I calm my breathing but my breath hitches when something shuffles by the dumpster.
I glance around and see nothing, but…I get that prickling sensation again. Just like the other day. I’m at the club though.
The parking lot is packed with cars but there are no people where I am. everyone is inside the club having a good time. I still look around though to check.
Seeing nothing I keep walking straight ahead. I look around again when the chilling sensation burns the ends of my spine and that’s when I see a hooded figure standing far away in the distance, right by the dumpster.
My heart races, galloping. I’m sure that’s the same man I saw the other day.
Fuck… he’s just standing there.
I start to run, and I don’t stop until I get in my car. I’m far away from him and he didn’t come after me. He was just watching. Just watching me.
What the hell is this?
The other day was bad, but this makes it worse.
He was watching me for a reason, why?
Chapter Fifteen
Christian
I’m exhausted as fuck.
As I stare back at the computer screen everything jumbles together in a swirl.
Salvatore and I have been looking through files for hours. So far, we haven’t seen anything that jumps out at us. We set things up at my place so we could research properly.
Gibbs is out working with some people from his team. He’s investigating the police side of things because he has more resources to do so, while we’ve been trying to see what we can garner from the files in regard to where Falcone might be keeping the guns.
There’s a lot of information on stolen shit. We’ve looked through a lot over the last six days and there’s still more to go through. I thought we would have had something by now.
The clock’s ticking and my patience is wearing out. Exhaustion from working so hard over the last few days is coming for me and it’s getting to the point where I’m finding it difficult to concentrate.
Salvatore leans back in his chair and sighs with frustration. I glance at him and he looks over at me.
“Sometimes I miss the days when I could just ass around,” he states. “When I had Vince and Frankie to watch my back, and I could spend my days watching my girls back instead.”
“You mean her ass, not her back.” I point out and he throws a crumpled piece of paper at me.
“You fucker, you know that’s what I mean.”
I actually laugh and the sound sounds foreign. I look at him though and think about him and Mimi.
It was always clear to me even before they liked each other that they were going to find some way to be together. I don’t know why I thought that, I just did. They’ve both been with other people before realizing they were it for each other, but that never changed my mind. Not even a little.
When they did get together, I wasn’t surprised. Now they have two kids. All the guys have their dolls and kids.
Vincent has one and a baby on the way, Gabe has two, Nick has two. I really am the last bachelor left.
“What?” Salvatore asks.
“Nothing, just thinking.”
“About what? You do realize it’s thinking that nearly got you killed last week.” He smirks. “Or maybe it was not thinking. You gotta sort that out Christian.” He chuckles.
“I was thinking about how we’ve all moved on. You have. You might long for the days when you used to ass around, but I know you don’t actually mean that. You wouldn’t trade what you have now with Mimi.”
“No, I definitely wouldn’t. Always my Babygirl.” He leans forward. “You… you’re sweet on that girl at the club.”
I gaze on at him completely thrown off kilter. The comment shouldn’t surprise me though. It was Mimi I spoke to about stopping Lilly’s bookings, so of course she would tell Salvatore.
He raises his brows daring me for me to say otherwise.
“Salvatore, I don’t know what to say about that,” I answer, and he gives me a lopsided grin.
I’m very aware that Lilly is going to be wondering what happened to her bookings and I will make good on my promise to compensate her. What I’m still pussyfooting around is what I’m going to do about her in regard to me.
“Christian, if you like her just take her. That’s how we roll,” Salvatore says and looks at me with narrowed slits.
That is how we roll, but that mostly works for the women we want to fuck and forget. At least that’s me and how I thought I would continue on until my dick fell off.
“I don’t know if I can do that with her. In fact, I think I shouldn’t, except I want her.”
He tilts his head to the side and looks me over. “What’s going on with you? Questioning whether or not you should be with a woman. There’s um…only one time when I’ve seen you this way and it was so long ago it’s classed as history.”
He’ll remember Amelia. Everyone does even if they don’t talk about it. they remember what happened and they don’t talk because it crushed me to no end, and it took me a long time to come back from that.
I raise my palms and shrug. “Don’t know, maybe this shit with Falcone has my mind all over the place.”
He doesn’t look like he’s buying that excuse. “You know sometimes you have to take risks. They’re not always bad even if they remind you of previous risks that didn’t work out.”
“Yeah?”
He nods. “Yeah.” He sits forward and taps on the keyboard. “Sometimes you have to try and—”
He stops talking abruptly and stares at the screen. When he doesn’t say anything more I realize he’s found something.
“What is it?” I ask getting up to see what he’s looking at.
“More shit,” he answers.
I look and I see that it is more shit.
It’s a list. A schedule of the shipments we had booked with our clients and what Falcone was planning to steal. That motherfucking bastard.
Jonny’s name is next to each of the shipment jobs with the payment he’d be getting for his work. Next to his name are the names of the three guys I killed for delivering the items.
The fucking list goes back to two weeks after Peter’s death, showing they definitely took advantage of the situation. That was the first robbery and we didn’t even know about it. That was a shipment of money that was going to Denmark. I dealt with that contract for Manuel Alfonse, another long-standing client. It says here they took fifty g’s from the stash. The next hit was Angelo’s guns.
“Look at that,” I point and ball my fists. “Next Friday was going to be another robbery. Fucking Jonny was in on it. he wasn’t just a look out. He was in on it.”
Now I wish I’d definitely put the bullet in his head. The camera’s picked up masked men taking him away in a black sedan with no plates. Of course, I know now for sure he’s fish food.
I’m pissed at the advantage they took of the situation and pissed at myself too because it really was my fault. Shit like this would never have happened when Peter was alive, and I put my trust in Jonny not thinking for one second that he’d screw with me.
It looks to me like they thought Jonny would be in charge and take over. there are listings right up to next year for the small arms shipments we have planned with Angelo and some of our other clients. These fuckers planned to make a fortune from us.