Packing Heat(14)
Finally, I sat down and he just stared at me.
“You’re a journalist,” he said finally.
“Freelance.”
“For who?”
“The Chicago Daily.”
“Shit paper.”
“Yeah. Pays the bills.”
“What were you doing in that bar that night?”
“Research,” I admitted.
“For what kind of story?”
“About the mob.”
He nodded, his face cool and impassive. I couldn’t read him one bit.
“What do you want to know about the mob, Jessica?” He paused and smiled. “Sorry. I mean Cassidy.”
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
“Don’t lie to me. You wanted to find something out. Go ahead, ask me.”
“What do you know about human trafficking?” I blurted out.
His face broke for just an instant. He looked almost pained, like I had said the exact wrong thing in that moment. He quickly gathered himself together, though, and that moment passed.
He shook his head. “I don’t know much.”
“But your organization does it.”
“We do.”
“Why? Isn’t it wrong, even for you?”
“Yes,” he agreed, “it is. There’s a split in the mob. We’re not all interested in trafficking.”
“So why do it?”
“Because it brings money. And we’re not about to tear ourselves apart from the inside over it.”
“Why are you here?” I asked him.
He took a drink and sighed. For a second, I had the totally irrational desire to stand up and walk around the table. I wanted to sit in his lap and forget all of this, go back to being Jessica, go back to that moment in the alley. It had been a perfect moment, and I’d been thinking about it so much since then. We nearly got it back once, but now it looked like it was totally gone.
“Do you know a woman named Dasha?”
My heart nearly stopped.
I leaned back in my chair and then drank my whisky down. It turned my throat and nearly turned my stomach, but I took a deep breath and steadied myself.
“I do,” I said.
“Fuck.” He stared at me. “Dasha is currently in a warehouse on the edge of town, getting tortured for everything she knows. So far, she gave up your name.”
“Why?” I asked. “What?”
“We wanted to know how she knew about that whorehouse. She said a journalist named Cassidy told her. That’s you.”
I felt like my whole world was spiraling down around me.
I was in way over my head. I always had been, but now I knew it. Sitting across from this gangster, I realized that I didn’t really know him. This whole time he was just a stranger and all I’d wanted was to taste him. That was all it was between us.
But now Dasha was captured and she was getting tortured. Dasha, that strong woman I barely knew, the woman I wanted to be so badly.
Caught and tortured.
“How?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It wasn’t my group that caught her. But right now, Cassidy, you should be pretty fucking worried.”
“I’m just a journalist,” I blurted out. “I’m just chasing a story.”
“You’re sniffing around where you don’t belong.”
“These are real people, Rafa. I’m trying to do some good.”
“And I’m trying to do the same thing.” He sighed, shaking his head. “How did you know about that whorehouse?”
“I’ve been interviewing people. I just followed some leads until I found it. I didn’t know the mob owned it.”
“Well, we do. Or at least we did before the Spiders came and stole from us.”
“That wasn’t my intention.”
“Whatever you intended, Cassidy, you’re in the middle of this now.”
“What’s going to happen to her?”
He shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”
Fear lanced through my body. If a woman like Dasha could get caught and tortured, then what was stopping them from taking me? I was way in over my head, and I had nobody to protect me. I wasn’t even a full-time employee at the paper; I just took whatever assignments they had lying around. I was working on this human trafficking story on my own.
Nobody could help me.
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“That’s a better question.” He topped off his drink and sipped it. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to you.”
“Rafa, I didn’t have anything to do with this.”
“But you did. You got involved in this. And now it’s my job to take care of you.”
I felt a catch in my throat. “Take care of me?”