“Fill me in,” I say as I throw my BMW into drive and head for Pops’ house.
“I can’t get into it over the phone. Can you come by the place?” He means the factory on 8th street that our cleanup crew uses to prepare bodies for disposal. Sometimes we use it for torture or planned hits, too.
“Yeah.”
I see Jimmy’s car outside the factory when I pull up a few minutes later. There’s another car, too, a silver Mercedes. It gives me a bad feeling, so I pull my piece from the glove compartment and grab a few extra clips. I rack the chamber with a heavy click and tuck the gun into the waistband of my pants before walking inside.
I open the door. The huge ground floor of the factory is poorly lit, but Jimmy is sitting, bloody and tied to a chair in a shaft of dusty sunlight. As soon as he sees me, he widens his eyes and nods his head to my right. I take a reflexive step back just as a gunshot blasts my eardrums. Without waiting, I duck my head and charge the gunman. He grunts as I smash into him, firing his gun blindly a few more times before we fall to the ground in a chaotic heap. I pin him with my knees and a forearm to the neck. With my free hand, I pull my gun from my waistband and put two in his forehead. More gunshots pelt the wall beside me.
“Fuck!” I shout, grabbing the man’s body and flipping it to cover me like a shield. I fire from behind him toward the muzzle flashes lighting the darkness. I feel the bullets tear into the corpse as I fire back. I down both of them and duck behind the corpse again.
“How many?” I shout to Jimmy.
“That was it,” he says. “We’re clear, boss. Fuck.”
I stand, checking myself to be sure I didn’t catch any lead. Jesus. My heart is beating out of my chest. I don’t bother asking Jimmy what happened, it’s clear enough. Someone got to him and used him to lure me in. My mind immediately moves past that and goes to Aubriella. I don’t think they would even know about her friend because I’ve been careful to keep them apart since she’s met me, but if they manage to lure her out…I realize with a sinking dread that I never gave her a phone. I’ll have to get her friends’ number and try to get through that way to warn her.
“Do you still have your phone?” I ask.
Jimmy shakes his head. “Busted. This is going to sound crazy, but one of ours is working with them. It has to be. We had three soldiers watching the captured capos and our guys all wound up dead, shot from close range, like it was someone they trusted. The capos are loose, too.”
I clench my fists. “Who have you talked to since?”
“Just your Pops. He went with a crew of our top capos and a few of the Jersey guys who were in town. They’re hiding out at the restaurant. Place is probably safer than the fuckin’ Pentagon right now.”
“What about the women?”
“Jack was taking them to his place.”
“Have you heard from Frankie?” I ask, not sure exactly why I wanted to know about him specifically, but there’s an unease in my chest that makes me ask all the same.
Jimmy shakes his head, looking thoughtful for a second, but neither of us have time to sit around and follow hunches. Aubriella is out there, alone. The adrenaline flooding my system is practically begging me to go hunt down every last Anastasio and fill them with lead. I can’t though. Not while she’s still out there. I need to find her and make sure she’s safe before anything else.
“You good to roll?” I ask.
Jimmy nods. He’s holding his ribs, but he looks like he could still squeeze the trigger, so I snag a gun from one of the nearby bodies and toss it to him. He pockets it and limps behind me as we move to my car.
26
Aubriella
Aria holds her cup of coffee like it’s a lifeline. “He’s a mobster. How does a relationship like that end? I mean, what? Is he going to marry you?”
I roll my eyes. She has been like this for nearly thirty minutes, barely letting me get a word in. At first, her protectiveness was sweet, but it’s getting exhausting quickly. I know no one is going to really understand. Hell, I wouldn’t understand. I thought I wanted her to talk me out of all of this, like a few quick words of reason would snap me out of his spell. She’s only reminding me how badly I want out of this world of rules. Thinking about begging for my job back and going back to my life of counting pennies doesn’t even feel like an option anymore.
I cross my arms. I’m leaning by her kitchen table while she paces in the kitchen. “Maybe he does. I don’t know.”
“You barely know him!” she half-shouts.
I look down. “Yeah. But he feels more real than any guy I’ve ever known.”