I leaned back in the booth. The vinyl squeaked. The diner was mostly empty, a trucker at the counter nursing a plate of fries he'd stopped eating twenty minutes ago, a couple arguing in whispers by the window, body language that said the fight was older than tonight. The overhead lights buzzed. The coffee machine behind the counter gurgled and spat. Normal people doing normal shit at 1 AM on a Tuesday.
We weren't normal people. The woman across from me had overheard something at a mafia-owned nightclub that got her disappeared, and I was the loud twin of the two of us and the one elected to ‘put her at ease’, sitting in a diner booth with egg on my sleeve and a gun in my waistband and the beginning of a headache in the form of a brown-eyed doe.
"You're staring," she said.
"You're interesting."
"You're rude."
"I'm honest."
"Nah, you’re fucking rude. Don’t stare at me… freak." She took another drink and set the mug down and pushed her plate to the edge of the table for the waitress. "You work for the family that owns the club?"
"I work for the family. The club is one of our properties."
"So the men I was pouring drinks for, the ones in the back booth with the thousand-dollar shoes and the guns under their jackets, those were your people."
"Some of them."
"And the ones I overheard? The ones having a conversation about delivery schedules and names and a marina south of the waterfront?"
Everything in me locked up, though my face didn't show it. Leone hadn't given me specifics about what she'd heard. He'd said she was a witness. A liability. Someone who knew too much to be left in a Delaware apartment and too much to be cut loose. But a marina, delivery schedules, names. That was operational intelligence, not background noise.
"Those weren't our people," I said. "Not all of them."
"I figured." She reached for the cream, poured a thin stream into her fourth cup of coffee, and stirred it with the handle of her fork because the spoon was dirty. "Because the conversation I heard wasn't about your business. It was about your business being someone else's business. And the men having it weren't nervous about being overheard by your soldiers. They were nervous about being overheard by each other."
I looked at her across the booth. Behind the exhaustion and the bitten nails and the oversized jacket, there was a brain that didn't match the diner or the hour or the situation. She'd spent two weeks locked in a room and she'd used that time to think,to replay what she'd heard, to sort it and build a picture she was now parceling out in pieces she chose and in an order she decided.
A bartender. Right. And I was just the charming twin.
"Where are you taking me?" she asked.
"Somewhere safe. The Bonaccorso compound. You'll have a room and food and security, and nobody touches you."
"And in exchange?"
"In exchange, eventually, you tell us everything. The conversation, the names, the marina. But not tonight. Tonight you eat and sleep and stop worrying about whether the next person through the door is here to kill you."
"How do I know you're not here to kill me?"
"Because I bought you pancakes. Assassins don't buy pancakes."
"That's the worst logic I've ever heard."
"And yet here you are. Eating the pancakes."
Her eyes held mine. Brown eyes with something underneath that wasn't fear and wasn't gratitude. She was deciding, right there, whether the man with the easy smile and the gun and the egg on his sleeve was worth the risk.
"My name is Savannah," she said.
"I know. I’m Emilio."
"Emilio." She said slowly, as if talking to a small child. "You always rescue women from apartments at midnight?"
"Only the ones who throw lamps at me."
The corner of her mouth moved a fraction before she killed it, and the effort of killing it told me everything the smile would have. She wanted to laugh. She didn't trust the impulse. Two weeks of locked silence had stiffened the muscles required for humor, and she wasn't ready to stretch them for a stranger no matter how good the pancakes were.
