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“I’m really sorry. It won’t happen again,” he repeated, for all the world like he was apologizing for having blown his brains out for real.
“And what’s this I hear ‘bout these dead guys? You kill these guys, Bruno? Outside the diner? That ain’t smart, honey.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Bruno explained. “I was just trying to—”
“And this girl? They tell me there’s a girl. Who’s this girl, eh?”
Trust Zia to cut to the chase. “I just met her, so I don’t really—”
“She a nice girl, honey?”
His eyes flashed to where Lily had been, and got a nasty shock to find her gone. He looked around, frantically. Spotted her, up high.
She’d clambered all the way up to the tip top of the crumbling granite cliff tower, and was looking out over the canyon, piled full of stormy fog. A ragged window had opened up, showing her a breathtaking glimpse of Mt. Adam’s stark, snowy shoulder. She stared at it, hair whipping like a bright flag against the wintry palette of whites and grays. Beautiful and lonely. Proud. And tough.
“Yeah, Zia,” he said quietly. “I think she is a nice girl. She needs help, though. She’s being messed with pretty bad.”
“Well, you help her, then. Nobody messes with a Ranieri,” Zia said. “Kick them dirty sonzabitches’ asses, hmm? Make Tony proud.”
Zia Rosa’s bloodthirsty encouragement made him grin. “You bet, Zia,” he promised. “I’ll try. I promise.”
“This girl, she like babies?”
Bruno rolled his eyes. Only a matter of time with Zia Rosa. “We haven’t gotten that far. We’ve been distracted, by killers on our tail.”
Zia Rosa clucked. “You young folks, you too easily distracted,” she lectured. “You forget what’s important. You gotta—”
“Not going there, Zia,” he said loudly. “I’m busy, OK? I’m hanging up now.Ti voglio tanto, tanto bene, OK? Goodbye.”
He closed the line in mid-squawk, and sat, listening to the relatively soothing shriek of wind around the jagged rocks. He thought of calling Kev, but why? What could he do but scold?
He looked at Lily, up there on her granite pedestal. A fortress of solitude. Her body’s whole proud, defiant stance was a silent reproach.
Hell with it. Kev could wait. There was only so much abuse a guy could take. That chick was not done with him yet tonight.
Not by a mile.
CHAPTER14
Zoe crossed one long leg over the other and listened again to the recorded conversations that had taken place in Davy McCloud’s living room. She squeezed her thighs together as she did so, privately relishing the deep, throbbing ache.
Melanie, one of the agents who had handled the job at the baby store this afternoon, tapped at the keyboard, manipulating the filtering program that enhanced the sound. Nadia and Hobart looked on.
The ploy had worked. The source of sound was the smartphone buried inside Rosa Ranieri’s purse, crowded with junk and tossed who knew where in the McCloud house. They had loaded the remote-activated spyware program onto the woman’s phone in the baby store.
Zoe felt surprisingly fresh and alert, considering how long it had been since she slept. She’d coordinated Melanie and Hobart’s baby store gambit from the plane, as soon as she’d seen the old woman and her handler, Miles Davenport, coming out of the McCloud residence on the long range hidden surveillance cam. She was pleased with herself. So was King. He’d told her she was special. Made her team leader. He’d promised to read her one of her reward texts tonight over the phone.
Her thighs and buttocks contracted, provoking a spontaneous orgasm that pumped tingling heat down her thighs. Fortunately, the climax was not powerful enough to startle her into vocalizing, but she did miss a few seconds of the recording.
“Run it back, please,” she ordered. “The last twenty seconds.”
Melanie looked puzzled, but she did as she was told. The voice came through again. Sean McCloud spoke, his voice tinny through a cloud of staticky fuzz, but the one-sided conversation was audible.
“…booked a room at the Marriott downtown. At midnight, Miles meets us. I take his rig and head down to you guys. Then Miles drives Liv and Eamon to Tam’s the next day. So even if they’re tracking our vehicle, I won’t have to worry about…”
The sound of a newborn baby swelled into the foreground, and the voice of an older woman, speaking Italian. “Dai, piccina, non piangere, dai...”
“Can’t you filter that baby stuff out?” Zoe snapped, irritated.
