by Diana Layne
Dave blew out a breath. “We need to meet.” He didn’t want to tell Sandro about Nia over the phone.
“Si. Soon.”
“It’s important we meet now.” Dave emphasized the word ‘now’.
“Carlo knows I was working with you, which means it is likely they’re watching you. If you rush off now, after talking on the phone outside they will know you have been talking to me. It will be hard to lose them when they are so alerted.”
“Okay.” Dave conceded, beginning to pace. Ten feet left. Ten feet back again. “When and where?”
“You will be very careful no one follows you?”
“Look, damn it, I know how to do my job.” He raised his fist in the air, briefly wishing Sandro’s face was there before he realized his anger might draw unwanted attention. He dropped his hand.
“I trusted you before. I have a contract now on my head.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Resisting an urge to squeeze an imaginary throat, Dave ran the fingers of his free hand through his close-cropped hair. “How did you find out?”
“Marisa.”
“Is she the one who told you my office is bugged?”
“Si.”
“She could be making the whole thing up. They could be using her to set you up right now.”
“Has she not given you good information?”
“She could have given us the information to look like she was cooperating.” Dave’s palms began to sweat. He coudln’t afford to screw this up. One wrong move and he’d be pushing papers for the rest of his career. And that was the least of his problems. One wrong move and Nia could--
“She saved my life this morning. Which is more than you can say.”
She . . . she . . . Dave struggled to bring his thoughts back to the conversation. She saved . . . who was she? Oh, Marisa. Marisa saved Sandro’s life this morning, yes. Dave clenched his teeth and rubbed his hand down his pant leg, half-afraid he was losing it. “Point taken,” he conceded at last. “Okay, tell me where do we meet?”
“I will pick you up in front of the drugstore around the corner from your office. In one hour. Make sure you are not followed.”
“I won’t be followed,” Dave promised. “What are you driving now? Her car?”
“Not her car. I don’t yet know what I’ll be driving. Keep your eyes open.”
“Oh, they’ll be open, Sandro. Nice and wide. I won’t be caught off guard again.”
Chapter 10
Dave stood with his back pressed against the outside wall of the large chain drugstore. An ominous looking rain cloud approached with the evening’s dropping darkness. Soon enough, the skies opened and fat, cold raindrops pelted the ground. Dave shivered and turned up the collar on his overcoat. Welcome to New York City in the fall. Although snow was in the forecast, the temperature hadn’t yet dropped enough for any white stuff to form. Thank God for little favors.
Huddling against the wall under the eaves, Dave fought the feeling he was losing control of this case. He couldn’t fail at this. Never mind he’d always wanted to emulate the old man, had gone into the FBI in the first place thanks to his dad, one of the first profilers. Dad’s footsteps were hard to follow, but Dave thought he’d done okay. Until now.
Now, it wasn’t only his reputation at stake, but Nia’s life. Nia, the woman he’d dreamed of marrying, patiently waiting for her to grow up and notice him. But he’d waited too long. She fell in love with a soccer player instead of Dave. Leaving Dave pining after her all these years. While it might disgust him, that he was married to his job and not the woman of his dreams, he’d simply never found a woman to compare.
An older maroon Buick LeSabre pulled to the curb and thankfully saved him from moving further down the path of self-castigation.
The dark-tinted front passenger window cracked. Marisa’s flawless face came into view in the opening, but it was Sandro’s voice who ordered from the driver’s side, “Get in.”
Dave quickly opened the back door and slid onto the seat and immediately choked on the smell of cigarettes. “Damn, Sandro! Have you two taken up smoking?”
“Sorry, it is the best we could do.” Sandro didn’t sound apologetic.
“Whose car is this? I don’t recognize it.” Dave thought he’d had all the mobster cars under surveillance at one time or another, and this was one he definitely hadn’t seen.
Like any aggressive Italian driver--or native New York driver for that matter--Sandro muscled the car back onto the road through the smallest of openings in the traffic. Car horns and squealing brakes sounded behind them. Dave resisted the urge to jump into the front seat and take over.
“I don’t know whose car this is,” Sandro answered once he was in the flow of traffic.
Dave paused in taking off his overcoat. The car smelled awful, but it was warm and with his wet coat, he felt steam rising from his neck. “You don’t know? You saying this car is stolen?”
“I can look at the registration papers if you like.” Marisa offered an innocent smile from the front seat.
A glance at the steering column showed no key. “You wired this car?”
“No. She wired it.” Sandro nodded his head toward Marisa.
Dave stared, somehow not finding it difficult to imagine Marisa wiring the car. With her sharp intelligence, Dave bet she had all sorts of hidden talents. Immediately, his imagination teased him with images of her in bed, eager to teach him her talents.
“My brother runs the auto-theft ring, you remember. He thought it would be amusing to teach his little sister a few trade secrets.”
Her words brought Dave back to focus. He knew her brother Massimo’s long list of talents as well, which really made him wonder how many of those trade secrets she knew.
“She taught me how,” Sandro said. “I will do it next time.”
“Next time? You taking up stealing cars in your spare time?” Dave’s head started a low throbbing in his temples. Whether from the strong, stale smell of cigarettes or the new problems piling up, he wasn’t sure, but he had a feeling the throbbing would be a full-fledged pounding before he got out of the stolen car.
“It will be best if I don’t use the same car for long,” Sandro continued.
“Shit, I can see this on my fucking report . . . Federal witness stealing cars.”
“It might look better on your fucking report than, ‘Federal witness found dead’.” Sandro frowned when he caught Dave’s gaze in the rearview mirror.
Tension filled the air, but Dave broke eye contact. Sandro was right. There was no sense arguing with the legality of it, especially since Sandro and Marisa appeared to be operating on their own agenda now. How much farther would Sandro venture outside the law once he found out about his wife? Dave rubbed his forehead.
“I might as well confess about the BMW I stole this morning,” Marisa said.
Dave sighed. “Because I look like a priest?”
Marisa’s lips turned up slightly at Dave’s attempted humor. “So you can recover it and return it to the owners. You most certainly do not look like a priest.”
The look she sent Dave was blatantly appraising, like the night he held her in his arms at the bar. Every time they’d met since, he’d struggled to ignore the feelings she evoked. Long, leggy, lithe, she was perfection personified, no argument there.
But his attraction would never move beyond the physical, and at the moment, he didn’t have time to even indulge in that little fantasy. Aside from the legal issue of her being an informant, they had grown up in different worlds, both literally and figuratively. Black and white, cop and criminal, total opposites on the spectrum.
Get back to work, Armstrong.
“What went wrong, Sandro?” Dave blurted, jerking his thoughts back to business. “They’ve kidnapped Nia.”
Sandro stomped on the brake. Dave’s face slammed into the back of the front seat. Okay, so maybe he should have been a little more tactful. He rubbed his sore nose.
Tires
squealed and horns honked impatiently behind them once again. “Damn it,” Dave swore, more upset with himself than Sandro. “Don’t stop in the middle of the road. Find a place to pull over.”
“My wife is . . . Gone?” Sandro demanded as he double-parked in front of a popular local restaurant. “And you wait this long to tell me?” He swung around, his face contorted, the promise of murder in his eyes.
“I didn’t think I should tell you on the phone.”
“Certainly not,” Marisa lashed out. “It is much better to tell us while he’s driving so he can kill us in an auto wreck.”
Dave gritted his teeth. “And there’s a good time?”
“How did this happen?” Sandro demanded, the anger in his voice echoing in the confines of the car.
“Carlo’s men ran her down in her car.” Dave admitted, mentally replayed his total failure at saving Nia. “I tried to help,” he added quietly. “But they shot out my tires and got away.”
“Shooting? There was shooting around my wife? They got away?” Sandro thrust his hands in the air and leaned back, looking up as if to speak to the heavens. Or the roof of the car. “Dio mio! You are useless.”
Dave tensed at the insult, though he wouldn’t attempt to defend himself. He had failed, pure and simple, and Sandro was more than justified to be furious.
“Was she hurt?” He met Dave’s gaze in the rearview mirror.
By now Sandro’s neck muscles were bulging; his eyes like shards of sharp, green glass. Marisa laid a hand on his arm to calm him, which only seemed a marginal help.
“From what we could tell, she wasn’t harmed,” Dave said, watching Sandro’s nostrils flare in the struggle to breathe and visibly bring his raging emotions under control.
“The trunk and tires and back window had been hit,” Dave continued, “but we found no trace of blood. From what witnesses said, she was struggling when they forced her into the other car.”
“Witnesses? There were witnesses and no one helped her?”
“People get nervous around guns, especially when someone’s shooting them. There were five men with guns.”
“What of my son? If they got Nia, where is--”
“Danny’s fine. He’s with your aunt and uncle at a safe house. You need to go there.”
“No. No safe house.” Sandro slammed a hand hard against the steering wheel, before turning to face Marisa. Dave had no clue what Sandro was spouting in rapid Italian. He was talking much too fast for Dave to pick out any familiar words. As typical of many Italians, Sandro used his arms, punctuating his raised voice and rapid speech with hand gestures.
The sudden attack didn’t appear to faze Marisa. She argued back, their voices growing louder until she and Sandro were screaming at each other.
“Whoa, guys.” With a hand on each, Dave pushed them away from each other. “This is not helping. And besides, all this Italian flying around, I can’t understand a thing. You’re going to have to speak English if you want my help.”
“We don’t want your help.” Sandro’s face was still flushed, but his voice was controlled, the volume lower. “Get out.”
“Sandro!” Marisa scolded.
“You asked for my help, Sandro.”
“It was a mistake to trust a buffone like you.”
The words splattered like hot grease and Dave felt the burn.
He forced himself to stay calm. “I never intended for Nia to get kidnapped. You know I would give my life for her. We were supposed to get through this without her knowing.”
“If you weren’t so incompetent--”
“Sandro, blaming me is only wasting time.”
“Something went wrong.” Marisa said, changing the course of the dialogue. “We all agree. Now, we will have to work together to find Nia.”
“No.”
“We need each other, Sandro,” Dave said quietly.
Sandro ignored Dave and turned to Marisa. This time he spoke in English. “You said she would be safe.”
“No one said she isn’t safe. Poppa is using this as a tactic. It’s you he’s after.”
“We knew something could go wrong,” Dave added. “That’s why I wanted to have her under surveillance.”
“If Carlo’s men had seen you watching my house, it would have tipped them off. Waiting until Nia left for her game in Germany, and she was out of harm’s way would have been best.”
“No one would have known we were watching.”
“Because you are professional, right? What kind of professional let’s his office get bugged? Either way, Nia and Daniele were at risk. My way would have been best had Carlo not discovered our plans.”
“I suppose she didn’t believe you after all,” Marisa said.
“She might have believed me. There might not have been time for her to have made arrangements.”
“Then why was she in the car?” Marisa asked. “Most likely she was trying to hunt down answers.”
“Believe you about what?” Dave asked. “Hunt answers for what?”
“I needed a plan to get my family out of the way once Marisa told me Carlo had put a contract on me.”
Dave turned to Marisa. “When did you find out?”
“Early this morning. But I couldn’t get to Sandro right away. I was afraid I’d be too late.”
“You should have called me,” Dave told her, irritated he’d had to depend on tapes to be translated. He’d been a step behind all day. He hoped it wasn’t an omen.
“There was no time,” Marisa said. “I heard Gigi on the phone giving orders that poppa wanted Sandro. But I couldn’t leave until . . . later.”
Because she’d been in bed with Gigi . . . Luigi, Marisa implied. Dave read between the lines. He’d known Marisa and Luigi Conte, the Peruzzo family consigliere, or advisor, were involved. It was actually good for their set-up that she was ‘sleeping with the enemy.’ Still, it didn’t stop the swift feeling of envy powering through Dave.
Nothing more than lust, he assured himself. He’d simply been too long without a woman. “What is the plan you are talking about? The plan for Sandro to drop out of sight?”
“No, the plan to get Nia out of the way.” Marisa started her explanation with how she drugged Gigi with sleeping drops, slipped out and stole the BMW.
“A cop’s coming from straight ahead, Sandro,” Dave interrupted. “You’re still double-parked. Start driving again and we’ll keep talking.” Hardened New Yorkers would likely ignore a cop giving a traffic ticket, but for someone looking for Sandro, it would be waving a red flag.
After Sandro merged with the traffic, narrowly missing a bike messenger, Dave turned back to Marisa. “No one noticed you swiping a car off the street in plain sight?”
“Of course not. I know what I’m doing.”
“Okay, so you swiped the car, then what?”
“I drove to a place where I could stop Sandro soon after he left his house. I was afraid they might get him on the way to the soccer field or be waiting for him once he got there.”
“Good thinking,” Dave said. “I know Carlo’s men were there sometime before we arrived.”
“You went to the field?” Sandro asked, looking in his rearview mirror.
“My translator discovered they knew about you when he was working on the tapes from last night. We rushed to the field, but you were gone. So, what have you two been doing all this time? Why didn’t you contact me earlier?”
“Sandro wanted Nia and Daniele out of town before we started working on any ideas to keep him alive.”
“We should have put them--and you, Sandro--in a safe house--”
“No. How many times do I tell you no?” Sandro cut him off. “I will be prigionero to the Peruzzo family no longer. It is why I offered help in the first place. So you could catch Carlo and get him out of my life.”
Sandro switched on the turn signal and turned a corner. “I believed Nia would be safe. Carlo told me years ago he would never harm a woman. Marisa told me the same thing. He lied.
She was wrong--”
“You don’t know he’s going to hurt her,” Marisa protested. “He’s only trying to use her to get you.”
Somehow, to Dave’s ears, he picked up that Marisa wasn’t as confident as she sounded.
“Si.” Sandro nodded. “If I stay hidden, what will happen to her? Who knows how she will act as prisoner. She is fearless,” he said with loving admiration in his voice. “That is why I wanted her out of town. If I had disappeared, she would have looked everywhere for me. Who knows what trouble she would have gotten herself into?” He caught Dave’s gaze in the mirror. “You’ve known her since she was child. Is this not so?”
Dave agreed. “Knowing Nia, you’re right. It’s why I okay’d waiting until she left for Germany before we tried to trap them. But . . . ” He shrugged, knowing their plan had gone horribly off track. “So what did you come up with to get her out of town so suddenly?”
“Poca importa? What does it matter?” Sandro gestured with his hand. “She is a prisoner now.”
“It might help to know her mindset. I want to know what you told her and see if I can decide how she is going to react to being a prisoner. If she has even the slightest inkling you are in danger, she’s liable to do something crazy.”
“In spite of what Marisa said earlier, she has no, what you call it . . . inkling.”
“You can be so sure?”
“Si.”
“What did you tell her?” Dave persisted.
A silence, then, “To go back home to Dallas.”
“Just like that? I know better. She would have never gone without a good reason. What made you think she would rush back home to Dallas?” Dave was fighting an increasing urge to throttle Nia’s husband. Nothing new about the urge. Dave had wanted to throttle Sandro the moment he swept Nia off to Italy and married her.
Sandro exhaled, then finally answered. “I told her I was leaving her for Marisa.”
“Jesus!” The word exploded from Dave’s mouth. “Well, no need to worry about her looking for you. Unless she didn’t believe you.”
“She believed me. I . . .” Sandro looked at Marisa, “was very convincing.”
Dave ached for what Nia must have suffered thinking the man she loved so much had betrayed her with another woman.