"He's not going to stop," I say quietly. "Not until he’s taken me away from you."
Nico reaches across the seat and laces his fingers through mine, and brings my knuckles up to his mouth in a soft yet possessive kiss.
"No he won’t,piccola," he says. "I don’t care if he’s OCCB. I’ll take his hands before I ever let him come near you again. I swear it."
I nod. But somewhere in a far-off part of me, the seventeen-year-old girl with her hand around the strap of her duffel bag is telling me that I should be afraid.
Veryafraid.
20
NICO
Morning
Anastasio sets the folder on my desk the next morning.
"Case just opened this morning," he says. "No hiding the church shootout now. Organized Crime Control Bureau is running the whole show, and I’m sure you’ll be interested to see who the lead investigator is."
I don't reach for it. I don’t have to. "Frank Carpenter?"
"Bingo." He drops into the chair across from me. "He didn't sign the order to open, but every name attached to it answers to him. And the requisition came up through his office."
The man’s good, I’ll give him that. Not every day that you meet a captain who knows how to dress a personal hunt in procedure’s clothes.
Anastasio continues to look at the folder, and I finally reach over, wincing slightly before I open it. The photographs come first. The altar steps where Father Valdoni went down. Sal in his good suit. The font of holy water with a dark spray up the marblethat nobody bothered to wipe before the camera came. Fucking cops documented all of it.
"What does this touch?" I ask.
"Everything they can reach that ever ties back to you. The shooting gives them the door. Once they're through it, they subpoena the businesses, the books, the men.” Anastasio pauses for a moment. “Terminal 7.”
Fuck.
Of all places that I can’t have the cops touch, it’s Terminal 7. It’s the one piece of clean business that I own. The single place where I can still say I built while I was still Nico, and not Don Leo’s son.
Anastasio spreads his hands and continues talking. "It's a goddamn fishing license, Nico. And the man holding the rod hates you personally."
I turn another page. A diagram of the cathedral floor with little markers where each body fell. Somebody spent an afternoon on it. The dead have been sorted into evidence. There's a marker near the confession booth, and I look at that for a second longer than the others, at the little printed shape of the place I had her mouth on me an hour before men came through the doors shooting.
"How long do we have?" I ask.
"Before they start kicking doors? Weeks. Before they have something a grand jury will look at? Months, if we starve it. Frank wants it faster than that. Which means he'll cut corners, and make mistakes." Anastasio shrugs. "He's hungry to put you away.”
“He’s hungry for more than that,” I correct him.
“Either way. Hungry's sloppy. We can frontrun that. Clean up as much as we can before the OCCB swings the hammer in our faces.”
"Then we give him nothing but air to swing at," I say. "Move the Terminal 7 paper through the Cayman shell before any subpoena can name it. Anything in Red Hook that can't survive a flashlight goes dark by Friday. The men who were inside that day stop being in this country. Send Benito to the ones who can't fly, and tell them the bureau is offering deals to whoever talks first, so the first one who talks is the only one who hangs." I close the folder. "And nobody,nobody, says one word into a phone they didn't buy yesterday."
Anastasio nods slowly. He's watching me the way he does when he's waiting to see if I'm going to do the thing he thinks I should do, which is panic, which I'm not going to do.
"You're oddly calm for a man with a noose around his neck," he says.
"I have a bullet hole in my shoulder, a case with my name on it, and a Greek who wants my wife skinned for boots." I stand, slow, and the wire of fire goes down my arm again. "Isn’t that what Dons are supposed to deal with on a day to day basis?"
He almost smiles. Then he doesn't, and there's the rest of it sitting on his face, the thing he came in carrying under the folder.
"There's one more," he says.
