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“What do you need? I’m guessing you came here to ask for something.”
“Support. Manpower, money, guns. And that’s just to fight the war. I need you on my side when I start cleaning house.”
“I’ll run it up the chain and see what I hear.”
“Do it quietly. I don’t want every single wannabe gangster on the East Coast to know something’s going on in Georgia. You get me?”
“This isn’t the first time I’ve smoked out a rat.” He sits up straighter and slams his palm down onto the table. “But when this is over, I want her gone.” He points a finger at Cora.
“Ben—”
“I’m not joking, Nolan. I want her out of my state. When this is finished and you have your traitor, I want her packed up and moved on. I can forget about her again, but not if she’s still in my fucking back yard.” His jaw quivers as he says it and I get the sense that this has bothered him for a very long time. Not that I’m surprised—the mafia exists because of the code of silence, and anyone that breaks the code has to be dealt with severely or else everything falls apart. Men like Ben rely on that silence to stay out of prison, and Cora shredded it all to pieces and walked away relatively unscathed. That fact that she’s not dead means some other poor asshole might talk to the cops and think they can get away with it too, which is very bad for our safety.
“We’ll deal with that when we get to it. And if you have any theories—”
He shakes his head. “I’ve got nothing for you. I’ve thought about it a thousand times, but nobody makes sense. Nobody knew the whole thing, not enough to make it burn so perfectly.”
“We’ll figure it out then.” I push my chair back and stand. “Good seeing you again.”
“Yeah, yeah, you should come visit sometime when you don’t want something, you know what I mean?”
“You can always come up north.”
“Bullshit. You’d have me thrown out on my ass. You really want a wise guy like me prancing around with your genteel Southern men and ladies up in Marietta? Hell no, you want to keep the likes of me down in the city swamp where we belong.”
He laughs as Cora joins me and we walk off together. Once outside, she picks up her pace until she’s practically running back to the Rover.
Chapter 9
Cora
It takes about ten minutes for my heart to stop hammering so hard it feels like I might be sick.
“Nobody said anything about me leaving Georgia,” I say quietly because if I say it any louder, I think I might cry or scream or both. I keep thinking about the look on that big man’s face: the pure loathing, the pure hatred. These people think I’m a monster for telling the police the truth about what happened, like I had any other choice.
The cops were talking about me going to jail for decades. If that happened, who was going to take care of Momma through her cancer? And if the treatments didn’t work, who was going to watch out for her in her last days? What about Kady?
I was still a freaking kid when it all went down and I had a mountain of weight on my shoulders already.
I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and burn for a bunch of mobsters. I had my sister and my mother to think about.
So I talked.
Nolan keeps his eyes on the road.
“I didn’t know Ben would go that far,” he says.
“He’d rather freaking kill me, you know that, right? Throwing me out of the state is his second choice.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“And you think he’s not going to? You think he’s going to be satisfied with exile?”
His eyes narrow. “Ben is a smart man. He knows who makes the money in Georgia.”
“Yeah? And I guess that’s you?”
He says nothing, only keeps driving.
I lean back and clench my jaw to keep from losing my mind.
That awful day seven years ago keeps playing over and over through my head like a bad TV movie. I’ve been obsessing over that trip again and again for years and years, and it still doesn’t make sense, but there’s something weirdly soothing about Ben and Nolan feeling the same way. I can’t put the pieces together, not into a cohesive shape, but neither can they.
It all started with that terrible flight up to Philly International.
I was shaking the whole time and thinking some cops were going to jump out from behind every corner to arrest me. I was all alone with only a single checked bag packed like I was on an overnight trip even though I went straight from the terminal to a cab and gave the driver an address somewhere in the southern part of the city. He dropped me on a lonely street corner and I stood there like an idiot looking around at an empty lot strewn with trash with a U-Haul place next to it until a guy appeared nearby, called out my name, and led me to the truck that would change my life. This is you, sweetheart. Good fucking luck. It was a white pickup, a newer model, nothing special. It’d be one of a million just like it down south. The guy walked off and I never saw him again, but I thought about him a lot as I started the drive back home. There were a lot of miles to cover and only so much radio I could stand, and so I started making up stories for that guy, giving him names and backgrounds, imagining an entire fake world.
