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She looked stupid pretty in her light yellow wrap dress that made you think of spring in the middle of winter.
“Hey, Mere,” I called as I opened the door, watching her head lift.
I almost went back a step.
Because her face was so damn… blank.
Blank.
Mere.
I swear the woman wore every small emotion on her face. And yet… there was nothing.
“Hey, Cesare. What are you doing here?” she asked, tone a little… distant. Like she was speaking to a customer, not someone who knew what her pussy tasted like.
Weird.
All of this, paired with the unreturned text, had me immediately on edge.
Uncertainty rose up in my system, making me feel more awkward than I was sure I ever had in my life.
“I’m actually here to check on the delivery,” I told her, nodding toward the back room. “Since Dennis still isn’t around,” I added.
“Oh, right,” she said, her tone still so bland, face so blank. “Go ahead. I am just finishing an arrangement,” she said, waving toward the couple of flowers she’d brought in from the back.
“Small arrangement,” I said, making her head shoot up. I could have sworn I saw something there then, panic, maybe? But then it was gone, making me think I was imagining things.
“Well, sometimes we have very cute, very young customers who want to get their moms or their teachers or their little crushes flowers. We like to cater to all budgets,” she said.
I could have sworn there was a false note in her words. But I had no reason to doubt her.
So I just gave her a nod, telling myself I would figure out what was going on with the two of us after I talked to the guys in the back.
“Excuse me a moment,” I said, getting a distracted nod from her as I moved past her and into the back room.
Where five guys were lining the table, long white boxes spread out before them.
They looked up, surprised, as I moved into the room with them.
“Who are you?” one of the men asked. The boss of the crew, I figured.
He was on the tall side, but shorter than me, with a stockier build, and a sharp, hawk-like look in his eyes as he looked at me.
“I’m who pays your boss,” I explained, moving forward toward the table, reaching for one of the boxes, and flipping open the lid.
I grabbed the handful of baby’s breath out, tossing it onto the table, and pulling the false back out of the box.
Then there was the compartment.
Full of guns.
Ones that came in from the south.
Conveniently, from the general area of the flowers this flower shop in the cold north needed to order from.
They looked like they were all there, too. Which meant any theory of the supply being less causing the cash shortage we were getting didn’t hold any weight.
It really was looking more and more like Dennis was the reason we were getting a cut in our share of the business.
No wonder he was MIA.
The bastard.
“Looks all good here,” I said, pushing the box back to the guy who took out the guns with his gloved hands, and put them into a different, bigger box.
“Run a tight ship here,” the man said.
“I see that,” I agreed. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Jake.”
He was lying about that.
What can I say, when you were raised in the Family, surrounded by criminals, you knew when someone was feeding you a fake name.
That being said, I didn’t blame him for not giving me his real one.
“Alright. Jake,” I said, putting some emphasis on it, so he knew he wasn’t going to bullshit me. “Carry on. I’m just going to dip into the office for a minute.”
“Yeah, boss,” Jake said, waving over toward it.
The men were already back to work as I let myself into Dennis’s office.
I hadn’t been back since Mere caught me in there the last time. I wondered if she had been in.
Because the place had been cleaned.
The coffee cups were gone.
The paperwork was all sorted and stacked into a neat pile.
That certainly seemed like something Mere would do. But, somehow, I don’t think she would overstep that professional line.
Hm.
Who then?
Dennis?
Had he cleaned up his office like he had his house, maybe removing any incriminating evidence?
I dropped down into his seat, swiveling around for a second, before reaching to pull open his drawers, looking around.
They, too, seemed to be reorganized.
Pens, sticky pads, a calculator that looked older than me.
It wasn’t until I was about to slide one of the drawers closed, that I heard something.
A little tap.
Pulling it back open, a single bullet was sitting there.
A bullet?
Just one?
That was… odd.
Maybe he’d just found it and stashed it in there so the employees didn’t see it.
But I was reasonably sure it hadn’t been there the last time I’d gone snooping in his desk.
Why get rid of all the other evidence of the illegal shit going down in the flower shop, but leave a bullet?
