by Julia Harper
But she didn’t finish the sentence, because her thoughts scattered. There was a smear of blood on the console.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered. “You’ve been shot.”
Chapter Twenty
Friday, 10:03 a.m.
Tony the Rose sat at a huge steel and glass desk in his mansion office in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Chicago. His office was a dark room because the black vertical blinds were pulled permanently over the windows. Tony didn’t like the thought of someone looking in the room from outside. Maybe taking a shot at him from the outside. Better to live in the half light than be highlighted on a stage. Besides, he wasn’t too interested in the view: trees with maybe a glimpse now and then of a Rottweiler patrolling the grounds.
On the wall opposite his desk was a fifty-seven-inch flat-screen TV with the sound off. It was tuned to the Weather Channel. A plate of Pepperidge Farm sugar cookies lay on the green ink blotter in front of him. Next to it, a Cuban cigar smoldered in a cut-glass ashtray. Tony sipped espresso from a tiny gold-rimmed glass cup and thought about what a pain in the ass his family was.
“That Fed double-crossed us,” Leo, his right-hand man, said. Leo was sitting on the other side of the desk in a red armchair, bony knees poking up. “’Course. Feds always double-cross or fuck things up, you don’t mind me saying so.”
Tony selected a perfectly round cookie and carefully bit off a quarter, savoring the taste of vanilla. What Leo was really saying was I told you so, only he couldn’t say that out loud, because Tony would then have to blow his brains out. Which didn’t mean that they didn’t both know what Leo really meant.
Tony swallowed his bite and said, “Sending Neil was a mistake.”
Leo made a big shrug, both hands palms up at shoulder height. “Don’t know that it was the Neilster’s fault this time, Tony. He said the place was already fucked when he got there. What could he do?”
“Not lose the kid, for one.” Tony shoved the rest of the cookie into his mouth and wiped his fingertips on a white paper napkin.
“True.”
“Make sure our feeb had Ricky killed, for another. That was the job I sent him to do in the first place. The feeb was supposed to have Ricky killed, Neil was supposed to verify the hit. Simple. Except no one does what they’re supposed to do anymore.”
“I dunno, Tony. I think the whole thing was a setup.”
Tony looked at Leo over the rim of his espresso cup. “Why?”
“The feeb knows we’re sending a guy, and when our guy gets there he finds a whole lot of dead Feds? I think the feeb wanted Neil to go down for his mess. Had nothing to do with popping Ricky.”
“So you’re saying the feeb never planned to have Ricky killed at all?”
“I think so, Tony. I think so.”
“Motherfucker,” Tony commented without any real heat. He’d been dealing with Feds for a long time, and like Leo said, they always double-crossed or fucked things up.
“So now we gotta worry about this trial,” Leo said, opening an unpleasant topic of conversation.
Tony had been on trial for the last couple of weeks on federal charges. He didn’t like to think about the trial too much when he wasn’t actually in the courtroom. It gave him heartburn. And he wasn’t due back in court until after lunch. He should’ve had the morning off. But that wasn’t going to happen.
Tony grunted and set down his espresso cup. “What about Ricky Spinoza? Can we get to him?”
Leo shook his head slowly, looking like a sad balding basset hound. His face was all vertical lines and drooping jowls, topped by the big dome of his bald head. Two patches of fuzz sat over both ears, making him look vaguely like a morose Bozo the Clown. “They’ve moved him again. Him and his girlfriend.”
“I am not going to be sent down by some two-bit hustler who thinks he can cross me and get away with it.”
“No, Tony.”
“I’m too old to go to the pen again. I’ve got gout in my knee.”
Leo looked surprised. “Gout? Had an uncle who had the gout. I didn’t know people got gout anymore.”
“Of course they do,” Tony replied. “It’s a buildup of uric-acid crystals in the joint. Happens all the time.”
“That so? You sure it’s your knee?”
“Yeah, it’s my knee.”
“’Cause my uncle, he had gout in his big toe.”
“It’s my knee.”
“I’m just sayin’ I never heard of gout in the knee. Toes, yes, knees, no.”
“Leo, would you kindly shut the fuck up about your uncle’s gouty toes?”
“Sure, Tony.” Leo held his hands wide and shrugged. “I’m sorry to hear you got gout.”
Tony nodded. “I want Ricky dead.”
“I hear you, but I don’t trust that feeb anymore and it’ll take too long to find Ricky. He’s due to testify in three days.”
“We ought to ice the feeb.”
“Yeah, Tony, yeah,” Leo said in an annoyingly soothing tone. “But maybe later, huh? We gotta keep Ricky from testifying.”
Tony drank the last of his espresso and patted his lips with the napkin. Then he sat back in his leather chair, making it squeak a little. “I need that kid. If we have the kid, Ricky doesn’t talk.”
“Neil said she was gone.”
“Neil is a jerkoff who I would never have sent for this job if it weren’t for my niece and her mother,” Tony growled. “I don’t even like Janet.”
This was the problem with family. They expected you to hire them just because of blood, never mind if they were screwups. What was worse, they expected you to hire their asshole husbands, too. And in the case of Neil, he had not only his niece, Ashley, hounding him, but her mother, Janet, as well. And though Tony would never say this to anyone, his younger sister kind of gave him the willies. Janet was a coldhearted bitch and a mean one, too.
No one knew how hard it was to be the boss. Tony allowed himself a small moment of self-pity.
Then he looked at Leo. “I’m bringing in Rutgar.”
Leo’s head jerked back like he’d been popped in the forehead. “Jesus, Tony. Rutgar? He ain’t exactly a precision worker.”
“He gets the job done. Every time.”
“Yeah, but the job’s usually a hit, pardon the expression.”
“So?”
“So, you want a baby hit?”
Tony shrugged. “I want Rutgar to bring the kid to me.”
Leo looked uneasy. “Yeah, but what I’m saying is that Rutgar gets kinda enthusiastic when he’s working. People get hurt, and sometimes they ain’t the ones supposed to be hurt.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m not going to prison again. I need that kid, and I need her fast. If she’s a little bruised in the process, well”—Tony picked up a sugar cookie and idly ground it into the plate, watching as it shattered and fell into little pieces—“that’s the way the fucking cookie crumbles, isn’t it?”
Chapter Twenty-one
Friday, 10:24 a.m.
It’s not a gunshot wound,” Dante said from the passenger seat.
“How do you know?” Zoey felt tears blur her vision. She blinked them away fiercely. Not now. “You’re bleeding. You could be in shock and not know that you’re hit. We have to get you to a hospital.”
But even as she said it, she knew that wasn’t possible. They might as well turn themselves in at a police station as go to an emergency room. And after the shootout under the overpass, she very much feared that Dante wouldn’t come out of a police station alive.
“The Caddy hit my thigh when the SUVs crashed into it,” Dante said beside her. “Must’ve gotten a cut or something. I’d know if I’d been shot.”
She glanced quickly at him. He was yellow under his naturally swarthy skin. Not a good sign. “How would you know?”
“What?”
“How would you know if you were shot?” They were heading north now, and she’d driven into a commercial area. Zoey searched the stores as she drove by
.
“Because I’ve been shot before.”
For a split second she stared at him before she wrenched her gaze back to the road. It’d never occurred to her that he might be hurt in his line of work. Which was silly, of course, considering what they’d both been through since yesterday afternoon, but there it was. It seemed too Hollywood, an FBI agent being shot, too surreal. Not part of her everyday, boring life.
But Dante was sitting next to her, his hair rumpled, his face shiny with sweat, his eyes shut in what must be pain, not looking at all like a GQ cover model now. Now he looked like an ordinary man and he was real. Suddenly real in a way that he hadn’t been before. He was a flesh-and-blood man. One who could feel pain.
One who could be shot and killed.
She drew in a shaky breath. “What—?”
“I’ll tell you later,” he said quietly, and she felt ashamed. This was a wild adventure for her. She was worried sick about Pete, true, but after this was all over, after they got Pete back, she’d return to her normal, slightly boring life. Whereas for Dante, this was his life.
She saw what she was looking for and made an abrupt turn into a corner mall, the kind with an old K-Mart and a row of little discount shops. Dante grunted as he was thrown against the door. She jerked the BMW to a halt in the K-Mart parking lot between a blue sedan and a yellow Jeep.
“I’m sorry,” Zoey babbled as she unhooked her seat belt. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
Dante grabbed her arm, his fingers tight even through her puffy coat. “You can’t go in there.”
“You need bandages,” Zoey hissed fiercely.
“How’re you going to pay for them?”
“I’ve got a credit card.”
“It’ll be traced. I don’t want you—”
She turned and placed her hand over the hand that gripped her arm. “Look. They already know we’re in Chicago, right? It doesn’t matter if they trace my card to a K-Mart.”
He stared at her, his bitter-chocolate eyes intent and worried. Then he let go of her arm. “Hurry. I don’t want them to find us here.”
She nodded and scrambled from the BMW. The wind was cold outside, and she walked swiftly to the automatic sliding doors. Inside, insipid background music played, and once again she felt a sense of disconnect. Zoey grabbed a monster cart and started wheeling it through the aisles. First stop was the pharmacy area. She picked up first-aid supplies, as well as some bottles of painkillers, then looked at the cart and hesitated a moment. She’d only been in the store less than five minutes. It wouldn’t take much longer to pick up a few things more.
Twenty minutes later she was through the checkout line and lugging four full plastic bags to the car. She could see Dante frowning as she unlocked the back seat door and threw the bags inside.
“What did you get?” he asked as she buckled her seat belt.
“Supplies.” She looked over her shoulder as she backed out of the parking space. When she turned around again, she caught Dante’s eye. “What?”
“Looks like you plan on a siege.”
She shrugged and put the car in drive. “I like to be prepared.”
He didn’t say anything for a bit as she drove a couple of miles closer to the Loop. She pulled over into another parking lot and turned off the engine.
“Okay, take off those pants.” Zoey leaned over into the back, rummaging in the plastic bags. When she came back up with her first-aid supplies, Dante was looking at her with raised brows.
She rolled her eyes. “Unless you want me to cut them off, Lips.”
“Lips?”
She could feel her face go hot. Oh, wonderful. Her mouth had been betrayed by her nervousness.
He reached for his belt buckle. “Did you say Lips?”
“No.” This was the point when Zoey knew she should politely look away, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. There was something unbelievably erotic about a man undoing his trousers, and her eyes were fixed on his long, dark fingers working at his fly.
“Yes, you did.”
“Okay, maybe I did. So what?”
He lifted his hips and slid his trousers down until they bagged around his knees. She noticed sexy gray knit boxers, and then her gaze was caught by the massive bruise on his thigh. It ran from just above the knee to under the edge of his knit shorts and was highlighted by a huge abrasion. Blood must’ve dried and stuck to the material of his trousers, because fresh blood was welling all along the scrape. The whole thing looked very nasty.
“Shit,” Zoey breathed. “You didn’t break your leg, did you?”
“No,” Dante grunted. “I wouldn’t have been able to stand if I had.”
“Good point.” Zoey unscrewed a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and glanced at him apologetically. “This will probably sting.”
He looked resigned. “So what’s with Lips?”
She began to carefully clean the wound using the hydrogen peroxide and a sterile gauze pad. “Remember when I moved into the apartment building?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, that first night I went down to use the laundry room and you stole my dryer.”
“What?”
“You stole my dryer. You stole my dryer almost every time I used the laundry.”
“I did n—”
“You’d go down to the basement, and you’d take all my clothes out of the dryer and steal it. You did. And what was worse, it was always my underwear load. I think you have a panty fetish.”
“I do not,” he muttered. His sculpted cheekbones were getting ruddy.
“Anyway, I didn’t know your name, but I got to calling you Lips of Sin.” She had her head down, dabbing at an oozing cut, so she couldn’t see his face.
There was a silence in the car, and she began to really wish that he’d say something. The silence stretched, the only sound in the car their breathing—his deep and even, hers getting just a little ragged.
Finally, she inhaled and said the first thing that came into her mind. “Who was that back there under the overpass?”
She straightened to throw away the soiled gauze she’d been using to clean his scrapes.
He caught her wrist when she swung back. “Zoey.”
His hand was hot against the cool skin of her wrist, and his eyes were dark and intense. She stared at him, and for the life of her she didn’t know what to say.
He sighed and let go of her wrist. “They were probably professional hit men.”
She swallowed, feeling a wave of relief. She got out another square of gauze and tore open the paper wrapper. “No, I mean the dead guy. Did you know him?”
He was silent a moment, and she was conscious of the warmth of his thigh under her fingertips. It was a nicely muscled thigh beneath the bruises and cuts, with a scattering of just enough curly black hair.
“That was Kevin,” Dante said at last. “Poor bastard.”
She glanced up at him. His lips were set in a grim line.
“Kev, the guy you talked to on the phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Wasn’t he the guy who gave way where we were?”
He caught her eye. “Yeah, Kev was a weasely guy, but I kind of liked him anyway. It was hard not to.”
She stared down at his lap, noticing absently how well the gray cotton fit over his crotch. “Why would they kill Kevin?”
Dante robbed his face looking infinitely weary. “Because he was one of two people in Chicago who knew that I was working undercover at the Chicago FBI office.”
Zoey felt her eyes widen, and her hands stilled over him. “Who was the other?”
“The Chicago office SAC, Jack Headington. The guy we were supposed to meet.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Friday, 11:02 a.m.
Her hands were warm and gentle on his bruised skin. For some reason Dante hadn’t expected that. Her gentleness was a nice contrast to the stinging pain of the hydrogen peroxide she was using on his scrapes.
“Why were you under
cover?” she asked softly.
He blinked and glanced at her. All he could see was the top of her silly multicolored reindeer hat. She was bent over his lap as if doing something entirely different than administering first aid, and he could smell the sweet scent of her hair.
He glanced away, trying to push the inappropriate thought from his brain. “A little over a month ago I was sent in undercover to do an investigation of the Chicago FBI office.”
“Like, an internal investigation?” Zoey murmured. He could almost feel the brush of her breath on his leg.
Christ. “Yeah, exactly like an internal investigation. There were suspicions that someone in the Chicago office was crooked.”
“Because—?”
“Bad guys being tipped off about raids, evidence disappearing, stuff like that. To top it off, five months ago a mob informant was killed right before a meet with the local cops.”
“Couldn’t that informant’s killing have been job related? It’s probably not a very safe profession, tattling on the mob.”
Dante smiled grimly. “Yeah, but added all together it set off some alarm bells. The higher-ups decided it was time to send in someone from outside the Chicago office to look into things. Someone who wouldn’t be tainted by local loyalties and politics. Someone like me.”
“All alone?”
“One guy being transferred in is a lot less suspicious than several.”
She sighed and ripped open a new gauze packet. “And the first thing your bosses did was tell this Headington guy? That sounds kind of stupid.”
Dante tensed as she poured more hydrogen peroxide in his wounds. The stuff stung like a son of a bitch, and beneath the sting was the pounding ache of his bruised thigh. He wondered idly if he’d be able to walk on the leg tomorrow.
“Jack Headington’s the SAC of the Chicago FBI office. He’d have to know why I’d been transferred anyway. Besides, there is no reason to suspect him. He’s done decades of exemplary service in the FBI, had several commendations, and never a hint of problems in all that time. In fact, he was the one who initially pushed for an outside investigation.”
She snorted. “Probably wanted to be able to keep an eye on what you found.”