A yellow one pulls over. She leans forward to tell the driver something through the passenger window. Gets in. The taxi sits at the curb another beat, indicator on, waiting for a gap in traffic.
The smile thins out.
Right. I just put her in a cab. Alone. With Nico’s men in the city somewhere, nursing whatever bruises they drove home with, and Antonio’s people driving a man with a split lip back to a house where he’ll spend the night thinking about me.
I watch the taxi ease into traffic.
A reasonable man would close the blinds, finish the folder of urgent paperwork, and call her in the morning.
I’ve been a reasonable man for most of my adult life.
Right?
15
RAFFAELE
The office is too quiet with her out of it. My cabinet is still marked. My tie is still loose at the knot. The folder Marcy slid under the door is sitting at my shoe like a dog waiting to be noticed.
Focus.
I bend down and pick it up. It’s thicker than it should be. Marcy’s handwriting on the tab:RD—URGENT—NIGHT.Underneath, in smaller letters, is a note I almost miss:Judge’s clerk wants call back before 9.
I drop into the chair and thumb it open on the desk.
The header hits me before I’ve registered the rest of the page.
CONTI, NICO—Associates
Three arrests. Late last night, in one of those half-empty industrial pockets east of the river. Drug charges. Weapons possession. Two of the three names I recognize immediately; the third is younger, a kid who was probably along for the ride. I flip the pages and skim. Quantities. Vehicle searches. A traffic stop that turned into a car search that turned into an arrest for reasons that don’t quite hold up to a second read.
I go back to the top. Read it again more slowly.
None of this is the way Nico’s people get caught. I’ve spent a decade drilling a protocol into that side of the operation so airtight it borders on paranoid. They don’t carry weight on the same trip as a piece. They don’t stop for cops. They don’t talk in cars. The three men in this file did all three of those things in a single night.
The traffic stop is in Conti territory. Which means the officer is on the list. Which means the officer knew exactly who he was stopping and chose to stop him anyway, which means either the stop itself was sanctioned or the officer is suddenly an idiot—which he isn’t.
Sanctioned by whom?
I already know.
Three men, all Nico’s, caught in a way that requires the feds to notice if they so much as glance at the paperwork. A file that lands on my desk, marked urgent, on a Thursday night, which puts it on my plate tomorrow. Then I spend the next forty-eight hours pulling strings instead of moving Antonio’s witnesses around. Subsequently, the Martinez arraignment gets handled half-assed, or doesn’t get handled at all, and Antonio screams to Vincenzo, causing the whole week to collapse into a mess I have to personally dig out of.
This isn’t an accident. This is a tantrum with paperwork.
Petty little shit.
I know exactly what Nico is doing. He’s still stinging from the gala. From the silence afterward. From the fact that I hung up on him and then went home with her. This is his version of a reply—throwing a handful of his own people into the system because he knows I’ll have to catch every one of them, because he knows the brain of the famiglia doesn’t get to choose what to clean up.
It’s the adult version of a kid knocking over his own blocks to make someone else pick them up.
I close the folder.
I should probably call Vincenzo. Flag it. Let the old man handle his son the way he’s been handling him for thirty-something years. A short call. Ten minutes. I’ve made that call a hundred times.
I drop the folder on the desk.
And I pick up my coat.
