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She couldn’t fight her excitement. Five minutes, and she’d made three-thousand euros. She bounced on the seat a little.
“Are you counting cards?” a voice hissed over her shoulder.
She looked over to see the man with the toothpick, sneering at her.
She frowned at her tiny pile of chips. What about her novice playing skills made him think she was a pro at this? “No. I wouldn’t even know how to do that. You told me I could play cards. So I’m—"
He wrapped a hand around her upper arm and yanked her to standing. “Come with me.”
She was shuttled so quickly down a narrow back hallway that she kept stumbling over her own feet and the feet of the men surrounding her. “What is this all about?” she tried to demand, though they seemed intent on ignoring her.
When they reached the door, toothpick man said to her, “You don’t gamble at Sophie’s without an invitation.”
“Well, you could’ve told me th--” she began, but one of the thugs opened the door and shoved her into the room before she could finish the sentence. She stumbled forward into a room with such plush carpeting, she felt like she was treading on clouds.
She caught herself before she fell into the lap of a man, sitting on a recliner, watching a soccer game on television.
For a moment, she was sure she’d been escorted into the wrong room. When the jeweler had mentioned a mafia man, she’d expected a man more like the thugs outside. This man, with his graying hair and beer belly, looked like a harried father who’d just returned from a long day at the office.
He didn’t look at her. He simply turned down the volume on the television with a remote on the arm of the chair, and said, “You’re an American?”
“Yes.”
His voice was toneless. “I don’t like Americans.”
“I’m Daisy Fortune, a private investigator.”
“Even worse,” he said, his eyes still glued to the screen. “A nosy American.”
She backed up against one of the thugs, waiting at the door, and thought about Zachary’s warning. This man may have looked like a harried father, but something told her when it came time to do business, he didn’t play softball. “Are you Etienne?”
He finally looked at her. “I am. Who told you about this place. And what made you think you could cheat me?”
“I wasn’t cheating.”
“The last American who came in here cheated. And Todd, over there—” He motioned to the thug behind her— “said that you were in the Pharoah’s casino complex, asking questions about him.”
“He cheated you.”
Etienne nodded. “In a big way. And I don’t stand for it. There are consequences for cheating me.”
“Like what?”Death,she thought.
His eyes lowered down to her hands, which were clamped together in front of her. “My boys break fingers. The little one, first. Then the bigger ones.”
Heart beating a steady, hard drumbeat in her chest, she hid her hands behind her back. “Has anyone ever cheated you so bad that they deserved death?”
Etienne stared at her, surprise evident on his face. Then he said, “I don’t think that is something you need to know, American.”
He started to turn his head back to the soccer game.
“Franklin Tate is dead,” she stated, making him swivel his head back to her.
“Is he, now?” A smile touched his lips, and then, unable to contain his delight, he laughed.
“You’re happy about that news?”
He considered that. “Thrilled. And it’s not news. I’d heard it from my people. Rarely does anything happen in my world that doesn’t get right back to me. And I’d say Franklin Tate got what he deserved, just like you said.”
