“Look, she did nothing! All she did was get attacked!”
“We’ll see,” Petrie said. “Mr. Ranieri, do you have a twin brother?”
The question took him by surprise. “No. Why?”
“No brothers at all?”
He squinted into the wind, which was whipping tears from his eyes and then threatening to freeze them. “No. None. What the hell?”
“You might be interested to know that until you called me just now, you were presumed dead.”
Bruno scowled in total bafflement. “What? Dead? How? I never—”
“A man committed suicide this morning,” Petrie said. “He looked exactly like you. In fact, I suggest you call your great-aunt Rosa right away and tell her you’re alive, since I just got in touch with her and requested that she come down here to identify your body.”
Bruno jolted up to his feet. “What the
fuck?
”
“Hey, mistakes happen when you flee the scene of a triple homicide,” Petrie said. “Call her, please. She’s upset.”
“It’s not a triple homicide!” Bruno protested. “I didn’t commit a crime! I just prevented them from killing us!”
“Yes, of course,” Petrie said. “Call your aunt, and then come in, and tell us all about it. You’ll probably need to give us a DNA swab, too, so we can rule you out—”
“You guys already have one,” Bruno said. “From some stuff that happened last year.”
Petrie was silent for a moment. “I see. And might this situation have any connection to what happened last year?”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “No chance in hell.”
“Huh. You have a really eventful life, Mr. Ranieri. And I want to talk about this all further. Come on in, soon. And please keep in mind: The longer I wait, the worse your prospects become.”
“I can’t do that right now,” Bruno said. “I’m truly sorry. I’m not doing this to make trouble for you. I’ll be in touch.”
He broke the connection and dropped his face into his hands.
It was snowballing. A dead lookalike suicide, a hysterical Zia Rosa. And staying square with the law and trying to help Lily Parr seemed to be mutually exclusive. He didn’t relish the thought of life as a fugitive. Much less did he relish the thought of life in prison.
He had to call Zia, but that was going to be an emotionally punishing yell fest. He was too rattled to face it, at least for another minute or two. Sean, next. He pulled out the dedicated phone Aaro had given him, enabled the encryption function, dialed.
“About goddamn time,” Sean said tersely. “What the fuck is going on? With this cop calling to tell Zia Rosa that you blew your brains out? She practically had a stroke on us, man! It was ugly!”
“I don’t know,” Bruno said helplessly. “All I can say is, I didn’t do it. I still have my brains in there, such as they are.”
Sean grunted, clearly unimpressed with Bruno’s brains, whether located inside his skullor elsewhere. “So? What’s the deal? Aaro called after that and told us what he knew, which wasn’t much, but at least he told us you were still alive up there, so Zia could calm down a little. He told me about finding Petrie’s number for you. Did you call the guy?”
“Yes. It didn’t go well. But he knows who the corpse is not.”
“Huh. So what the hell happened?”
“Like Aaro told you,” Bruno said wearily. “These guys attacked me and this girl I hooked up with this morning. I defended myself, and—”
“Snuffed them in the process.” Sean’s voice was heavy with disapproval. “Heard about that part.”
“On the bright side, I’m alive, and so is she,” Bruno snarled.
“Yeah. The only positive thing you can say about the situation.”
“I did not call you for a lecture, so fuck off.”
“The lecture is the price you pay for my help,” Sean informed him. “Back to the problem. The guys you killed. Any ideas?”
“It’s about Lily,” he admitted. “She wasn’t surprised.”
“Ah.” Sean pondered that for a beat. “What did she do to them?”
“Nothing,” he snapped. “She did
nothing
.”
“Wow, aren’t we defensive.” Sean waited for more and huffed with impatience. “Bruno. I need a little more collaboration here from you.”
“She doesn’t know! That is to say, she has suspicions, but . . .”
“But what?” Sean prompted.
“But they’re not helpful ones,” he forced out.
“Define helpful.”
“She thinks it’s connected to me,” Bruno admitted. “Her dad committed suicide in a locked psych ward over a month ago. She says it’s murder. She also thinks it was connected to my mamma’s murder. We’re talking way back, when my mamma, ah . . . Did you know about her getting killed? The Mafia goons who came after me?”
“Yeah, Kev mentioned that,” Sean said.
Yeah. Right. Kev “mentioned it.” Like that horrible event was something you could just “mention.” Only Kev. Only the McClouds.
“And what do you think?” Sean insisted.
He looked over at Lily. She was huddled against the face of the cliff. Shoulders slumped, face hidden. Two locks of hair fluttered out of her hood on either side of her hands. The brightest point in the picture.
He steeled himself. “I think it’s a load of crap,” he said. “I think what happened to my mamma was exactly what it seemed.”
“So. What’s the deal, then? With the girl?” Sean asked delicately.
“I don’t think she’s lying. She’s convinced of what she says.”
“She must be pissed at you,” Sean said. “For holding out on her.”
Duh. Bruno swallowed back a rude and unhelpful comment.
“So.” Sean’s voice was brisk. “What do you need from us?”
“Help securing Lily. Help figuring out who’s attacking her.”
Sean paused. “You’re taking on the cross, then? Wow, man. Sure you’re up for it? Looks like a big ol’ fucking shit storm.”
“I don’t know what else to do!” he exploded. “The guys who attacked hewere coordinated, trained. They meant business.”
“Have you considered the possibility that this chick is, um . . .”
“Sure I have,” he snapped. “I’ve made my judgment call. I’m helping her. So you can help me do that, or you can fuck off.”
“I sense the effects of excessive sexual hormones on your brain.”
Bruno’s nostrils flared. “So I take it you’re fucking off, then?”
“Calm down. I’m not one to criticize when it comes to sexual hormones. I’m not judging you, man. Really.”
“Fuck if you’re not,” Bruno growled.
“Don’t get testy,” Sean soothed. “I’ll collect you guys tomorrow. We’ll find a safe place to stash your girlfriend—”
“She is
not
my girlfriend—”
“Seth and Raine’s island would be good,” Sean mused. “And we’ll start to dig for answers. Sound good to you?”
“Yeah. How soon can you get here?”
“I’ll leave tonight, late. I’m thinking a dawn arrival.”
“Another thing,” Bruno said, apologetically. “Lily’s convinced you guys are under surveillance. I have no clue whether this is true or not—”
“But in the interests of covering our asses, we’ve got a plan in place,” Sean supplied. “I 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 them.”
Bruno sighed in relief. Sometimes the innate paranoia of the McCloud clan was actually convenient. “Yeah. Thank you.”
“Why didn’t you crash at Aaro’s?” Sean complained. “Sandy would’ve been so much easier to get to. There are real roads up there.”
“He didn’t invite us,” Bruno said.
“Since when do you need an invitation to trash someone’s life, property, and livelihood?”
“That’s a McCloud creed,” Bruno said sourly. “Not mine.”
“Is that so?” Sean sounded amused. “We’ll see how it shakes down in the end. Wait, wait. Hold on. Zia Rosa wants to talk to you.”
Bruno jumped, as if stuck by a pin. He wasn’t psychologically prepared for Zia yet. “What the hell is she doing there?”
“I’m at Davy’s house.” Sean was enjoying himself way too much. “She’s here now, since Davy and Margot have the littlest baby. Helena’s number one. Eamon’s been demoted, poor squirt.”
“No! Don’t put her on the phone yet! Wait—”
“Here he is,” he heard Sean say, and Zia’s voice blared over the line at triple volume.
“Eh, Bruno?
Che cazz’ stai a fare?
Who’s this cop who’s callin’ me, tellin’ me you was dead?”
“I’m sorry about that, Zia, but I’m not dead, so—”
“
Che cazzo,
Bruno! I practically had a heart attack!”
“I know, Zia, but I swear to God, I didn’t—”
“I don’ wanna hear about you shootin’ yourself in the head no more, OK? I got high blood pressure! I coulda had a stroke!”
“I’m really sorry. It won’t happen agan,” 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 Mr. Adams’ 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? Good-bye.”
He closed the line in midsquawk 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 in itself.
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.
14
Z
oe 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 a remote-activated speakerphone in the phone buried inside Rosa Ranieri’s purse, crowded with junk and tossed who knew where in the McCloud house. So many variables, but she’d decided to risk it, and the risk had paid off.
Zoe felt surprisingly fresh and alert, considering how long it had been sine she’d 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 static 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.
Melanie’s fingers drummed madly on the keys. “Working on it.”
McCloud’s voice came back into focus.
“. . . when do you need an invitation to trash someone’s life, property, and livelihood? . . . Is that so? We’ll see how it shakes down in the end. Wait, wait. Hold on. Zia Rosa wants to talk to you.”
“Stop it there,” Zoe said. “Have you arranged for Miles Davenport’s vehicle to be tagged?”
“Manfred went up to cover it right away,” Melanie said.
“And Seth and Raine’s island? Who are Seth and Raine?”
“Seth Mackey and Raine Lazar,” Hobart supplied promptly. “Mackey is a colleague of the McClouds. They have a private island in the San Juans. Stone Island. Here’s the map. And a satellite picture.”
Zoe glanced at the printouts Hobart was holding out and waved them away with a finger flutter. “Later. What do you have on Aaro?”
“Not as much as I’d like,” Hobart said. “He did a stint in the Army Rangers with Davy McCloud. It was very difficult to find any info on him before that, because he had changed his name. His original surname was Arbatov. From Coney Island, New York. Ukrainian in origin. His family was famous for arms trafficking, but they wound down after the patriarch Oleg Arbatov was diagnosed with cancer. The current boss is Alex’s cousin, Dimitri Arbatov.”
“Alex hasn’t been involved in the family business since before the army, and not much then, either,” Nadia said, eager to be seen as useful, though from the look Hobart gave her, he’d done all the work. “They consider him a black sheep, it seems. He appears to have gone legit.”
“How admirable of him,” Zoe said. “And now?”
“He runs a one-man security consultancy,” Hobart broke in as Nadia began to reply. “Private referrals. Cyber security stuff for private corporations. It’s extremely difficult to find personal data on him.”
“But you managed,” Zoe purred. “Of course?”
Hobart’s smile was smug. “Of course.”
“Is someone on it?” Though it was hardly necessary to ask.
“I’m on it,” Nadia broke in eagerly. “I’ll head to Portland now.”
“And Detective Sam Petrie? Is anyone assigned to him?”
Melanie’s mouth hung open, clearly taken by surprise. “Ah . . .”
“I need the same software loaded onto his phone that you put on the Ranieri woman’s,” Zoe said. “I would have assumed that was self-evident. Bruno Ranieri spoke to Petrie today, and I would have loved to have heard that conversation. They have the cadavers of four of our operatives. Is it just me? Is this not painfully obvious? To anyone?”
Melanie’s mouth worked. “Ah . . . I’ll just go down tonight, and—”
“No” Zoe said to her sharply. “Not you.”
“But I can—”
“No.” Zoe raked the woman with her eyes. “You don’t have the look. You’re the one we use when we need the fresh-faced suburban mom. But you don’t do a convincing slut.” Her eyes cut to Nadia. Nadia’s chin tilted up, proud to be the slut of choice. Zoe had never liked the bitch. Special series twats. Thought they were such hot shit.
Melanie sputtered, reddening. “I could, too!”
“Probably it will just be a matter of breaking into his house and loading the software onto his phone while he sleeps. But if a personal approach is necessary . . .” Zoe’s voice trailed off. “I’ll do it myself. You take care of getting smart tags on all the McCloud vehicles. Bug-sweep proof.” Zoe tapped her long fingernails on the desktop.
“Manfred did that weeks ago,” Melanie said sullenly. “We’ve been logging every last move those people make. Would you like to see the—”
“No. I’m sure you’re being extremely efficient.” Zoe dismissed her with a wave. Melanie looked hurt. Zoe was being harsh, but she had to establish her authority as team leader. Which meant being ruthless.
“We’re lucky that the Ranieri woman put her purse down right in the common room,” Melanie said, trying to draw attention back to her successes, not her shortcomings. “And just in time to hear of Sean McCloud’s travel plans tonight. If it wasn’t for their kids making all that noise, we would barely have needed to filter the recording at all.”
“Speaking of kids.” Zoe glanced at the door to the adjoining room, where Melanie had left the tandem stroller. The toddlers had been asleep, but the boy had just woken up and was exercising his lungs. The sound was irritating. She required a calm environment for optimal concentration. Then the girl woke up, too. The sound redoubled. The operatives stared at the stroller and its shrieking occupants, at a loss.
“What’s wrong with them?” Zoe asked. “Are they hungry? Make them shut up. Do you have food? Bottles?”
“That’s the pod leader’s job.” Melanie sounded defensive. “Not ours. And they’ve got bottles in their strollers if they want them.”
Hobart glanced at his watch. “She was supposed to have been here by now to pick them up. She’s forty minutes late.”
“Call her,” Zoe said. “In the meantime, do something about that noise. Drug them or something. I can’t stand the sound.”
Melanie looked uncertain. “That’s forbidden in the protocols. They’ve had less than optimal results in the past using sedatives.”
“So?” Zoe said impatiently. “Do something else, then. I don’t care what you do, just solve the problem.”
“I can put the stroller into the bathroom,” Nadia suggested. “If we shut the connecting door, we’ll have two doors to block the sound.”
“The tandem won’t fit through the bathroom door,” Hobart said.
“The supply closet, then,” Nadia said. “The door’s wider. It’ll go if we wiggle it in sideways. Come on, Hobart. Help me lift it.”
Zoe watched as Nadia and Hobart wrestled the double stroller with its shrieking cargo into the dark maw of the supply closet. The door swung shut. The volume cut by two-thirds. When the suite door closed, the sound was blocked almost completely. Ah. Much better.
“Good,” Zoe said. “Jeremy, Hal, and Manfred will make up my team tomorrow when we follow Sean McCloud. I’ll hook up with them in Portland, after I take care of Petrie.” She looked at Melanie, then Hobart. “You two stay here. To monitor us.” She glanced at Nadia. “You concentrate on Aaro. Get going.”
Nadia scampered away, eager to get to work as the superslut. Melanie’s mouth tightened, face red. Zoe observed this with satisfaction. It was the stupid bitch’s punishment for not even thinking of including Petrie in the surveillance net. Hers and Hobart’s. They would stay at headquarters, in disgrace. That would teach them. She’d chosen every available agent in the area for her team, except those two. Idiots.
Hobart turned to face the computer screen without comment. Probably relieved to be spared combat duty. Gutless egghead geek.
“I’ve sent a list of supplies to your comms. Add anything else you think would be useful, have it assembled and packed by early this evening. I will brief the team here, at nine
P.M.
”
“Ah, one small problem.” Hobart was looking at his list.
Zoe spun on him. “I don’t want to hear about problems,” she said.
Hobart looked up, apologetically. “I can’t get an armored SUV for you in that amount of time. I had no idea . . . these things need just a little lead time. Maybe I could get one by tomorrow afternoon—”
“I can’t believe you didn’t anticipate this. We can’t wait. Our window of opportunity will close. Are you too stupid to see that?”
“Um, maybe by midmorning, if I offered them an extra—”
“Just give me a normal SUV,” Zoe snarled. “We’ll have to manage without the armor. Is everything clear? Good. Get to work.”
They got to it.
Finally alone, Zoe placed her long golden legs up on the desk, admiring how graceful they were, right down to her slender feet in the white wedged sandals. She clicked the mouse until she set the recording to run from the beginning. Rosa Ranieri’s triumphal return from the baby supplies store, followed by the phone call from Petrie, which had involved much wailing and carrying on in Italian.
She tried not to let herself get distracted by the thrills of anticipation, thinking about that phone call tonight in the privacy of her room. Lying on her bed, telling King about her excellent progress.
Too bad about the armored SUV. She would have preferred to play it safe, but truly, it was probably overkill.
Tomorrow, she would complete the task he had assigned her. She would undo all the damage Reginald had done. She would be brilliant.
King would be so very pleased. And when he showed her what a full Level Ten reward sequence felt like, all thirty verses . . . oh, my.
She would be pleased, too. Oh, so very pleased.
Lily shifted on the chair by the stove. The tender moment up on the mountainside hadn’t lasted. Since his cell conversations on the bluff, which he’d taken great pains not to let her hear, Bruno had been stonily silent. She’d been appalled, on the mountain, to find out that the descent was even more excruciating than the ascent. A contradiction of natural laws. Physics reversed, just to insult her. Water flowing uphill. What was up with that? Her knees and ankles still shook like jelly.
But her life lately had been nothing but a series of contradictions of natural law. By the laws of emotional physics, it made no sense that a mild-mannered—well, maybe not so mild, but certainly relatively harmless—chick who wrote essays for a living should end up being the target of brutal assassins. If Bruno was right, and there really was no connection to Magda, then what the hell did they want with her? Like water, flowing uphill for no good reason. Why would water bother? Why expend the effort? It wasn’t like there was any money to be made in killing her. And yeah, she did tend to speak her mind, true, but she’d never been quite that bitchy to anybody. She was almost certain of it.
And Bruno, being silent. Wow, that felt like another contradiction of natural laws. At the cabin, he was a blur of activity, but scarily quiet the whole time. He built up the fire, cleaned and loaded three different handguns, made up the bed, restoked the fire. He cooked a delicious meal, which they ate in strangled silence. He washed dishes. He would not let her help with these activities. Evidently, her mental instability would be dangerously exacerbated by the stress of rinsing lettuce or tucking a sheet over a mattress. She’d tried to insist, but he’d turned her down so hard she’d ended up huddled in the chair, wishing she was small enough to slide under the door. The silence was deafening.
She tried to lose herself in the twisting, dancing flames while Bruno sloshed and clanked at the sink. Then, quiet.
Her neck prickled. She twisted around. He was holding a six-pack. He looked at the beer, he looked at her, and he put it back into the refrigerator. “Feel free,” she said. “It’s my own personal choice not to drink. I’d never judge anyone else for having a beer. It’s OK.”