by Beverly Bird
The man was not an inch taller than Kate was, but he was round. She stared at him, amazed. He had to weigh three hundred and fifty pounds. He had hair the color of ginger ale, and muddy brown eyes. His face was florid.
“Son of a—” Joe began.
“Hey, watch your language. I’ve got a lady with me.” And that quickly, that cleanly, Raphael had his gun in his hand.
Kate’s heart pounded in shock. She hadn’t seen him move. He didn’t threaten with it, but merely made sure it was visible. What did he expect to happen here?
She did not want to be part of this. And she wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
“Now what?” she whispered, leaning close to Raphael’s back.
“Now you shut up,” he said in an undertone.
“Who’s she?” Joe asked, peering around him.
“My lady, the one I just mentioned.”
My lady? Something curled in Kate’s stomach, something sweet and languorous.
“She’s my job, pal. And I take my jobs seriously. So we need to talk.”
The air left Kate, and everything else inside seemed to sluice out of her with it. Of course, she was his job. He mentioned that often enough. How could she forget?
The fat man stepped back from the door. The gun must have persuaded him. Raphael strode inside. Kate stood immobile for a moment, then she scooted in after him.
“Stay here,” Raphael said to her. He pointed at her feet. “Not an inch farther.”
“But—” She broke off at the look of warning on his face. She stayed put.
Raphael and the man named Joe went inside. She could just barely make out a bar behind a stand of ferns guarding the entry. She’d had a vision of hard, practiced killers sitting around a big table. Shoveling food in, drinking Chianti. Wrong mob, she thought giddily. Apparently, the Irish did things differently.
Kate craned her neck around the ferns. There was a row of seven men on the stools in front of a long panel of what appeared to be teak. They all wore suits. A few lean, hungry types hovered behind them, and they mostly wore jeans. They seemed younger.
Joe went behind the bar. Raphael followed right after him. Kate grinned. She liked his style.
They were talking too quietly for her to hear. Kate tucked Belle closer to her chest and crept forward. A growl rumbled in the dog’s throat, and Kate closed her hand over her muzzle.
She watched Raphael put his palms on the bar. She thought his eyes had gone dark again, but in the dim light and with the distance between them, she couldn’t be sure.
“Who put the word out on the McGaffney witnesses?” he asked.
Kate shivered. It was just like in the movies.
“You got the wrong restaurant,” said one of the men at the bar. “Sounds to me like you need to be talking to Charlie.”
Kate noticed that all the men who were standing had their hands at or near their waists, where Raphael always kept his gun. They were armed. The giddy feeling washed out of her. This was for real.
Raphael didn’t look at the man who had spoken. “This is the way I see it. This current problem is between you guys and Charlie Eagan. It’s your war, your business. I don’t give a damn if you all shoot each other from here to Poughkeepsie. It’s less I have to worry about on the streets. But now you’re involving innocent people, and you know how testy I get about that. I’m not crying over Phil McGaffney. But that woman last night? She bothers me. And the one over there by the door? Gentlemen, you don’t want to know.”
“Who’s she to you?” asked a man at the bar. Kate’s breath gathered into a weightless sensation of expectancy. She cursed herself a thousand times for being a fool.
“Innocent,” Raphael said calmly. “She was at the scene when Phil got hit, but she saw nothing.”
A lot of gazes came around to speculate over Kate. She took a judicious step backward toward the door again.
“She saw who nailed Phil, hey, let her tell us,” one of the seated men said. “We’ll take care of it. Otherwise, we can’t help you.”
“So what’s the word?” Raphael said, swerving the subject, having made his point. “Who took out McGaffney?”
“Do we know?” said the first man at the bar. “If we knew, there would have been more action by now instead of all the waiting.”
Kate listened and frowned. He was saying that if these men knew which of Eagan’s men had killed Phil McGaffney, if they could pinpoint exactly who had ordered the hit, a mob war would have been in full force by now.
“Then thanks for your time,” Raphael said. He stepped around the bar and came toward her. He took her elbow and steered Kate out the door.
She blinked in the sunlight as they stepped outside. “That’s it?”
He looked at her, scowling. “What did you expect?”
“Answers.”
“From here? These guys have no idea which of Eagan’s guys hit Phil.”
She couldn’t help it. Kate dragged against his hold on her arm and stamped her foot. “Then why did we even bother? This was just…just wasting time!” And the light was thinning, the day getting older. They were never going to get this figured out by nightfall!
“Let me get this straight. You thought some great nugget of wisdom was going to pop forth out of all that?”
Kate hesitated, then nodded.
“Someone died, Kate. And no matter what I said back there, McGaffney was a human being and that makes me mad. But these guys aren’t going to tell me who killed him.” He frowned and looked up the street, as though thinking ahead. “We’re going to make another four or five stops this afternoon. And no one is going to tell us anything. But they’re going to talk among each other. And someone way down on the totem pole, someone maybe a little disgruntled and a little ticked off at somebody else, he’s going to get an earful of it. And one of those guys is going to come to me and tell me what he knows.”
Kate was horrified. “That could take days!”
“Depends on how fast we talk to a whole lot of people. You should have thought of that before the prosciutto.” He turned away from her. “We’ve got a lot of cages to rattle and a lot of trees to shake before that one guy gets my message, so let’s go.”
He started walking again. Kate followed him, a little woozy from the blast of reality.
“You did okay with that back there,” he said finally.
He was a few steps ahead of her again. Kate didn’t try to catch up this time. She hugged the dog a little tighter to herself and smiled.
By five o’clock, her arms ached abominably. By six, her feet were in agony. She was more than ten strides behind Raphael on Eleventh Street, and Kate no longer even cared about keeping up. As long as she could see him ahead of her, she wouldn’t lose him.
He’d been absolutely right. No one had told them anything. Detective work was nothing like in the books that were her passion. They’d spent the entire afternoon talking to this person, that person, then another one—and they had learned nothing worth knowing.
Kate was tired. She was demoralized. But with each useless interview, Raphael seemed to become more dogged. She watched him gaining ground on her again. A man had died, a woman had nearly been killed, and he fully intended to stand for them, she realized. No matter what it took, no matter how many seemingly useless questions he had to ask, he would do it. He was not discouraged. He was doing what needed to be done.
Kate pressed her free hand to her heart. She was actually starting to admire him. Fantasies were one thing. A misguided kiss was more of the same. Not hating him anymore…well, she could accept that. But respect?
Kate stopped cold in the middle of the sidewalk. Raphael went on for several strides before he realized that she was no longer trailing behind him. He stopped and looked back.
“What are you doing?”
“My arms hurt,” she shouted. “You take the dog.”
But instead of coming toward her or answering, he looked at his watch. “Want to stop by your apartment and
pick up some of your things while we’re in the neighborhood?”
Kate looked around. She was so numb from fatigue that she hadn’t even realized they were only a block or so from her apartment. The thought of clean clothes galvanized her. She started walking again.
The feeling dissipated as soon as they crossed her lobby. Sure, there were clean clothes up there. There were also the remnants of her life. She wasn’t sure which she dreaded more—finding a lot of calls for Dinner For Two on her answering machine that she would have to turn down, or finding no calls at all.
“I want to stop and buy a newspaper after we leave here.” She stabbed her finger on the elevator button. “I want to see what they have to say about all this.”
“What’s the point? You were there. You saw the whole thing go down firsthand.”
Her temper kicked. “Maybe I want to see if they spelled my name right.”
And he was just as determined that she would never know.
There’d been a paper behind the bar at Bonnie Joe’s. He’d caught a glimpse of the front-page headline. The big banner was all for the rumbles of war amid the Philadelphia Irish underground. And beneath that, in just slightly smaller print, there had been a howl about the connection to Dinner For Two. It hadn’t taken the press long to follow the trail of Kate’s bread crumbs from Phil McGaffney to Betty Morley.
“You’ve got ten minutes,” he said, to take her mind off it.
Kate swung around to face him as the elevator doors opened on her floor. “It’s six-thirty at night!” she cried. “Even you have to give up at some point!”
He gave her a little nudge, sending her off the elevator. “We’re done for the day.”
“Then why are you timing me?”
“Because every minute we stay here is a minute someone can figure out you are here. If you were trying to find someone, where would be the first place you’d look?”
Kate ground her teeth together. She hated him being right all the time.
She hated being afraid more.
But she was. He had spooked her—again. She whipped through the apartment in record time, throwing clothes and toiletries into a small overnight case. She refused to drag her big suitcase out of the closet. For one thing, it was the one she’d come to Philadelphia with from the Midwest so many years ago—full of dreams that were dying now. And somehow, she thought, if she packed that many clothes, it would be like admitting she was going to be with Raphael for a while.
She saved the kitchen—and the telephone and answering machine there—for last.
Kate held her breath and looked at the little numeric display window. It showed a big, red zero. She couldn’t help it. A small sound was wrenched from her chest.
“This will be the worst of it,” Raphael said, watching her closely. “These first few days. But time will pass. And people will forget.”
She looked at him, another thought suddenly coming to her, one that appalled her. “I never called into the diner this morning to tell them I wouldn’t be in again!”
Raphael looked away from her, from the way her color drained. Then she grabbed the telephone. She tapped in two numbers, then her finger stalled. Slowly, making that sound again, she replaced the receiver.
“What good would it do?” she asked miserably. “If the diner hasn’t already fired me, they’ll just want to know when I will be back. And I can’t tell them.”
They’d know that already, Raphael thought, if they’d read the papers.
“It’s all…gone. Dinner For Two. My job. My…my savings.”
Raphael scowled. “What happened to your money?”
“I’m going to have to dip into it to survive! I have no income now!”
He hadn’t meant to comfort her. He’d been carefully avoiding it all day. Now his hands went to her shoulders almost as though they had a will of their own. He thought about shaking her out of it. He only held her instead, his fingers kneading out some of the tension he found there. “Kate, this isn’t a siege without end. Before the month’s out, you’ll have another job.”
She made a strangled sound. “It’s only August ninth!”
He ignored her nitpicking this time. “Dinner For Two will start getting calls again. You’ll be notorious, and the bad guys will be behind bars.”
She sniffed, not in that indignant way, but as though she was trying not to cry.
“I’ve got a little money put aside,” he heard himself say. What the hell was he doing? Her net worth was probably three times what his was! She saved, he spent. That was what money was earned for, in his book. “I’ll make you a loan to tide you over so you don’t have to touch that restaurant money.”
She stared at him, then, finally, her eyes started swimming. “That’s…that’s ridiculous.”
He knew.
“I’ve got money. That’s not the point.”
“If it hurts you this much to use it, then I don’t want you to do it.”
Her stomach rolled. So did her heart. What was he saying?
That he cared. But she knew, somehow, that it said nothing particular about his feelings for her, except, perhaps, that he was starting to consider her a friend, or maybe he’d just always considered her a victim. And she knew that he would do the same thing for anyone in her situation, anyone who was scared and helpless against what was happening to them. Life’s little trivial nuisances—like how much money he had in the bank—rolled right off his shoulders, unimportant.
It made a feeling swell inside Kate that was so treacherous, so dangerous, so far beyond tolerating him or liking him or even respecting him, she shook her head fast and hard and backed away. She couldn’t let him see it in her eyes. She knew, in that instant, that she could fall in love with him.
“Let’s go,” she said, her voice still clogged. “It’s giving me the creeps to be here.”
He went to the door and held it for her, but he let her juggle her overnight case and the dog, making no move to take either of them from her. Kate opened her mouth with a caustic comment, then she laughed.
She felt the reflex climb all the way up her throat, and she let it out gladly because for a minute there, she’d purely been on the verge of losing her mind. Loving him? It was much, much better to enjoy the little grunt he made when she passed him and shoved the dog at his chest so hard that he had no choice but to catch her. It was infinitely better to hear him swear under his breath as he shut the door behind them.
This was safe ground.
Chapter 11
They picked up his Explorer from her garage, then Raphael followed Kate’s big, lumbering van over the bridge toward his neighborhood. She’d refused to leave it in the municipal lot. So he kept close to her rear bumper, uncomfortable with the idea of her being in a separate vehicle.
Periodically it expelled bursts of noxious smoke from its tailpipe. Raphael closed his windows tightly and swore to himself. He decided that a tune-up probably wouldn’t fix whatever ailed the van’s exhaust system. It if were that simple, as meticulous as she was, Kate would have had it fixed by now.
He was coming to know her entirely too well, he thought.
On the seat beside him, Belle yapped once as though agreeing with his thoughts. He scowled at her, not sure how she’d come to be riding with him instead of in the van. “Why don’t you run back to wherever it was you came from?”
The dog cocked her head and gave him…well, a pitying expression, he thought. Like she was saddened by the fact that he was stupid enough to believe it was even an option.
“I’m not buying it,” Raphael muttered. “You’re just a dog. Hell, you’re not even a purebred. You’re a mutt off the street.”
She showed teeth. It was a little eerie, he thought.
“All you do is eat and sleep. Name one angelic thing you’ve done so far.”
She yawned and closed her eyes. Dismissing him, Raphael thought, and the boring limits of his human mind. He was inclined to nudge her wiry little body off the seat onto the floo
r just for the hell of it, but she’d probably bite him again.
They reached his town house and Kate rolled her van into his driveway first. It was so big that when he tried to tuck the Explorer in behind her, about a foot of his vehicle protruded out onto the street. “Uh-uh,” Raphael said, getting out. “This isn’t going to work.” He motioned back and forth between the two trucks.
Kate looked at them blankly. “You want to change them around?”
“Damned right I do.”
“What for?”
“If anybody’s tail is going to get smacked by a drunk driver, it’s going to be yours.”
“Does the judge typically drink and drive?”
“It doesn’t have to be anyone who lives here. Traffic passes through.” And it was the principal of the thing, he thought. It was his driveway.
He headed toward her, intent upon wrestling her keys away from her if she wouldn’t cooperate. Then his cell phone rang.
Too much was going on right now to ignore it. His number was easily available and he’d talked to a lot of people today. It was possible that someone from within McGaffney’s ranks had already turned. He paused to answer it, then he scowled. “It’s for you.”
Kate caught the cell phone as he passed it to her. “How could it be? No one knows I’m here.”
Everyone knew, he thought. He had very little doubt that somewhere in that newspaper article, it had been mentioned that she was in protective custody. The rest was an easy leap.
She frowned as she followed him inside and spoke into the phone. “Hello?”
The bright, cheerful voice of Beth Olivetti answered her, the assistant she had hired before this nightmare had started. It seemed like a lifetime ago. “I called police headquarters and they said you were assigned to Raphael Montiel and gave me this number. How are you doing?”
Kate was mildly disquieted that the cops had volunteered such information so easily. Anyone could find her, she realized. Then again, Raphael had been giving the number out to people they’d talked to all day. He was always on the move and had to have a way for people to reach him.