If you're still here, welcome. Novel-length stories in installments take patience, I know.
Where we left off: Harry had Sydney stashed at the home of a family friend to keep her safe while he went to meet Nikki, another escort at Regan's party. He hoped to get a line on Larry Beck, one of the men, but really all he got was laid. Charlie Everett, another suspect, has just been murdered. Harry suspects it was on Regan's orders when Everett attempted to ransom some information to Regan.
—C
CHAPTER 4
"I figured," Sydney repeated her words of the previous evening.
The two of us were sitting at Uncle Jimmy's kitchen table. I'd spent almost an hour making sure I wasn't followed. I didn't use my own car in case someone tailed me. I picked up a light-silver Malibu at the rental place and let it merge in with every other cookie-cutter silver sedan on the road. I spent the time along side streets, through the Holland Tunnel, then more of the same as I worked my way south. Finally, a totally illegal U-ey on Bayview Avenue around a Jersey barrier convinced me I was clean, and I headed across the Bayonne Bridge onto Staten Island.
Jimmy announced he was going out for breakfast when I showed up. It wasn't that he didn't want to see me. It was that he didn't want to hear much beyond the answer to his quiet question.
"Are you sure?"
"Ninety-nine percent," I replied. It didn't make me happy to tell him. His sad nod said it all. Uncle Jimmy didn't like bad guys. He didn't have a huge beef with the low-level kind, people just trying to get by in a city that could be very cold. If the law took a dim view of your way of doing that, if you were some kid boosting a car for a few bucks, he'd run you in. But there was no animosity in it.
The ones who ruined lives? Those he had a hard-on for. The drug kingpins for whom a few million wasn't enough so they'd pump that poison to kids, the wife-beaters, the pimps who scoured the bus terminal for new blood. "Fuck the fuckers," he'd say.
But dirty cops were a quandary. There was that thin blue line. Jimmy believed in it. "Us against the shit tide rolling out of the city's sewers" meant that comrades were comrades, and peccadillos, as he saw them, were a gray area best ignored. When I'd had my difficulties, his advice was "Don't see nuthin' long as everybody's got everybody's back and no one's gettin' hurt, Harry."
A cop who was somebody's private hit squad, though? No, that was over the line... way over it, and that made them part of the sewage. But just because he saw it that way didn't mean it didn't cause him serious agita to go against a fellow officer.
"I'll do what you need me to do," he said as he pulled on his jacket. "You know that. Fuck the fuckers." But his voice lacked its usual heat in saying it. It was almost sad as he went on. "But I don't wanna know precincts or names unless I need to know, or how far the shit has spread. Leave me my illusions they're all solid blue like your dad was, Harry."
He looked to see if that upset me. It didn't. I'd known the man all my life. I trusted him. I knew where his moral compass pointed and a few degrees off north was okay by me.
"I promise she's safe here from anyone, no matter how far it goes," he went on. He was telling me he'd pull the trigger no matter who was trying to hurt her. "But beyond that situation, the cleanup..." He looked away. "I'd take it as a personal favor if there's any way I can stay out of it. You and me, we're different people."
We were. It's why I ended up carrying a license instead of a badge, because I couldn't look the other way as he suggested. Neither of our compasses pointed true north, but they didn't point exactly the same way.
"We're good, Uncle Jimmy," I assured him, "and I appreciate what you do."
Now, I sat facing Sydney across the breakfast table. She'd seized on the shopping bag of clothes with glee and emerged shortly in jeans and a sweater. The tight taper of the jeans emphasize the length of her legs, and the cashmere draped softly across her serious curves. Like I said, she'd have looked good in a burlap sack, but I had to admit this was way better than good.
I'd stared at her, the background part of my brain thinking thoughts that weren't going to happen in Jimmy's house, the foreground trying to decide exactly how to tell her the body of a hit man was in her apartment.
"I figured," she said after a moment. "Stop panicking about how to tell me."
What? I'm trying not to panic
you
. Oh.
Then I wondered about her figuring.
"Do I really come across as the type to put the move on every pretty woman I meet?" There may have been a little heat in my voice. "Sasha's got it ten times over Nikki. She had guys' tongues hanging out. I did nothing even when it was offered. And for the record, you were the one who started—"
She was laughing and shaking her head halfway through that outburst. "No! I'm not saying that. I know you don't. And yes, I made the first move on you. You're not that type of guy, but she's that type of woman."
I settled back in the chair in confusion.
"Let me guess," she said, "big vulnerable eyes, soft voice, hesitant, scared?"
She saw in my reaction that she was right.
"That's the kind of guy you are, Harry. A knight who'll do anything for the damsel if she's in distress. A femme fatale? You're proof against them. That's why someone like Sasha doesn't stand a chance with you even though ninety percent of the men in this city would cut off their left arm... or left something... to have a shot with her. She's even reeled in Jordan, and he's had more gorgeous women than you can shake a stick at. It doesn't matter his twist is he wants to break her; he's still hooked by that slinky allure." I'd shared my suspicions about where that relationship was going when I'd told her about my visit to his house. She'd agreed.
"And Nikki's that type of girl. Not damsel in distress... the kind of girl to put the move on every pretty man she meets." She was grinning as she bent my words back at me.
"You're wrong. She's really scared, and she should be."
She sobered a little. "Yeah, she should be. Like I am. It's not
every
pretty man, just those she wants something from. Some, like Larry, it's the lifestyle. With a guy like you, it's something else. From you she wants protection. So she put the moves on you. I knew she would. It's what she does, ties men to her, and she's good enough at it that I was pretty sure she'd succeed. I'm not—"
"No, you're wrong." I was disgruntled at the implication I'd been maneuvered. "She's like... like a deer hiding from wolves."
