Page 37
The lawyers earn their retainers arguing chain of custody with the authorities. They also unearth a recent text from one of Matteo’s men to one of ours.
Tell your principal—you are in this with us whether you like it or not.
Nick reads it over my shoulder and sets the phone down with more care than the phone requires. “He’s doing this to us on purpose. Leading them to us. He’ll leave us in the fucking wind, just to prove that he can.”
“Anything on who called the tip in?”
“Routed through a prosecutor’s hotline, anonymous. A professional.” Nick lifts one shoulder. “Does it matter? We know who is doing this.”
“I want to know if he bought one of our men to make this happen.”
“Fair enough.” He huffs out some of the anger, but never all of it. The man has anger to spare. “That’s his answer to the buyout. Fucking poetry, by his standards.”
“I will make him choke on his poetry, Nick. We are not out. We are annoyed. As you said before, he wants me angry, because angry men fuck up. I am not fucking this up, so I’m staying calm.”
“When you were on the phone earlier, you broke two pencils.”
“And that’s how I’m staying calm, fucknuts.”
He smiles briefly. But it falls quick. “So now I’ll say the part you pay me to say. The marriage was cover. There’s nothing left, Lupo. Finanza at our berths means files get opened. Files mean names. One of the names is a Boston physician who married you two weeks after meeting you and watches over Sarah at swim lessons.”
“Your point?”
“Send her home.” He says it flat, with no cruelty. “Pay the back half, put her on the plane, let the marriage story dissolve into a whirlwind that ended. She’s clean right now. Every day she stays, Matteo could sink his hooks into her.”
“He won’t.”
“And if he tries to buy her? Take her? What then?”
“We’re not doing this—”
Nick exhales loudly. Annoyed. “He could, Lupo.
“She treats Sarah. Full stop.”
“And no one has treated Sarah better. I can tell. Kid’s been having a streak of good health with the doctor around, and I understand wanting to keep her here.”
I know that tone. I hate that tone. “But?”
“There’s a wedding nobody attended. A courthouse with no record of your marriage. A doctor who vanished off her career ladder mid-climb. If this goes to war and then to court, proximity to fake drugs is enough to ruin her. License, name, all of it.”
“No.”
Nick leans back and gives me the long look he gives a route with a problem in it. “That wasn’t a business answer.”
“Sarah’s counts are the best they’ve been in two years.”
“Milan has pediatric oncologists. You interviewed nine of them last spring and rejected the lot, and Sarah did fine before—”
“Sarah did fine?”
“Lupo—”
“Now she runs stairs and holds out her arms like a kid. She’s blossoming thanks to Veda, Nick. You’ve watched it happen the same as I have. I’m not returning my daughter to fine.”
“And the doctor?” Nick asks, carefully. “What are you not returning her to?”
“She has a life with a decade of her name on it, and she’ll go back to it when Sarah’s stable and this is finished, because that’s the arrangement.”
