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“You’re never going to lose me.”
“I have to tell you something.” Cash sighed. She waited. “I… I need you with me. Here with me. Come home to me.”
She nodded, sleep and contentment dragging her. “I will.”
In the room adjoining hers, the door opened and closed, jolting her back to real life. The job. David the Butler. “Cash?”
“Yeah, babe.”
“Got a second for work?”
“Guess so.”
“Get anything good off the listening devices on the butler?”
“I think so. You want to know now or when we debrief tomorrow after you return?”
“Now is fine. He just slammed a door, and I’m awake again.”
“All right.” Cash cleared his throat, shuffling what sounded like his covers. “Two things of interest. First, he’s conversed with someone named Nero. He calls himself Mars.”
Her stomach bottomed out, shooting her straight up in her lonely, rumpled bed. “What? What’d they say?”
“You know Nero?”
“What’d they say?”
“Package logistics. Nothing I can make heads or tails of, though I haven’t tried that hard yet. Why? Who’s Nero?”
“Antilla Smooth was obsessed with Roman history. One of the reasons why my cover worked so well… he could—”
“Get to the point, Nic.”
“Nero and Mars. Roman gods of war. Mars may have been subservient to Nero, and if you translated some texts, even his wife. But mostly—”
“Smooth’s dead. I blew his brains out. Clean shot.”
Nic nodded. “I saw him, but the hierarchy didn’t fall apart completely. Maybe they picked up where Antilla left off.”
Cash whistled. “This is what we need. Tip of the iceberg, this will prove the butler is a double.”
“You’re right. So this godforsaken trip is worth it.” She paused, letting it sink in and squelching the urge to confront David in the next room. “What’s the other interesting item?”
“He’s logged phone time with someone named Gianori. He’s connected to Smooth somehow, and I haven’t looked him up yet, but—”
Nicola reached to the nightstand and palmed her chromed out .38 Special. “They’re not connected.”
“Sure sounded like it.”
“That’s wrong. They’re not.”
“How would you know that?”
She was a Gianori encyclopedia, that’s how. “Salvatore Gianori. Mafioso boss for the Gianori clan. His sons, Basilio, Durante, and Emilio, are all named Italian versions of ‘I’m king motherfucker.’ They deal in gun smuggling, bid rigging, and loan sharking. But Salvatore, his specialty is violence.”
Her insides shook, recalling everything she knew about the mobsters who were never nailed for anything, ever.
“Nic, why do you know that?” Concern edged his voice. Not panic, which he surely heard in hers, but ice cold concern. “Tell me you just know your mobster history, that this David asshole doesn’t know about…”