by Eden Butler
“If I did, that’s none of your damn business,” the woman in question said, standing in the doorway, her hands on her hips. “You two, inside. Now.” She waited until the kids scattered, not bothering a second glance in my direction as they went back inside. Angelica moved out of the doorway and stood in front of me. “I’m never going to like your sorry ass.”
“No shit.” The glare she gave me was sharp, and if I didn’t know her any better, I might be afraid of Angelica. But I did. An entire childhood filled with P.E. classes and her unable to make it even halfway up the rope in gym deflated any threat she might be.
“Let’s get this straight.” She stood closer, pointing a long, manicured red nail at me. “Ava is too damn good for the likes of you. Give up now and save yourself a world of embarrassment.”
“I’m just trying to figure out where she went.”
“Away,” Angelica said, glaring at me. “And the farther away from you she is, the better off she’ll be.”
She didn’t balk when I laughed at her, stretching my neck like I was ready for the battle she clearly wanted to have. “No really, Angelica, your obsession with me is a bit much.”
“Screw you, Dario.” She twisted her mouth in a sneer as she walked back to the door.
“Ah, darlin’,” I said, my laugh forced just to piss her off, “I’m afraid you’re just not my type.”
She stormed inside, slamming the door behind her, and I moved away, toward the restaurant wondering what kind of trouble Ava had gotten herself into and how the hell I could help her out of it.
9
Dario
“Mrs. Blake wants her community fee back.” There was no humor on my brother’s face. The lines across his forehead deepened as he watched me, and faint wrinkles began to form around his mouth. Dimitri wasn’t old. He was tired.
And pissed at me.
Again.
“You told her to fuck off, right?” It was a half-hearted joke and went over like an anvil. “Lighten up, man. That shit was funny.”
“Yeah,” he said, pointing to himself. “Get me. I’m in fucking stitches.”
“Man—”
“I told you this shit was going to happen.” Dimitri nodded behind me, waving in our kid brother Dante. “You got anyone he can talk to?”
“Dimitri—”
“Save it,” my brother said, grabbing the card Dante gave him. “Our little brother here knows more hackers and PIs than anybody.” He stretched over his desk after glancing at the number and handed it to me.
“Who is Matt Winslow?”
“Former cop,” Dante said. “From Newark. He’s decent. I mean, shit, how hard can it be to find one chick?”
When I glared at him, Dante reached for my jacket flung over Dimitri’s sofa to grab a cigarette.
“Hell no,” Dimitri said, grabbing the pack from Dante. “That shit isn’t happening.”
“Fuck’s sake, I’m not a kid. Besides, Dario smokes.” Just then he did look like a kid, his frown exaggerated, and despite his huge shoulders and big hands, he still dropped the Marlboros when Dimitri shook his head. “That all?”
Dimitri waved him off and Dante scattered, grumbling as he left the office.
“You think it’s time for a PI?” Dimitri barely moved his head, but I caught his meaning. “You really think one woman is worth all this trouble?”
“I think where there is one fire, more will follow.” He leaned back, rubbing his face, fracturing the cool my brother always seemed to manage. “Ava refuses to pay. Then Mrs. Blake wants her money back.”
“You didn’t give it to her?”
Dimitri blinked at me, disregarding the question. “I’m waiting on who’s next.” He leaned forward, arms on the desk. “And I don’t like that the baker just rolled out. Angelica said it was out of character.”
“Oh, so she talks to you about Ava?”
“Dario,” my brother said like I didn’t have the good sense to see my way out of a wet paper bag, “everyone talks to me about most everything.”
“Ava didn’t.” He didn’t answer, kept his mouth straight. That was something I knew for a fact. She was closed off. Secretive. Dimitri might have a way with people, but Ava wasn’t one of them.
“Which makes me worry.” He moved his chin nodding to the card. “Dig a little deeper. Get with Adele Wilcox at the county clerk’s office. Ava had to give her details when she got her business license. Adele will know what those details are.” I opened my mouth ready to complain, but Dimitri waved his hand, silencing me with two fingers. “Tell her I’d consider it a personal favor if she gave you that info.”
“Jesus, Dimitri, you sound like a fuckin Don.”
His mouth twitched, but he didn’t smile. “This town expects me to keep it safe. If Ava Anderson has a past she’s running from, then it’s likely to show up here. I need to know what’s gonna start poking around in my town.”
“I’ll ask around.”
He motioned again to the card. “If you don’t get anywhere on your own, then call Dante’s guy. I don’t like them on principle. He’s your last resort.”
“I feel you,” I said, grabbing the card as I stood.
Dimitri stopped me before I made it out of the door. “And Dario?”
I glanced back, lifting my eyebrows.
My brother’s expression was cool, calm again, but I noticed how he drummed his thumb against his desk, a nervous unconscious habit he had. “If Ava doesn’t turn up and you and the PI end up with nothing, then the boys will go looking. That’ll be noisy too. I wanna avoid that shit.”
My brother wasn’t a violent man, but he’d protect his family and this town no matter the cost. Something in my gut told me Ava might have secrets that could require us cutting our losses and kicking her out of Cuoricino indefinitely.
* * *
Adele Wilcox was pushing fifty, but that didn’t mean the woman was past her prime.
She sat at the counter alone in the county clerk’s office, her fingers moving across the keyboard like they were possessed and the exorcism she needed was a hundred keystrokes away.
“Can I help you?” She didn’t look away from the screen until I stood in front of her, leaning an elbow on the counter. Adele kept typing, glancing at me, then down to my elbow that pushed a stack of folders farther up her desk. I straightened, lifting my hands in way of apology before she looked back at the screen. “You need a business certificate?”
“No. I need information.”
She stopped typing, twisting her body away from the keyboard, and I spotted her long legs under the counter. They went on for days and there was soft pink polish on her toes peeking out from the fuzzy slippers she wore.
“Do you have a court order or warrant?”
“No, darlin’, but I have a message from my brother.”
Adele frowned, mouth in a line like she doubted there was anyone in my family that would make her risk her job for information. “And who—”
“Smoke.”
She straightened and a slow-moving smile brightened her face. Hell, a smile like that and the woman could easily convince me I was way into older women.
“And what does Mr. Carelli need?” Her smile shifted, curling up higher on one side as she looked me over. “You’re Dario, aren’t you?”
I looked over my shoulder, watching the hallway before I turned back to face her. “Guilty.” Adele’s gaze moved as I flicked my piercing with my tongue, something that rarely failed to get attention. “You know me?”
“When you were little.” She leaned forward, her attention moving down to my chest, then back to the eagle around my neck. “You got big—”
“Sweetheart, you have no idea.”
Adele repressed a laugh then straightened as the elevator in the hallway chimed and two frumpy-looking women moved into the office, nodding to Adele as they went through the door behind her.
“I can’t play with you today, Mr. Carelli—”
“Pity,” I said,
hoping her clear interest in my family name would get me the info I needed.
“But,” she continued, ignoring me, “I owe your brother.” There was a small blush that colored her face, and I almost asked what that favor had been, but Adele cleared her throat, tucking a curl behind her ear, the flirty smile lowering. “Now, what is it that you need?”
“Details.” I leaned forward, back on my elbows again, but this time I avoided the need stacks of files on the counter. “Ava Anderson. What can you tell me?”
Then Adele gave me what she could.
A week into my search, and a confirmation from Adele that Ava had filed all her documentation, Certificate of Assumed Name and Certificate of Incorporation under her name, with all the right IDs and forms. But everything was paid for in cash, and, thanks to a call to Dino’s aunt who ran the credit union in town, the small bank account Ava did have wasn’t linked to any other businesses or individuals.
Another week passed and my patience bled out. It was time to give the PI, Matt Winslow, a call, something I didn’t let Dimitri know about. My brother was stressing over threats to the town docks and the search for Ava was put on a backburner until they were secured.
It was a Friday afternoon, several weeks later when I got my first update from Winslow.
“I know one thing,” he told me, his high-pitched voice making him sound like he hadn’t hit puberty yet. “She ain’t Ava Anderson.”
“And you know this how?” I sat in the park, my eye on the swings as Maggie and her roommate Vi pushed Mateo back and forth.
“Because Ava Anderson, according to the records I searched, was a four-year-old immigrant from Slovenia who died back in 1984.”
“Huh.” The news didn’t surprise me, though it probably should have. I knew Ava had secrets. She had walls that I’d wanted to break apart, but then Angelica outed me and I lost my chance. “Anything else?”
“You sitting down?”
“Just tell me.” Across the park Mateo squealed, pulling a smile from the two women, and getting the attention of some asshole I didn’t recognized walking behind them, his eyes on Maggie and not the kid at all. The hairs on the back of my neck rose and my gut gurgled.
“Nothing current came up on her, but there were pictures from a meeting she took a couple years back. Had to be her unless she’s hiding a twin. In New Orleans…with a fed.”
My stomach dropped, and I stood, tightening my grip on the cell. “What fuckin fed?”
“FBI, as far as I can tell, but my sources confirmed it when I circulated her picture. They met for an hour at some hole-in-the-wall place outside of the Quarter. My guy recognized the fed she was talking to. Alex Washington. No one knows what he’s working on now, but two years ago he was heading a trafficking case against Ian McKinney that went bust.”
“Why the hell would she be talking to a fed about—” Then it hit me, like a bullet between the eyes. The scar. It was faint, healed but in the same spot. A scar that, the rumor went, Liam put there himself. A woman working with the feds against McKinney? The fucking scar…shit.
There had been rumors for years. Dimitri and our cousin Johnny had talked about that a few months back just after I got out. We were in the city when Liam Shane tried hitting on our cousin Cara. Then her husband Kiel had escorted that asshole out of the restaurant.
Liam Shane had a wife no one had seen for years.
The same woman that stuck in my head.
She’d been broken. Beaten, scared of everything, and when I showed her a little kindness, she got desperate. That kiss left an impression. I wasn’t into messing around with married women, but her going at me the way she did? Her clinging to me like I was a lifeline was a memory that still rose to the surface when I was low and lonely.
Jesus, how had it taken so long to realize?
She looked nothing like Shane’s wife. The bleached blonde hair was gone. Her thin, waifish body was rounder now, curvier. Her eyes were bright now, glinting. No dark circles. No sunken hollows.
Could Ava really be Reagan Shane?
No one knew much about her before she married that bastard. Most people believed Shane had offed her. Back when I was still in prison, that thought alone had me itching to bash the guards’ faces in just to escape and get a shot at taking that prick out. But there had also been rumors about her leaving him, about her having help to do it.
“What’s the next play?” Winslow asked.
My attention went back to Maggie and Vi, then shot to Ricky and Manny as they stood near the picnic tables watching. Dimitri was possessive about Maggie. She likely never realized how protected she was when he wasn’t around.
“Lay low,” I told the PI, thinking how Dimitri would take this news. My guess was not good. He hated Shane. So did our cousin Johnny, but if there was a longer game at play, something that might lead back to Shane’s uncle, Ian McKinney, then Dimitri would want to set some things in motion.
But first we had to find out who Ava really was.
“Let me look up a few things and I’ll get back to you. For now, if anything comes up, you tell me as soon as you know.”
Winslow ended the call and I immediately pulled up Instagram, remembering how visible—and careless—some of the McKinney women were. To my left, Ricky and Manny eased back on the tables, stretching out their legs as Maggie picked up a yawning Mateo and she and Vi walked away from the swings. The chatty asshole still watched them.
Ricky jerked his attention to me when I whistled, waving him over while Manny followed the guy who had his phone out filming Maggie as she walked away. I met the older man on the sidewalk, both of us watching Manny and the asshole. The man tried grabbing his phone back from Manny when he took it, but my brother’s guy was too quick and slammed it to the ground, waving him off, toward the parking lot.
“Fucker,” Ricky said, laughing as Manny pushed the man when he didn’t move quick enough. “What’s up?”
“That event Johnny had us working in the city? The one before I went on the inside? For my cousin Cara’s charity?”
“How could I forget?” Ricky’s laugh was throaty with the hint of a cough behind the tone. “Between the McKinney crew showing up and Cara fighting with that drunk bitch—”
“That drunk bitch was McKinney’s daughter. The youngest.” I shook my head, trying to remember the girl’s name. “She couldn’t have been more than seventeen then. Cara tried kicking her out, and McKinney had a problem with that shit.”
“Yeah. A few of his boys got in Cara’s face.” His grin stretched wide. “Then we all got in their faces back.”
“The drunk girl, was that Stephanie or Rosalee?”
Ricky snapped his fingers, nodding like the memory clicked on. “Stephanie. Rosalee wouldn’t drink. Not even back then, and that was before she became a nun.”
“Stephanie McKinney,” I said, nodding my thanks to Ricky as I thumbed the name into the app. “Wild and loud and loaded.” A few names appeared in the search results, and I clicked the first one. “And obnoxious enough not to set her account to private.”
The girl had grown up, but the years hadn’t done much to calm her. There were thousands of pictures, most of them of Stephanie and a ball of white fluff she tried to pass off as a dog. I scrolled through bikini images with her enhanced ass hanging out of her thong, and past hundreds more of her in her Ferrari or laying like a Playboy Playmate across her pink, satin sheets. There were a few of her father, Ian, and a couple of her modestly dressed as she sat next to her sister, habit, and all.
It took almost a half hour before I reached her earliest posts, dating back six years. The images were subtler then, when she was younger and there were far less tits and ass shots of her, but I finally came across the gold sequined gown and an underage Stephanie in front of a round table full of McKinneys. The old man and his wife, a few brothers, some cousins, and there, at the end of the table Liam Shane grinned like a jackass into the camera, his hand around the back of a stick-thin looking woman’s
neck. Pale. Waifish with a mass of thick, bleached blonde hair, just like I remembered.
“You’re the first man whose been nice to me in five years. I forgot what it felt like.”
“Madonna,” I whispered, zoning in on that blonde, falling onto the bench behind me as I continued to stare.
“Everything good?” Ricky asked, but I waved him off, clicking on the picture and moving the corners apart to widen the shot.
She didn’t smile like the rest of the McKinney clan, and her attention was on whatever caught her interest at the front of the room. But there was no mistaking who the woman was. The scar, red and deep, in that picture, as though the injury had only just happened. It ran from her collarbone to just behind her left ear.
How the hell had I not seen it?
That was Ava Anderson.
The woman that had gotten under my skin in the best possible way.
The wife of the enemy.
10
Dario
Funny thing about the truth; when you know it, or at least think you know part of it, it doesn’t keep you from wanting what you know you shouldn’t have.
Ava wasn’t Ava. Her name was Reagan. Reagan Connelly, according to the wedding write up in the Times I found online. She had no one, and out of nowhere, Liam Shane, nephew to one of the richest Dons in Boston, married her. But that was all I knew about her, and that shit was still enough.
“There’s intel, but I gotta tell you, Dario, if this shit is true, then I’m out.” Winslow’s high-pitched voice was higher than usual. It had been over a month since I’d found that picture of Ava on Stephanie’s Instagram, and in that time Winslow had gone quiet. Until today. “No amount of money is gonna put me on the bad side of these fuckers.”
“Who?”
My father glanced at me, a single look making me feel like shit. It was brunch. The family was here. Business could wait, but I’d been getting the runaround from Winslow for two weeks. Brunch was on the backburner.