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“Our women have different needs,” I point out. “Rose needed to help those women. You bowed when she insisted on Pearl and Anya remaining in our care.”
“True.” He settles back in his chair. “Sandy called me last night.”
I balk. “And you’re telling me this now?” I look at my watch. “Twelve hours later?”
“I was enjoying my day off.” He tosses the letter opener into the middle of the desk and focuses on it. I don’t challenge him. I was enjoying a day off too. “He heard about the Poles. Told me we left two alive. A prize for guessing who one was.”
“The Shark,” I muse.
“And guess what?”
“Don’t tell me Sandy offered you a name?” How many people are going to claim to know who The Bear is? If I hadn’t spoken to the elusive fucker personally, I would think he’s a figment of all our imaginations. A nightmare that haunts our dreams, but not reality.
“You’re so clever.” Danny turns his eyes up to me. “But that’s not all he offered.”
I raise my brows, thinking. It doesn’t take me long. “Volodya,” I breathe. “Sandy’s offered you Volodya too.” So there really is unrest in the camp, because not so long ago, Sandy and Volodya were playing nicely together under The Ox. Now he’s dead too, the Russians and Poles are offering each other up left and right. Of course Sandy would offer Volodya to Danny; he knows that’s a prime piece of meat for The Brit after he turned on him at the Winstable massacre. But is the not so tiny detail of Sandy organizing a hit on Beau when she lay in the hospital with a gunshot wound being forgotten? Surely not. It’s the whole fucking point I ended up resurrecting The Brit after he faked his death.
“I assume you declined.”
“Not exactly.”
“Don’t piss me off, Danny,” I warn, shifting in my chair. “He had a—”
He holds up a hand. “I know. But let us not forget, Volodya shot me of his own accord. Sandy was ordered by a higher power to kill Beau because she was uncomfortably close to exposinghim, like her mother was.”
I settle in my chair, but I’m far from comfortable with where this is heading. “He still acted, whether ordered or not. Rose doesn’t have a target on her head. Beau has been a target since she started digging around into her mother’s death.”
“We’re past that,” Danny says, appearing as frustrated as me. “The FBI and MPD buried that case for a reason, and since you were implicated in the evidence that was destroyed by Dexter and it wasn’t only The Bear’s name in that safety deposit box, we should be grateful. This is personal now, James. Beau doesn’t want justice like she used to want justice. She wants justice likeyouwant justice. With death. Blood.”
“Pretty fucking impossible when the man we want dead has disappeared off the face of the fucking earth.” The Bear vanishing pains me more than him terrorizing us. “He called us in St. Lucia. Took the greatest of pleasure in informing us he’s still alive, that we got the wrong man. We come back to Miami to deal with it. He calls us the day we arrive to tell us he dug up your pops and Beau’s mother, and over a week down the line, nothing. Not a fucking peep.”
“I think Beau’s right. He’s lost their confidence.”
Whoever he is.Who the fuck is he? Facing the idea that we may never know is torture. There was a time when no one knew who he was. Now, apparently, every fucker does if the amount of offers of a name is a measure.
“About tomorrow,” Danny goes on, swiftly changing the subject. “The funeral.” He eyes me curiously.
“What about it?”
“I’ll ask you again. Did you kill Beau’s father?”
“I’ve told you repeatedly, no, I didn’t fucking kill her father.” Wanted to. God, did I want to.
“Then what the fuck were you doing at the hotel?”
I breathe out, defeated. It’s time to share since Beau will find out later anyway. I pull out my phone, find the details, and slide it across the desk. “I wasn’t at the same hotel as Tom Hayley.”
Danny frowns as he picks it up and starts scrolling through the images. “What’s this?” he asks, splitting his attention between my uncomfortable form and my phone.
“I’ve bought us a place,” I tell him, a bit unsure, because, honestly, I’m still feeling it, and I can’t put my finger on exactly why. Would Beau like it? Hate it? “I was meeting the realtor at the lobby bar to finalize some paperwork.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you’d tell Rose and Rose would tell Beau.” This needs a gentle approach too. “I need her in the best frame of mind. Stable. Positive.”
“Is it an apartment, or is it a glass box?” Danny looks up at me. “It’s very... exposed.”
“And?”
