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Craig already arrived, and he turns away from the work I compiled over the weekend to accept his latte, grunting. “Look who’s been a busy girl while I was out of town.”
“How was the weekend?” I ask because I will not entertain his bullshit today. I can’t. There’s too much to be done to play childish games.
“I spent the whole time pretending to give a shit about a bunch of ten-year-olds playing soccer in a tournament my kid’s team didn’t win. It was joyful.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“So?” he prods in his arrogant way while I slide out of my jacket. “Are you going to answer my question?”
“You didn’t ask a question.” I stand back with my drink while he studies the photos I printed out and the profiles I put together on the Santoro and Vitali families.
“Is there any ink left in the printer after all this?” he asks with a sarcastic snort that gets my blood simmering.
Why not pat me on the head and patronize me a little harder?
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I grit out.
“It’s been a busy weekend for them,” he muses, looking at one photo after another. “As I’m sure you know.”
Know? I’ve visited the crime scenes. “Things are ramping up. A shoot-out in front of a Vitali bar on Saturday, a drive-by yesterday on Santoro turf. It’s getting uglier.”
“Word has it, old man Vitali is on his last legs, so yeah, everybody’s trying to carve up what they can with the family perceived as being weak.” He turns to me, arching an eyebrow.
Clearly, the part of our day where we talk about things we already know in order to ease the tension between us is over—kind of the way a couple will reconnect after a fight using common ground, like adding something to a grocery list or asking who last let the dog outside. “I shouldn’t have said what I said when we were out on Friday. There was no excuse for it.”
“You’re right. There was no excuse,” I agree.
Heaving a sigh, he perches at the edge of my desk with his back to the corkboard I spent all weekend filling. “Here’s the thing you need to hear, though I know you don’t want to hear it.”
Here we go. I need to brace myself.
“You can’t go charging headfirst into everything. I know you’ve had it pretty easy so far.” When I suck in a breath, prepared to fight, he holds up a hand and shakes his head. “Let me finish before you get all up in your feelings. I’m sure you worked hard, but there are lots of people who work twice as hard and never get as far as you already have. You’re on the fast track. But you’re going to come up against a situation one day where the waters don’t magically part for you to walk through. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? You could end up getting yourself into serious trouble, strutting around with all this bravado. It’s no good. Don’t do that to yourself.”
As if the waters have ever magically parted for me. I want to say that to him, but instead, I settle for, “Point taken.”
He rolls his eyes. “Thank you is the response you were looking for. Why is that so much to ask?” he challenges, and I have to force myself to count to five in my head before I say something I’ll regret.
The thing is, I would never admit this to him with a gun to my head that I know he’s right. How do I know? Because I may have committed an unforgivable mistake on Friday night. Really, there’s no might about it. I know I did. And I spent the weekend doing penance, working until my eyes burned and my head ached, digging deep into the families, trying to get to the root of their feud.
Increased activity on the streets heightens my sense of urgency. So far, only members of the respective crews were taken out this weekend. How long will that be the case? When are innocent bystanders going to be caught in the middle?
How long are they going to keep getting away with it?
For as long as men like Luca Santoro keep using their charm to skate their way through everything.
Because I’m sure that’s what he did to me on Friday with his velvety voice and hypnotic eyes. He did his best to convince me I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary in that room, but I know that’s not true. Even if I don’t have proof and everything is still a little fuzzy, I’ve been popping aspirin like it’s my job in the days since, thanks to the bump at the base of my skull. There is no way I hit my head hard enough to make up something that grotesque.
The image of that beaten, dying man is burned into my memory. Luca used a hammer to break his face apart and not only his face. The guy’s fingers were bent at odd angles like that’s where Luca had started before working his way into the truly horrific stages. Why would he take that kind of a risk? All I had to do was step through an unlocked door, and bam, there it was. And a man like him would never take that kind of risk.
Would he? Or has he been doing it for so long it never occurred to him he might not get away with it?
Maybe I am making it all up.
Maybe it doesn’t make sense because it didn’t happen the way I remember it.
I could be taking my feelings about his family and their history and concocting a gruesome but false memory. It happens all the time.
But it doesn’t happen to me.
