s hit them where it hurts, shall we?” My mouth turns up into a smile, a motion far too unfamiliar the last few days. There’s a slight squeak as I open the first drawer of my desk, pulling out an envelope and dropping it in front of Dom.
“What’s this?”
“Our next target.”
Both of his eyebrows rise in surprise. He opens the envelope, extracting a stack of photos. “A distillery?”
“Their highest-producing distillery, to be precise,” I add, lifting a finger. Just like I have my casinos, the Russians have their vodka business. We already blew up one of their distilleries, but they’re like Hydra — you cut off one head, and two more grow in its place.
“Where is it?”
