Her sister’s hot breath in my ear at the same time told me what she would do, while her fingers slid into my pants, slipped behind the elastic waistband of my shorts. Her nails raked my burning skin and her fingers hunted, teasingly slowly, wandering around my writhing groin as she approached the hard, pulsing twitch of my cock.
The soft, wet sounds of her breath and her words made me hard and impatient as she drew out the words ‘suck,’ ‘slide,’ ‘lick,’ and ‘swallow.’ She pulled out my tee shirt and her lips fluttered down my stomach and she breathed in deep while she opened my pants.
I looked down to watch as she took a hold of my cock, but when her eyes widened, they were Vesper’s eyes. It was Vesper’s tongue that flicked over Vesper’s lips then curled out and lapped. Backing toward me as I bent my head, Vesper’s ass and her sweet, buzzing pussy lips dripped in the wet cotton where Anna’s mound had been.
The scent, the sounds and the sight of her swam in my dreams. Nothing I did could chase them away. The slight scrape at the bottom of her voice even trailed around after me while I was awake. In the noise of the shower or the heat of the exercise yard, I wanted to focus on the fact that she had sent me there but I couldn’t get away from the zinging in my stomach, the pounding in my chest and in my pants at whatever sound or sight reminded me of her next.
More than anything I wanted to fix my mind on what I would do to her when I got out and I found her. But the thought always melted into a memory of the moan that she made when my hips rocked and thrashed between her gorgeous thighs and how her pussy clung and wept as her walls squeezed on the hard ridges of my thick pole.
HE DAY OF horse’s release from prison was marked on the dairy on my phone, and I had made a small mark in the corner of that day on the planner in my office at the Bureau. The date was on was also on a sticky note on my fridge at home.
I wasn’t expecting him to call, obviously, but I hoped that we might run into each other somehow. I’d thought that I would probably find a way to be somewhere he was likely to be. Where that would be, I didn’t really know. Maybe a deli, maybe a bar. I certainly hadn’t expected to find him out on the New Jersey shore.
Fate had a funny way to play it out, though. Hardly more than a day out of jail and there he is, right in the path of another part of my investigation. The question burned louder, larger in the back of my mind. How wrong had I been about this man?
Out in the wind, on the roof of the bureau building, I slunk past the helicopter and hunched by a hut to make the call. Braced against the twentieth-story wind, I didn’t want to risk being overheard. The sharp chill scratched at my bones. I tried to tell myself there was nothing guilty about my wanting to make the call somewhere I wouldn’t be seen. That it was just a sensible precaution.
But having anyone know that I was talking to him at all would have carried way too many risks to even consider. I huddled against a concrete wall and hugged my arm tight. The phone was pressed to my ear while I waited for him to answer.
The caller ID on my phone was switched off so no number would come up on his screen. Whether I had a relationship of any kind with Horse was moot at this point, but the Bureau is a hornet’s nest of competitive, testosterone savagery and I knew that I couldn’t trust the other Agents, even those on my own team. Save one, maybe.
My job, and my career, with the Bureau would be over in a New York minute if it got out that I had even the hint of a personal connection with a felon. Especially a felon with a connection to my investigation.
He answered but he didn’t say anything. Just listened.
I said, “Horse? I know you’re there.”
“How did you get this number?”
“I ran a check on the phones that were out at Tarryfield last night. There were only two that I couldn’t account for. The other one’s still there, so I figured this one had to be you.”
My day took on a new shade. The sound of his voice wound me up and tore at me. It stirred up an anger that rose from my gut. Controlling my voice took more effort than I expected. “Look, can we just talk?”
“Sure. How ’bout them Yankees?”
There was a silence. I started again. “I could just haul you in for questioning.”
“And you’d do that. Misuse your position that way.”
“I think you’re connected to someone in my investigation.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Horse, let’s not kid around. You weren’t hanging out at Tarryfield for the good air. You weren’t going for a moonlight swim.”
“What evidence do you have?”
“How do I get through to you, Horse, I’m concerned for your safety. I’m not trying to pin anything on you.”
“Well, that’s a change of tactic, Special Agent.”
“What the hell…”
He cut me off. “So you’re tracking me now, right?”
“Horse…”
“Track this.”
I heard a whoosh of air. Then some confused stuttering digital noise. I imagined the phone spinning high in the air in a long upward arc. Then there was silence.
“Horse!” and I heard a splash, and then a short, deep gurgle before the phone cut out completely.
A bitter iron taste burned the back of my throat. I thought we’d been real with each other. That night, he must have been doing his bad boy ‘one time deal’ routine the whole fucking time. Playing me. And I had fallen for it like a schoolgirl, like a dumb, drooling teenager.
All the time he was in prison it burned me up. Every moment, every exchange, every word that had passed between us that night I’d kept freshly polished, painstakingly treasured. Because it was all a part of something that I knew was connected to the case that I had spent so long on. That’s the reason I told myself.
There was another reason, too, a personal one. But I couldn’t think about any of that now.
He must have gotten something out of me that night, although I still couldn’t figure out what it could have been, other than a notch on his bad boy belt. It was just as much of a mystery to me now as it had been when I arrested him.
It had been the same as when he was jailed. Jailed on a reduced charge, but still the charge was for something I was pretty sure he hadn’t done. It churned me up but he would never give me the chance to explain.
He would never find out how the barrel of his gun came to go missing, how it was that the ten-to-fifteen suddenly dropped to five. And he would never thank me for it.
L GUAPO TOLD me on the phone, “Go see Carmine.”
“Carmine Monreale, head of the Bonaventura family?”
“That’s him.”
“When you say, ‘go see him,’ tell me exactly what you mean.”
“You know what I mean. Go do it. Unless the job’s too big for you.”
This El Guapo had sent me to too many places I was likely to get dead. I thought about it. “What happened with Sal?”
“This line’s not secure.”
“We never talk on any other lines. You know there was another party there to meet him.”
“We can talk another time.”
“I don’t see when that will be.”
“Carmine. Big payout. Get it done.”
He hung up. A text message came in with some details. Times and an address.
Carmine Monreale was in what he called his country lodge. On the Internet, I scoped out about a twenty-four-bedroom lodge on four floors. Wide stone steps led up to a classical Greek-style entrance supported by high columns. Tall, red brick walls around the big parcel of countryside had what looked like security cameras every few dozen yards. I suspected there were also a couple of camera drones hidden nearby. Heavily armed goons were bound to be on every floor and there were probably going to be dogs loose in the grounds.
The Honda that I stole to get there exploded about a quarter mile along the wall from the big iron gates and, while everybody ran around, pointed their weapons in every direction, held fingers to their ears and talked into t
heir shoulders, I slipped over a wall on the far side. The dogs came running for the steak and sedative snack that I’d brought for them. Slipping in through a back door nearby wasn’t too much trouble. I had to guess fast where the security room was. That’s where the servers and screens for all the cameras would be.
As I guessed, it was on the ground floor at the back, by the kitchen. There should have been a guard in the cupboard with the nest of video screens, but he’d clearly deserted his post to watch the fireworks out front.
After I knocked out the phone lines and the Internet, and cut the power to the alarms, I slipped back out to scale the back wall, up onto the roof. I’d brought climbing tackle but I didn’t need it as the showy brickwork was easy enough to climb. There was a guy on the roof with a really big gun, but he was at the front watching the fire, too. I relieved him of his weapon and left him napping like a baby. Through a hut on the roof, I made my way down to the second floor. The room with the biggest double doors had two armed men outside.
This was the floor where I guessed the boss man would be holed up. High enough that he could be in command, but still be a tough fight to reach. Crouching around a corner, I rolled a fizzing smoke grenade past the two guards. As soon as they turned to go after it, I slugged the goons and cable tied their wrists behind their backs. One of them woke up while I was trussing them.
Quietly I told him, “There’s no point in you being dead. There are plenty of guys ready to shoot me on the way out. Just chill.”
I shot a hole in the lock on the big door as a precaution. There was no way to know if Carmine was in there on his own or with a battalion or if he’d put the guards outside an empty room while he waited across the hallway. I had the big machine gun from the guy on the roof in my left for noise and show and my own Sig Sauer pistol in my right for anything I needed to actually hit.
From the side of the doorway I shoved the door open, waited a beat and then moved quickly in and across the doorway, crouched down low.
Carmine stood in the middle of the big room. He was big with a shock of thick silvery hair. He had a decent sized gun ready, but he was aimed for me to be standing in the doorway and I’d got in too quickly for him to react. Plus, I had a stick of grenades. Scissors for his paper.
The big guy was dressed like he’d been at a fancy dinner and wore a blue toned gray suit with a gorgeous white shirt open at the neck. I wondered where the other guests were.
My gun was aimed right at his throat. His was pointed at the wall, and the wrong wall at that. Checkmate.
I said, “Maybe we could chat, Mr Monreale.”
“Aren’t you going to kill me first?”
“I’m not going to kill you at all. Not unless you make me.”
His eyebrow raised. “How would I do that?”
“If you move your aim I’d have to fire.”
He looked at my gun. “You have me cold.”
Then he moved to one of the two big chairs. They were ornate gold with red velvet, Louis Whatever or antique Sicilian or something. He lowered the gun and gestured to the other chair. I lowered mine, too and sat across from him.
He asked, “Should I know who you are?”
“No reason you should, no. They call me ‘Horse.’”
“Do they now.” He smiled thinly.
He watched me as he waited.
I asked him, “Do you know who El Guapo is?”
“Interesting question, Horse. I know who he is in the sense that I have had dealings with him. I haven’t ever met him though, and his voice is all that I know of him.”
“You don’t know if he’s with one of the families?”
“He isn’t as far as I know. Nobody has ever mentioned him. Not that they would necessarily.” He paused and looked at me. “An insider wouldn’t be likely to use a Spanish name.”
“No.” I said, “I’d been wondering about that.”
“Why do you ask about him?”
I told him, “El Guapo sent me.”
“First you bring a gun and grenades to chat; now it seems like you’ve come here to make jokes.”
“I’m telling you.”
His eyes narrowed. “Then you know the question you need to ask yourself.”
“Sure. That’s why I came to talk it over with you. I figure it would be in both of our interests to figure it out together.”
“The question being?”
“Who does El Guapo want dead more? You? Or me?”
He shook his head sadly. “You knocked out all the alarms, right?”
I thought about that. I said, “Even so, there must be twenty guys downstairs and still on active service.” Engines rumbled outside the front gates. Voices were raised.
“Sure,” he said, “But you’ve already done the hard part. Getting in now will just be a matter of brute force.”
Outside, it sounded like a lot of people were arriving. A lot of people with a lot of heavy-duty vehicles. “So it could be he wants both of us dead.” Carmine said, “Did you think about that?”
I shook my head. More from frustration, but it was also an admission. No, it was obvious enough, but I hadn’t thought about that.
“And you opened the door for him.”
I said, “Do you have a panic room?” A place this size, a guy like Carmine. He had to have one.
His eyes hardened. “You think I’m going to hide out like a fucking rat in a trap?”
I could see that he was a man who relished a fight, and the bigger the better.
“Mr Monreale, with all due respect, if El Guapo, whoever the fuck he is, wants you dead that badly, then my assumption is that I need to keep you alive, whatever it takes.”
His fingers wrapped around the gun. “That could be a tough call.”
I grinned, “Don’t test me, Carmine. I don’t want to kill you, but I won’t mind hurting you if I have to.”
Carmine was a big man and he had come up the hard way through the ranks of the mob. If he was really determined to resist me and stay out of the panic room, I knew that he could do it without breaking a sweat. So I kept talking, “Mister Monreale, don’t you want to know why I showed up to meet Salazar last night and a massive detachment of the FBI was already there, waiting?”
His eyebrows rose. The noise outside was getting louder. There were shouts and some loud bangs. The tension was obvious and shots would break out soon enough. I needed Carmine out of the way and fast. While he thought it through I told him, “Please. I know I’d have a better chance of dealing with whatever’s out there with you and that big gun, but it’s even more important that I know you’re going to be around afterwards.”
“You planning to hand me to the FBI?”
“They can’t lay a glove on you, can they?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Then don’t sweat it.” Some shots were fired out by the gates.
Hunter: Perfect Revenge (Perfectly Book 3) Page 8