“Hello. Rafe.”
My brother rolls his eyes. I don’t know why he doesn’t care for his given name, but he’s always insisted that people call him Rocco, ever since he was a kid.
Of course, Mom refuses to call him anything but Rafe. She named him after one of her favorite characters in a romance novel.
Maybe that’s why he doesn’t like it.
“I have something,” Shane says as he hurries through the door. “And let me just say, it wasn’t easy to get.”
“What is it?” I ask as he sits at the desk and opens his laptop, then starts tapping the keys.
“The waiter from the wedding.” Shane’s brow furrows as he searches the screen. “No one knew who he was. I asked the catering company. They had no record of him. I had to bust into the security camera logs at the resort. And let me just tell you, their security is buttoned down tight. Took me several days to crack the code.
“But once I did, I was able to find some footage of our man. Here.” He points to the screen. “See him? He’s floating through the crowd a bit.”
“It’s grainy and in black and white,” I say, squinting to see better.
“Yeah, their security is the bomb, but the video quality sucks. I cleaned it up a bit.”
He points to the bigger monitor on the desk, and Rocco, Nadia, and I shift our attention there.
“Carmine and Nadia sneak off,” Shane says with a cheeky smile. “You look a little intense there, brother.”
I was. I wanted to fuck Nadia like I’d never wanted anything else in my whole damn life. And if memory serves, it was some pretty damn good sex.
Nadia glances up at me with a smirk.
“Okay. Here.” Shane points to the screen. “See, he’s setting the glass for Pop on the table.”
“And looking around while he does it,” Nadia adds. “That’s definitely shady.”
“None of us noticed,” Rocco says. “We were all too busy partying.”
“Our guards were down because it was supposed to be neutral territory,” I say, thinking it over. “Not just in Denver, but at the wedding. We all had our guards down.”
“Before Pop can take a sip, Armando takes the glass by accident. He’s laughing with someone and just picks it up and drinks.”
I watch as Armando does just that. Pop looks over and scowls for a second, then shrugs and laughs, signaling for a waiter to order a fresh drink.
“I’m going to speed this up a bit because it takes a couple of minutes for the poison to kick in.” Shane hits a button, and the video runs faster. Then he slows it down, and Armando’s face changes. He reaches for his throat, his eyes bulge, and the next thing we see, he’s flailing about and ends up in the middle of the dance floor, seizing.
“That’s enough,” I say, but Shane shakes his head.
“Watch here.” He points again. “There’s our man. He takes a picture of the scene and then slips back into the crowd. And he doesn’t come back. He ducks out.”
“You said you found out who he is?” I ask, seeing red.
“Sean Brown,” Shane says. “At least, that’s the name he’s gone by for a while. I found him doing a search for his image. He’s also gone by Clark Brown and Rudy Brown.”
“Why all the names?” Nadia wants to know.
“He’s been in and out of jail,” Shane says. “I assume he changes his name so he can get jobs. Have a clean record.”
“He’s anything but clean. Fuck, he’s a contract killer.”
“Looks like it,” Shane agrees. “I have an address.”
“What are we doing sitting here, then?” Rocco pulls his nine-millimeter out of his shoulder holster and checks the magazine. I do the same, and I notice Nadia pulling her small piece from her Hermes bag, checking it, as well.
I laugh.
“What?” she says.
“You carry a concealed in an eleven-thousand-dollar handbag?”
She grins. “Doesn’t everyone?”
“We don’t kill him.” My voice is firm with the order. “We question him.”
“Maybe break his arm,” Rocco says with a shrug as we climb the steps to the upstairs apartment. Sean—or whatever his name is—lives on the second floor of a rundown building in a shitty part of town.
I raise my fist to knock on the door, but it’s ajar.
“Not a good sign,” Shane murmurs as he pulls his weapon. We all follow suit, and I nudge the door open with my toe. We soundlessly hurry inside.
But we don’t have to go far.
“Fucking hell,” I mutter and stare up at the man who used to be Sean as he swings from a noose tied to a beam in the ceiling.
“Shit.” Nadia circles around him. “He’s been up there a while.”
His face is purple, eyes bulged, and the rope cut the hell out of his neck. The smell of decay is overwhelming.
“There’s a note,” Rocco says and begins to read aloud.
I can’t live with what I did. I’ve done some fucked-up things but killing ain’t one of them.
“That’s it,” Rocco says.
“Well, damn.” I rub my hand over my face and listen as Shane murmurs into his phone. He’s calling in a cleanup crew.
The cops won’t find Sean.
He won’t be found at all.
And we’re at another dead end, literally. Back to square one. Which royally pisses me off.
“Look for a phone,” I say, already headed back to the one and only bedroom in the flop. His phone is on a charger by the bed, so I pocket it. Shane can dig into it when we get back to the office.
I rummage through drawers but don’t find anything else when Nadia pokes her head in.
“You’ll want to see this.”
I follow her to the bathroom and snarl. “Jesus fucking Christ, this is disgusting.”
“Yeah, our boy didn’t know what a toilet brush is. But that’s not what I wanted to show you.” She opens the medicine cabinet. “Look at these.”
Bags and bags of little blue pills.
“I’ll give you two guesses what these are,” she says.
“Given that none of us are pharmacists, it could be anything. Maybe Sean had an Aleve habit.”
Nadia rolls her eyes. “Right. It’s an anti-inflammatory. That’s why he had like five thousand of them in this cabinet.”
“We’ll take them,” Shane says. “Crew’s on the way. Let’s bail.”
We take the bags of pills with us, and I skirt by the body still hanging in the living room.
“He looks like a baby.”
“Twenty-two,” Shane confirms. “Still wet behind the ears.”
“Seasoned enough to kill,” I remind him. “I’d hardly call him innocent.”
Chapter 9
~Nadia~
I’m fucking tired.
It’s late. Carmine and I left New York before the sun came up this morning, and we’ve been working hard all day.
Carmine’s still at the office with his brothers, but I bailed. I need to sleep. I have to get my mind off drugs and death for a few hours.