“To drop this, lady, you could damn near name your price.”
Her dark brows shot up. “Well, now, that will require some thought. Normally, when I’m told I can have anything I want, I demand chocolate, but—”
“Chocolate? Chocolate what?”
“Oh, anything. I’m a confirmed chocoholic.” She taped the gauze down and looked at him seriously. “But in this case I’d prefer conversation.” Nick’s wariness returned in force, but she hurried on. “Not about what you’re not telling me or what I’m not telling you. I want you to tell me about you. The way I told you about me last night. About my dad, and—”
“What do you want to know?” He still wasn’t sure this was anything but another attempt to get the truth from him.
She turned from his thigh, pulling herself fully onto the bed and facing him. “You did talk last night, when the fever shot up. You talked about Danny.” Nick felt the old pain twist within him but concealed it. “Your brother, right?”
Nick nodded. “My brother’s death is not my favorite topic of conversation.”
“Of course it isn’t. I heard enough about that last night.” Compassion made her voice thick. “It must have been awful for you.” He said nothing. “But what was it like before all that?” He frowned at her. “I never had an older brother, but I always wanted one.”
What was she doing? Why did she want to stir up his most painful memory? Didn’t she realize that he couldn’t think of Danny without thinking of that horrible night in the condemned building? He hadn’t—not from that day to this. His only memory of his brother was of those last few minutes in the filthy building with the sirens and flashing lights outside. Of his pasty skin and lifeless eyes. It wasn’t possible to remember anything else. Was it?
“Or a sister,” Toni was saying. “I had an imaginary sister when I was very small, you know. She walked me to school that first day. When I was afraid of the dark, she was always in my bedroom with me. Sometimes we’d talk all night long—or it seemed that way.”
Nick frowned. “He was the one who brought home all the jigsaw puzzles.” He hadn’t intended to say the words. They’d slipped out, from some unseen crack into his subconscious. “There was never a lot of money—puzzles were cheap. Some nights we’d sit up until two in the morning trying to finish a new one.” He felt something tugging the corners of his lips upward, suddenly recalling the two of them sitting on the bedroom floor trying to do a puzzle by flashlight and fighting off attacks of laughter that were sure to wake their mother.
“He was a year older,” he went on. “He had the greenest eyes, and Fiona’s red hair. If you’d seen the two of us together, you wouldn’t believe we were related.”
He shook his head slowly, in awe. But Toni didn’t give him time to think about what had just happened to him. “I got one of those circular jigsaws for my birthday one year,” she said. “Remember those? They were tough.”
Nick’s mind returned him to that bedroom floor, with a circular jigsaw in front of him depicting Superman in flight, an adoring Lois Lane in his arms. And Danny, wondering aloud why one of Superman’s hands wasn’t visible in the picture and whether or not it was inside Lois’s skirt. They’d laughed so loudly over that one, they were sure they’d be caught. And every time one boy managed to stop laughing, the other one would start again and in seconds they’d both be rolling on the floor, red faced and breathless.
He didn’t even realize he was telling her about it as he remembered, and a minute later Toni was laughing. Nick was laughing. He was laughing. And when he stopped, he looked at her and shook his head. “How did you do that?”
She smiled at him and parted her lips to speak, then stopped. The smile died and her gaze focused beyond him, through the doorway into the living room. “Nick, the light—the little red light on the panel—”
He looked over his shoulder. “Someone’s at the front gate.” He glanced again at the clock and could think of only one person who’d show up at this hour. “You’d better grab me some clothes.”
She nodded and hurried to the closet, taking down a starched white shirt and a pair of the pleated trousers. Nick swung his legs over the side of the bed and felt the instant return of the pain in his thigh. Toni knelt and slipped the pants over his feet and up his legs. She made him lean on her when he stood to pull them up. She held the shirt for him to slip his arms into its sleeves.
He thought of the monitor as he buttoned the shirt, but before he’d decided whether it would be safe to share that secret with her, the little Gypsy was in the living room, tugging an armchair toward the bookshelf. She clambered up and grabbed the remote, pointed it at the big screen and turned it on. Nick limped into the room to glance at the screen and then, incredulously, at Toni. “When did you—”
“Within the first twenty-four hours. It’s Taranto, isn’t it?”
Nick looked at the gray Mercedes at the gate, its wipers beating uselessly against the slashing rain, its headlights pale in the storm’s darkness. He nodded. He wanted nothing more right now than to sit Toni down and make her tell him how she knew about high-tech surveillance devices, but he had to deal with Lou first. “I’ll have to go down and talk to him.” He took the remote from her.
He started for the door, but her hand gripped his shoulder with surprising force. “You can’t go down all those stairs on that leg.”
“It’s either that or invite him up here.” He saw the worry in her dark eyes and knew it was genuine and for him. He reached down and touched her face, trailing the backs of his fingers from her delicate, high cheekbone to her impertinent chin. She’d given him a precious thing in the hours before this dawn: the knowledge that he could remember Danny as he’d been before—when they’d been brothers in every sense of the word. When they’d been happy. How could he tell her what that meant?
His fingertips in the hollow under her chin, he tilted her head up and lowered his own. His lips brushed over hers. She didn’t pull away. He kissed her again, pressing his lips fully to hers, parting them with the tip of his tongue. He still held only his fingertips to her chin. He wanted to sweep her into his arms—to pick up where they’d left off last night before he’d said the things he had.
She stepped away, avoiding his eyes. “Taranto,” she reminded him.
He nodded and went to the door. She didn’t even try to see the numbers he punched, but when he pulled the door open, she was at his side again, her hand on the knob. “Be careful on the stairs,” she warned. “Don’t put too much weight on the leg.”
He closed the door with her still muttering that he at least ought to have a cane of some sort. And she was right. The stairs were torture, but he made his way down both flights and let Lou Taranto in the front door a few seconds later.
Lou burst in, hugged Nick like a long-lost son and urged him down onto the leather sofa. He moved behind the bar as if he owned it, poured two shots and waved a fleshy hand toward the mousy man who’d scurried in his wake. “My personal physician, Nicky. Also my nephew. I put him through med school. He returns the favor when I need him.” He slammed a shot glass into Nick’s hand. “The kid, Sly, filled me in. Down it, Nicky. Then drop the pants. David! Get over here and take a look.”
Nick glanced at the guy who jumped when Lou bellowed his name. He was pale, thin, and the round wire rims perched on his nose made him look ten years older than he probably was. He had a facial tick that tugged one side of his mouth sporadically. His hair was rumpled, as if he’d been yanked out of bed for the occasion. He stepped up to Nick, black bag in hand. Nick swallowed the whiskey, stood up and lowered his trousers. You didn’t argue when Lou Taranto offered to do you a favor. He sat down again, ignoring the small man who began to unwrap the wound.
“The boys say you got them outta there against the odds last night.”
Nick affected a derisive snort. “A lot of good it did. We lost the shipment. And Rosco.”
Lou swallowed half his whiskey and shrugged. “Too bad about Rosc
o. But I prefer dead to jailed. He went out with honor—not like Vinnie, eh?” He laughed, a low rumble that seemed to gain momentum as it moved through him. “As for the shipment, what the hell? Easy come, easy go, right, Nicky?”
Nick frowned, an uneasy suspicion settling in the pit of his stomach. “You don’t care about the shipment?”
“It’s gone. Whining about it won’t bring it back. I can afford the loss.”
Nick studied Lou’s face and realized he couldn’t care less about the cocaine that had been confiscated. “How much blow did we lose?”
Lou pursed his lips. “What difference does it make?”
He was wondering about all Nick’s questions. Nick shrugged quickly. “Not a damn bit to me. How many cops did we take out, anyway?”
Lou drained his glass and slammed it on the polished surface. “Not a damn one.”
“Good.”
Lou’s head snapped around. Even David stopped what he was doing and looked up quickly. “What the hell do you mean, ‘good’?”
“Think about it, Lou. This way the cops think they’ve won one. They grabbed a major haul—didn’t they?” Lou frowned and didn’t answer, so Nick rushed on. “They took out one of Lou Taranto’s men to boot. They’ll be so busy patting themselves on the back, making speeches and taking interviews, they won’t have time to bother us for a while. On the other hand, if we’d shot a cop or two—”
“They’d be out for blood,” Lou finished. “You’re a sharp one, Nicky. I’m glad you’re not working for the enemy.”
For once Nick’s smile wasn’t forced. David was already rewrapping the leg and not doing half the job Toni had, Nick thought. He was glad when the man finished and rose.
“I don’t know who tended this for you,” he commented, “but they did a nice job. Slight infection trying to take hold. I’ll leave something for it.” He rummaged in his bag as Nick stood and righted his trousers.
“Who fixed you up last night, Nicky? You holdin’ out on me? Got a woman stashed around here?”
The question startled him. He hadn’t anticipated it and he should have. Any hesitation would arouse Lou’s suspicion, and his answer might well be checked out. “Joey—the new guy you sent along last night.”
“Joey?” Lou’s brows lifted, two silvery arches above a bulbous, slightly red nose.
“Hell of a man,” Nick told him. “Drove like a pro, dropped the kids where it was safe, lost the cops. Then he stuck around long enough to patch me up. I would’ve bled to death if he hadn’t.”
“Salducci, right?”
“That’s right.”
Lou puckered in thought. “I’ll see he gets a bonus, then.” He looked down at David, who was bent nearly double, squinting at the label of a small brown bottle. “You about done?”
David jumped as if someone had pinched him. “Uh, yes. Here.” He set the bottle on the coffee table. It tipped over. “Antibiotics. Directions are on the label.” He pulled a tube of ointment from his bag, set it beside the toppled plastic bottle, snapped the bag shut and hurried to the door. He couldn’t seem to get out of there fast enough.
Nick glanced at Lou. “You scared him.”
Lou shook his head. “So does his shadow. I wanted to talk to you alone.”
“About?”
“The girl. I know who she was.”
“The girl?” Nick feigned ignorance.
“The one that you popped. She’s trouble.”
“She’s dead, Lou. How’s she trouble?”
“You’re sure?”
Nick released a deliberate bark of laughter. “Damn, don’t you think I can tell a dead woman from a live one?”
Lou smiled at that. “Sure I do, Nicky. I just wish you’d have asked her name first.”
“Like I told you before, she saw the hit, she had to go. Who she was was irrelevant.”
“Yeah, well, maybe not so irrelevant as we thought. Viper thought he’d seen her somewhere before. When they flashed her picture on the local news, he realized where. She’d been hanging around the club the past few weeks.” Lou blew air through puckered lips and shook his head. “Big headline, you know. Missing, Antonia del Rio. Only they aren’t saying who she really is. Not yet anyway. I wondered—checked with my informant inside NYPD.”
Nick shook his head, not following at all. What would Toni have been doing at the Century?
Lou reached inside his voluminous coat and pulled out a hardcover book. On the front of the glossy black jacket was a lamppost with a shadowy figure leaning against it, feminine calves outlined beneath a trench coat, ending in stiletto heels. Huge red letters marched across the top: Poison Profits. Across the bottom was written in equally large letters, Toni Rio.
The truth slammed into Nick like a freight train. He came to his feet so fast it jarred his thigh. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Lou tossed the book down as if it were dirty. “No joke. The bitch wrote this last year. Raised so much hell with the drug trade I had to drop my Colombian supplier. Took me six months to set up a new partnership. She knew stuff about the business I didn’t even know. She was good.”
Nick didn’t need Lou to tell him about the elusive Toni Rio. The bureau had a file on the woman that read like War and Peace. Her works were fiction, but the stuff she used to sweeten those plots was real and the whole world knew it. The lady sleuth she’d created—Katrina Chekov—waltzed from one taboo subject to another, shattering myths along the way and always putting the bad guys on ice.
That was no more than every Fed knew. If he’d actually read that file of hers, he might have known before now that her full name was Antonia Veronica Rosa del Rio—and that she looked like a tiny Gypsy princess. Rumor had it she was working on a new fictionalized exposé, one that would blow the lid off the Taranto crime family. Lou had to know that.
Nick cleared his throat. “Dead is dead, Lou. Even if she was some kind of celeb—”
“Don’t you follow, Nicky? She was writing a book about me! She wasn’t in that alley by accident. And if she knew enough to be there, she knew way too much. Who the hell knows what she has down on paper, just waiting for some nosy damn Fed to find—”
“It’s fiction, for God’s sake!”
“The book, maybe. But what about the notes—the research, or whatever the hell she’d call it? Man, to know about the hit, she had to be into us deep.” Lou shook his head. “I’m sending some toughs to her place tonight—tellin’ ‘em to tear it apart. And if they don’t find everything she had on us there, I’ll have ‘em lean on her family. She must’a had a family, right?”
“Wait just a damn minute,” Nick barked. There was no more time to feel his way. He had to take the offensive here and now or lose the chance. “This was my mess. I should’ve wrung the truth out of her before I took her out. For once in his worthless life, Viper was right. I loused this up. I oughtta fix it.”
“Like how?” Lou was listening. Nick knew he’d better make it good, or the game was over.
“I can get in and out of her place without anyone knowing I was there. If there’s anything to find, I’ll find it. Hell, I’ll bring it to you. I’ll personally light the match for you, and we’ll watch it burn over drinks at the commission meeting. Be the highlight of the night.”
Lou nodded once, then pinned Nick to the spot with an intense glint in his eyes. “And if you don’t find anything? You got the stomach to rough up the family?”
Nick smiled slowly. “I got ways of getting information that Viper doesn’t even have nightmares about. Let me handle it, Lou. I’ll let you watch when things get nasty.”
Lou’s grin split his face. Nick knew the man’s perverse appetite for watching people suffer. He was a sadist once removed—too soft to inflict the pain himself.
“All right, Nicky. All right. But I gotta have results by the meeting. I can’t let it go beyond that. The others are nervous as hell. If you can’t get what I need, I’ll send in someone who can.”
Nick nodded.
“I’ll get it, Lou. It’ll be the finishing touch for my initiation, don’t you think?”
When Nick had left the room, taking the remote with him, Toni had followed, shouting motherly warnings as a distraction and holding the doorknob in her hand as he pulled it shut. She hadn’t let the handle turn, so the lock did not engage. As soon as Nick’s footsteps had faded, she opened the door and silently followed. She would not sit still while he went down there, wounded and alone, to face Lou Taranto and whoever was with him. She didn’t like the odds. Besides, she had to hear this conversation. She’d convinced herself again that Nick couldn’t possibly be in Taranto’s employ. The man he was when he was alone with her was not that kind. Granted, he was entirely different when he was with Taranto. She had to know, once and for all, which Nick was the real one.
She sat just out of sight and well within earshot at the top of the curving stairway. All the air left her lungs in a rush when she heard Nick make the offer he just had. Her throat tightened until she couldn’t swallow, and her eyes were scalding. He’d sounded ruthless, vicious.
Not the Nick I know, she told herself as she struggled to contain the panic she felt spreading like ice water through her veins. He wouldn’t hurt her—he promised. This is just an act.
Maybe, she thought. And maybe not. She wanted to trust Nick. More than anything, she wanted to believe her instinct that he wasn’t capable of such cruelty, that he truly was the gentle, caring man she’d come to know. She felt it so strongly she would have trusted him with her life.
But can I trust him with my mother’s? And if there’s even a one-in-a-million chance I’m wrong…
She shook herself. She couldn’t think objectively about Nick. Her attraction to him always got in the way. And her mother was obviously in jeopardy now, if not from Nick then from Taranto himself. She had to get out of there, get to her, warn her.
Nearly frantic as she fought with images of what the filthy Viper might do to her mother, Toni jumped when Nick stood to walk Lou to the front door. Then she saw her opportunity. She slipped down the stairs as soon as they were out of sight and ducked into a small room off the opposite end of the living room. She had only one thought in mind now. She had to protect her mother. She’d failed one parent; she wouldn’t repeat the mistake.
Reckless Angel Page 12
