Over the Line (3 page)

“Smells great,” I tell her.

She sweeps her wooden spoon over the pan as if it were a magic wand. “Pan-seared scallops with herb and garlic sauce.”

I move around the long island that separates the kitchen from the family room and pull open the silverware drawer. “You’re okay with all this domestic stuff? I mean . . .” I start setting the table. “Do you want to try and find a job or something? Because Rob, Grant, and I could pick up more of the slack with the shopping and cooking if you wanted to.”

She flicks me a wary glance. “The thought of Grant in my kitchen is a little scary.”

I smile inside, liking that she feels at home enough here to think of this as
her
kitchen. “He could probably manage spaghetti and sauce from a jar without burning anything down.”

She scrunches her face at the mention of sauce from a jar. Like Mama, all of her sauces have been from scratch, simmering all day and filling our bluff-top fisherman’s cottage with the smells of our childhood, a world away. “I’m a few months from graduating from Parsons. All I’ve ever wanted to do is design. That’s gone, so I wouldn’t even know what kind of job to look for.”

When Ulie was five, she got into Mama’s closet and cut up her best cocktail dress to make a wedding dress for her Barbie. In high school, she rarely shopped. She would just take my old clothes or stuff she already had, pull them apart at the seams, and turn them into something new and fabulous. She doesn’t follow trends, preferring her own style to anyone else’s. She became a name in fashion design when Miley Cyrus wore one of her designs to the Golden Globes in January. But her designs are like a signature—easily recognizable. Even if there was a vehicle for her to be able to design here, there’s no way she could do it under the radar.

I flick a wrist at her pan. “You could cook professionally.”

She lowers her eyes and starts flipping scallops. “Anyone who was paying for their food would expect me to know what I was doing. You guys are my guinea pigs. If the scallops are overdone, you won’t send them back and refuse to pay your bill.”

I go to the cupboard for plates. “Promise to tell me if you’re getting sick of it, okay? I’m fine with doing the cooking sometimes.”

“I’m good.” She says it and for the first time since we got here, I believe it. She moves around the island and hollers up the stairs, “Dinner’s on!”

***

After dinner, I go to the porch and dial Wes.

“Everything okay?” he asks by way of an answer.

“It’s great. I got a job.”

“That’s fantastic.” I hear his satisfaction and know he’s truly happy for me. “Where?”

“It’s not a big deal, just doing the books at the little diner here on the island, but it will keep me from going insane.”

“Well, then, congratulations.”

There’s a smile in his voice and I catch myself smiling along. “Thanks.”

There’s a pause then, “Lee, would you be . . .”

I hold my breath, waiting for him to finish the thought.

“I was hoping you might be available to have dinner with me one night this weekend.”

Warmth pools in my belly, but before my body goes too far down that road, I need clarification. “If you’re worried about Rob, I think he’s starting to settle in.”

“It’s not about Rob. I just . . . I enjoy your company. I thought we could celebrate your new job.”

“So, we’re talking a
date
?” My heart pounds so hard as I ask and I’m afraid he’ll hear it through the phone.

He blows out a nervous laugh. “I guess we are.”

“And the Marshal Service allows that?” I push.

“Far from it.”

“So, you’re going rogue?”

Another pause. “It’s no secret I find you incredibly attractive, Lee. I’d like the chance to get to know you better . . . outside of our professional relationship.”

There’s no denying the heavy, hot rush to my groin at the thought of where “getting to know you better” might lead. I’m the baby monkey, and he’s my something soft. I need to be touched before I die of loneliness. “I’m free Saturday.”

Oliver

I snuff out my smoke on the heel of my Ferragamo wingtip and watch the entrance of Spencer Security.

It’s taken me two months to get this far. Without the Savoca machine, it’s been like looking for a needle in a haystack. But no one can know where I am or what I’m doing.

When Rob Delgado’s doorman called in March to tell me he was in his Lakeshore apartment, I swear I felt my heart skip. That’s what obsession will do to you—mess with your vitals. I got my ass over there as fast as I could. My mistake was bringing the guys. I was finishing up some business across Chicago in West Town, so I loaded in the limo and told George to step on it. Al was with me. Al is
always
with me at my father’s mandate since he went inside and I started heading up the organization. Al is the kind of guy who shoots first and asks questions later, and my father knows me. He knows I won’t shoot at all. So he sticks his most ruthless thug on me to, in his words, save me from my sorry self.

I’ve never been anything but a huge disappointment to the great Victor Savoca.

Growing up, I bought into the dogma. When violence is all you know, it’s the benchmark by which you gauge your own behavior. I’m responsible for more than my share of atrocities. But my perspective changed abruptly when I started studying at Kellogg and discovered the rest of the world doesn’t deal in the currency of fear. They deal in money. Cold, hard cash.

That’s where the real power lies.

My father doesn’t understand that the world has changed. His tactics are antiquated at best. In our business, success stems on surrounding yourself with the right guys. Used to be, those guy were like Al: the ones with big guns and no conscience. Nowadays those guys are the ones with big
brains
and no conscience.

Crime is a business, pure and simple. I believe in striking at the true heart of a person—his livelihood. If we need to make someone bleed for revenge, or to get a point across, make him bleed money. Gloating over a ruined a man is far more satisfying than gloating over a dead body. Watching his empire burn to the ground—knowing who’s responsible but being helpless to stop it—is a lesson he’ll never forget. If he doesn’t end up wallowing himself into eating the muzzle of his .45, the next time around, he’ll fall in line.

My father doesn’t see it that way.

I went to Delgado’s that night in March with one goal in mind: finding his sister Lee. Of course, I couldn’t tell him that, so I gave him some song and dance about a truce. But the cocksucker’s paranoid. He didn’t buy it. He clocked me over the head with the butt of his Glock and left me in his apartment, unconscious and bleeding. Lucky for me, he seems only slightly less gun shy than I am.

I don’t think I was out long, and when I came to, I took the opportunity to go through his things. Thought something might clue me in to where he and Lee where. In a roundabout way, I was right.

In the wastebasket next to the desk in his office was a section from an old
Tribune
. It was open to an article about a charity gala at the governor’s mansion the previous fall. The picture was of Delgado and Hollywood’s current golden girl, Sophie King, along with the governor and his wife.

When Delgado broke Sophie’s heart last fall, I was there to pick up the pieces. There are times when business and pleasure are one and the same. Sophie was one of those times. I looked at that picture and decided it might be time for a reprise. I managed to “bump into her” on her filming location in London a few weeks later.

Hell of a coincidence, us both being in London on business.

I didn’t really believe she’d be able to tell me anything I didn’t already know, but I let it slip that Victor’s crew was closing in on the Delgados. Said it was a damn shame, because I needed Rob home and alive for a business venture. It took another few nights of wining and dining, but Sophie finally spilled that she’d seen him before she left for London. She told me he’d been working as a bodyguard, but she wouldn’t give me any details.

But that was enough.

Via Google, it wasn’t hard to discover Sophie’s last stop before filming started in London had been an overnight in Tampa. A quick call to her assistant on the pretense of needing a security recommendation in Florida got me the name of Spencer Security.

The problem is, even if this is where Sophie saw Delgado, I don’t know for certain this is who he was working for. And the fact that she saw him nearly three months ago means, even if this is the place, he might not be working here now.

Spencer Security doesn’t list the names of their security staff on their website. I thought about calling and asking for him, but I can’t risk tipping Delgado off. Chances are he’s not using his real name anyway.

So I have no choice but to wait.

I want Lee to know, no matter where she goes, I
will
find her.

At the thought of her betrayal, rage rises up and wraps like an iron cloak around my heart, threatening to crush any bit of humanity left there. I close my eyes and hold my breath until it passes.

And I see her as she was before everything that came after—that first day of business law class at Kellogg, nearly two years ago.

She was starting her first year. I was in my second. I was already seated near Angela Bagglio, who I had a passing interest in due to her loose family ties to the Delgado organization. Her brother was a wiseguy wannabe, little more than a glorified gofer within the Delgado machine. But I’d discovered sometimes it was the smallest details that led to the largest victories.

When Lee Delgado sashayed into the classroom, I’d like to say I was unaffected. I’d like to believe I was in complete control of everything that happened then and after.

But I’d be kidding myself.

Her bright hazel eyes surveyed the room, and when they caught for a second as they passed over me, I felt a shift in gravity itself. There were times reading nuances in expressions and actions was all that came between me and a slug in my head. That hitch in her perusal of the room left no doubt she was aware of who I was.

From that second on, I was helpless to take my eyes off her.

Her sandy brown waves cascaded over the shoulders of her cream-colored silk blouse to an open collar that hung loose, revealing a hint of cleavage. Her burgundy pencil skirt hugged the round curves of her hips and ass and ended above the knee, giving me a glimpse of a pair of toned thighs and calves. She had a killer body and knew it. I had to respect a woman who knew her strengths and wasn’t afraid to use them to her advantage.

She took a seat in my row, but on the opposite side of the classroom. I was barely coherent when the professor started lecturing. I couldn’t tell you the first thing he said.

As she listened, she lifted a hand and combed through her waves with her fingers, separating out a strand and twirling it around her finger. A rush shuddered from my tailbone up my spine to my brain, and even though I had no clue why, that was the moment I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stay away.

The rest, as they say, is history.

If she thinks she can hide from me, she’s got another thing coming.

Mob-controlled gambling has always been a huge racket, with better payouts because we don’t pay taxes like the legal betting sites. Back in the day, bookies were involved and actual cash changed hands. Now nearly everything is electronic. Bets are collected directly from our clients’ online accounts and payouts are distributed back into them. Payout is calculated after each event based on outcome versus the spread. It’s one of the parts of my job that I truly enjoy.

I’m always in the program, tweaking and modifying. But, suddenly, the week before Christmas, two days after Lee and I returned from our weekend in Aspen, I noticed the spread didn’t factor anymore and our payouts went through the roof. I thought maybe I’d screwed something up and tried to get into the program to check it. Ended up throwing my laptop against the wall when my pass code wouldn’t get me in.

It took me the next two days, and the fact that Lee wasn’t answering my texts or calls, to put together what had happened. Though I’m not sure exactly how she managed it, I know it had to have been her who hacked into my program and changed the payout ratios. I’ve looked at it from every angle and there are no other feasible possibilities. And it makes sense. I had an ulterior motive when we started hooking up, and I had no doubt she had one of her own. But as we got deeper into each other, things shifted and I lost focus. I let down my guard and gave her too much, and she took advantage of the opening.

I knew I wouldn’t be seeing her over the holidays because her siblings were all coming back to the family home in Wilmette, just outside of Chicago, for Christmas. It took me another day to decide I had no choice but to go there.

But when I got to the house, the place was swarming with cops and Feds, and yellow police tape was strung across the pillars at the front door. The reports the next day said it was believed the Delgados had fled to Europe after a “gangland-style attack” on their home.

The online gambling leg of our business has been bleeding cash at the rate of nearly a hundred grand a month since Lee fucked with the program. Every month it gets worse as word spreads of our big payouts. The guy who designed and encrypted the program is dead; a casualty of my father’s wrath when he made the mistake of telling Victor he’d corrected a system glitch that had cost us a couple hundred grand over the first year of implementation. I’ve done everything I can to break Lee’s pass code, but considering the illegal nature of the account, and the fact that I couldn’t enlist anyone who might report back to Victor what happened, my resources to resolve the issue have been severely limited.

So I put my time and energy into another avenue. Finding Lee.

Like everyone else in Chicago, I assumed that my father was responsible for the contract on Lee and her family. I talked to his guys. Tried to see if any of them had a bead on the Delgados’ location. I couldn’t find anyone who was even looking.

So, as much as I dreaded it, I went straight to the source.

I was dead to my father. He’d made that clear. But that day, for the first time since I’d crossed him, Victor looked at me with pride in his eyes when he asked, “You purchase that special delivery for our friends up in Wilmette?”

And that’s when I knew it wasn’t us. It’s also when I knew I was a dead man unless I could find a way out of this mess on my own.

So I looked harder for Lee, dug a little deeper into the Delgado family tree. I didn’t find her, but I managed to stumble on some other useful information during my search. And then, finally, the stroke of luck that led me here: Rob showing up in Chicago.

I’ve been able to keep everything under the rug since she left, but underground betting has always been the Savoca business’s bread and butter. If Victor or anyone else in the organization discovers the hemorrhage of cash that our gambling ring has become, it’s
my
head my loving pop will want on a spike.

I told the guys I had some personal business in Vegas; gave Al a direct order to park his ass at my apartment and not to move until I got back. I took a flight to Vegas, and from there, traveled to Florida on an ID I pinched off of a guy we rolled in Little Italy for not making book. He’s dead now, courtesy of Al, so he won’t be divulging my alter ego to anyone.

My family doesn’t know this particular alias. They’d have a hard time tracking me. Once I find Lee, things should move pretty fast. But I have to find her first.

So here I am.

For the last three days, I’ve sat in my silver Chevy Cruze, the most non-descript ride I could rent, trying to blend in to the scenery outside the Spencer Security warehouse. So far no sign of Delgado. I’m starting to catch some notice from the people coming and going. If Delgado doesn’t show up by tomorrow I’ll have to come up with a new plan. Can’t risk getting the cops called on my sorry ass for lurking out here.

I lower myself into the car and close the door, taking a swig of the swill they call coffee here. Even the Starbucks tastes bad. It has to be something with the water. I slouch down into my seat and loll my head back, preparing for another long night. It’s only a few minutes before I’m antsy and need another smoke. I pull one from the pack and roll it between my finger and thumb, hoping just the feel of it and the smell of the tobacco will settle my nerves.

I’d almost kicked the habit before Lee deceived me. Put me at a table and let me negotiate with the owners of banks, boards of directors of major corporations, US congressmen, I’m cool as a cucumber. But Lee has me so fucked that I’ve got no control. That’s someplace I’m not used to being.

So the smoking picked up again.

As I’m running it under my nose, a blue beater sedan rolls into the parking lot. It’s a car I haven’t seen before, so I sit up a little straighter and watch. The car stops in a space near the warehouse, but it’s a minute before the door opens. A broad, dark-haired guy steps out, his back to me and a phone plastered against his ear.

My pulse quickens and I hold my breath, waiting for him to turn so I can get a look at his face.

He reaches into the back and slings a garment bag over his shoulder, then moves toward the building. I’m right on the edge of bounding out of the car as he scans a keycard and yanks open the door. He’s the right build. The right hair color.

But I can’t risk showing myself unless I
know
.

He steps into the building without turning and when the door closes behind him, I spew an expletive with the trapped breath.

The next fifteen minutes are agonizing, waiting for something to happen. Finally, a steel door on the side of the building rolls up and a limo pulls out. I slump down and strain for a view of the passengers as it cruises past.

The windows are tinted. I can’t see a goddamn thing.

I pound my fist into the dash and bark another curse. That was probably my man, but I’ve got to stay with the blue Chevy. That’s my best bet.

The sun sets. The blue car doesn’t move. I finish the coffee, watch a few other people come and go.