Reckless (18 page)

“He was a year older, but way smaller,” 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.
“That’s like my sister Joey and me. We look so different.”

“No, not around the eyes,” he said, looking
at her pretty eyes, getting kind of lost in the light that was
waiting there.

“I got one of those circular jigsaws for my
birthday one year,” she said. “Remember those? They were really
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
of them 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 that way too. “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 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, she was running into the living room, moving
a kitchen chair to the bookshelf, and climbing up onto it to grab
the remote. She 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 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. “Jake and 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. 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 dropped his pants. 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 saved their asses 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 Rosco. 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 his face and realized Fat Lou
couldn't care less about the heroin that had been confiscated. “How
much 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 without losing a single
man—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. “The new
guy—what’s his name?”

“Carl?” Lou's brows lifted, two silvery
arches above a bulbous, slightly red nose.

“That’s it. 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.”

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.”

“You still on that, Lou? She's dead. 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. Bitch wrote this last year. Raised so much hell I lost my
blow 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 small Mayan 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 guys 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.
In fact, I got a line on a half sister up Syracuse way.”

“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 sister?”

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
other bosses 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?”