Chapter 24
“Iwish you had stayed home. I don’t like the idea of you tagging along for this.” Joey kept his voice low as they stood there waiting inside the small cafe.
Layne grinned and shook her head. “Since when do I ever listen to what you want?”
“Well,” his hand slid up along her spine and began to possessively take hold of the back of her neck.
After her cheeks began to feel warm with a slight flush, she interrupted his response. “Don’t answer that.”
Joey smirked at her, leaving his hand gently massaging the tiny muscles on the back of her neck a few times before dropping his hand back down to his side.
The young barista at the Every Day I’m Grindin’ coffee shop in Greenwich Village looked like she barely was in her twenties. She looked at Joey with wide eyes that damn near had hearts popping out of them. “Can I get you anything else?” She extended her arm out to hand him the coffee he ordered.
Layne reached over and gently took the coffee from the girl’s hand. “He’s fine.” Not bothering to toss a smile at the girl. Helping herself to the piping hot beverage she walked with Joey out of the cafe.
Joey chuckled as he looked over at Layne. “You weren’t getting jealous, were you?”
Layne scoffed at how ridiculous that sounded. “Of a girl that looked like she should be the spokesperson for Squeaky Clean magazine? Please.” She walked with him toward their destination, an unassuming brownstone at the end of the block that had a “FOR RENT” sign in the front window with an invalid telephone number listed on it.
She caught the amusement in Joey’s face when he took her elbow with a gentle hand and paused her in her path. He leaned in and gave her the type of kiss that was slow but did powerful things low inside of her body. When he pulled back, she had almost forgotten all about the googly-eyed barista.
He smiled at her. “You’re cute when you’re jealous and don’t want me to know it.”
She wrinkled up her nose at him. “You’re a pain in my ass.”
His hand lightly patted said ass. “Maybe later if you ask me nicely for it.”
She shot him a look that was an attempt to be irritated with him, but he made it difficult when he gave her a wink that promised dirty things. Layne finished off the coffee before dropping it into an empty trash can next to the front steps of the house in front of them.
Joey jogged up the front steps of the rental and knocked on the door. Layne followed, letting him take the lead since these were his people, not hers. A raspy and cranky male voice came over the intercom to the left of the door. “What do you want?”
Joey grinned. “Open up, jackass.” He placed his hand on the doorknob waiting for access inside.
With suspicion in his voice, the unknown guy’s voice replied. “Who’s the broad?”
Layne straightened and stepped forward to give the man an earful, but Joey put a hand out to get her to back down. “She’s good. Stop fuckin’ around and let us in.”
There was a grunt on the other end of the line before the door audibly unlocked and Joey opened the door and went in ahead of her.
When she got inside, she closed the door behind her and took a look around. It appeared to be a vacant home that hadn’t yet been rented out. There was no furniture, no personal touches, and the wooden floors could use a good cleaning from the dust and dirt gradually collecting on them.
Joey waved for her to keep up as he went to the door that led down into the basement. Once they descended a level underneath the house, the air became musty from lack of air circulation and the lights remained dim. There was only the glow of an excessive number of computer monitors displaying lines of code on the wall above an oversized desk that sat two men with several keyboards in front of them.
The man to the right had scraggly grey hair that hung down to his shoulders. He had to be approaching sixty if he wasn’t already there. When he turned, he huffed at the sight of Layne and then looked over at Joey. “Do you have it?”
Joey reached deep into his pocket, pulled out the thumb drive, and tossed it over to the gruff old man who caught it in his hand and began to get to work extracting the data from it.
The man to the left had short and spiky brown hair and a set of wire-framed glasses over his eyes. He was considerably younger looking; Layne would have been surprised if he was even of legal drinking age.
When he turned around and saw Layne, he made a sound akin to a schoolboy giggle. His pale face turned a dark shade of red as he fumbled to get out of his chair. “Oh, um, hi. I’m Brandon, but my codename is Cowboy.” The poor guy was barely able to avoid tripping over his feet as he approached Layne, extending a hand out to her.
“Cowboy? Somebody ought to save a horse. I’m Layne.” She shook his hand with a smirk, teasing the poor kid who seemed like he had never spoken to a girl before in his life.
While the innuendo went over Brandon’s head leaving him looking confused, Joey caught onto it and rolled his eyes at her. She flashed a cheeky smile right back at him.
Brandon nervously chuckled while standing there staring at her and fidgeting in his spot. “Uh, do you have it? The phone?”
Layne pulled out Eric’s phone from her jacket pocket and handed it over to him. She was more than happy to be relieved of it after what she had to endure to get it the other night in the makeshift torture chamber. “I powered it down as soon as I could after I got my hands on it.”
Brandon took the phone and smiled crookedly at her before he shuffled back to his seat and began working some sort of techie magic on it. While the data may have been on the drive Joey had taken during his break-in to the Ellis residence while she and Eric had been at dinner, it was something on Eric’s phone that was able to provide access to it.
Layne didn’t pretend to even understand the level of nerdiness required to get the data Joey had been hired to acquire. She preferred a more brute-force approach of pulling information out of people.
The cranky old man looked over at Brandon. “You good?” When he got the nod from the youngin’ they both began to type commands on their respective keyboards. After a few minutes, the monitors lit up and began processing data.
Layne leaned over and whispered to Joey. “What are we looking for?”
Before he could respond, images popped up on a few screens, driver’s licenses on another, lists of names and addresses, receipts, videos, and other large amounts of information.
Something caught Layne’s eye and she abruptly spoke up. “Wait! Stop! Go back one.” She stepped up to the desk and pointed to a monitor that had flickered with an image that had captured her attention.
Brandon clicked a few things and when the image came up, she blinked. She stood there staring at the image with her brows furrowing together while she tried to process what was staring right back at her.
Joey came up behind her to take a look at what had her giving funny looks. “Is that…?”
“Andrew Correlli,” she confirmed for Joey. Her eyes read the text accompanying the image seeing the file path indicating he was in a folder dedicated to employee bios. Continuing to soak in the data it appeared that he had started working for Eric almost two years ago, long before Eric moved to the city. It noted that he was in charge of a territory covering all of Staten Island, but doing what it didn’t say.
She shook her head. “This doesn’t make any sense. If Correlli was working for Eric, why would he want him dead?”
“I-I think I found something,” Brandon spoke up while he filtered down to some information on the central monitor.
An audio clip file appeared and when it began to play it was obvious it was a conversation between Andrew and Eric.
“How many times have I told you not to sample the product?” Eric’s voice seethed with anger.
Andrew responded like a nervous wreck under Eric’s threatening tone. “S-sorry. I just thought that it needed a quality check. To make sure it is up to standards, ya know?”
“Your goddamn job isn’t to quality check. It’s to make sure the packages move safely from point A to point B so they can be cleared to be distributed across the state line!” Eric’s voice thundered back in response. “If you ever fuck up this bad again, I will make sure that you get the ending you deserve. Am I clear?”
“Absolutely. Very clear.”
“Good. Now, make sure that you go make good on our arrangement and go make friends with Russell for me.”
The clip ended. Layne grimaced while grinding her teeth as she bowed her head down. Her hands clutched the edge of the desk so tight it began to turn her knuckles white as the realization hit her.
“He played me.” She spoke through her clenched jaw. “Fuck!” Layne pushed away from the desk only to run right into Joey’s chest. His hands steadied her by her arms and made sure not to release her, even when she pulled against his grip.
Joey didn’t allow her to squirm away from him. “Hey, hey. Hold up.” He looked past her at the two men still running an analysis on all the data. “See what else is on there that’s useful, I will be right back.”
After she felt Joey’s hands release her, she pushed past him and quickly went right back upstairs. He was quick on her heels though and once she was upstairs, she spun around to face him.
“He’s been playing me like a goddamn fiddle! I knew he had motives to strengthen his power in the city, but God knows what else he’s been doing to make sure that Liam and I were desperate!” She placed a hand on her forehead struggling to keep up with the storm of scenarios crashing into her brain. If he coordinated Andrew getting in with Russ Spencer, the potential for other puppetry was limitless.
“Layney, calm down.” Joey’s voice tried to ease her down from her escalating temper.
She glared at him as he told her the one thing that most certainly was not going to bring her temper down a notch. “Don’t tell me to calm the fuck down!”
When he reached out to hold onto her shoulders, she swiped his arms away. “I’m going to kill him, Joey. I don’t care. I will hunt his ass down, make him suffer in his freakish torture room, and he can get off on his own demise on his way down to hell.”
Joey’s eyes settled on her and he waited until she was finished. “Are you done?” When she didn’t interrupt him, he continued to talk. “He will get what’s coming to him, don’t worry about that. There’s enough data there that my client is going to want him wiped from the playing board. After a little more due diligence on the details of what he’s peddling and how far he’s peddling it, then this can be handled.”
She tried to ease her anger down with a deep breath and think a little more rationally while Joey laid out what would hopefully be the next steps.
After making sure that she wasn’t going to go off on him like an Irish car bomb, he wrapped his large arms around her and drew her in close. He kissed the top of her head reassuringly. “We will handle Eric together when the time comes. Until then, we keep the status quo. Okay?”
Layne desperately wanted to argue with Joey, but having him hold her so close managed to ease the flare of her irritability. She sighed quietly as the tension in her body melted away one breath at a time.
“I hate you right now,” she murmured against his chest as her arms wrapped around his waist.
“Only because you know I’m right.” A cocky smile appeared on his mouth.
After Joey was confident that Layne wasn’t going to go on a mission to immediately hunt Eric down, he went back to the basement to wrap up discussions with his associates. It turned out that they hit a snag in the encryption of data that would take some time to bypass.
There was enough time for her to soak in everything he had said to her. When he came back upstairs ready to leave, she stopped him. “Did you mean what you said?”
He lifted a brow at her. “Which part?”
“That we would handle this together. The way things went down with Franzetti—” Her words were interrupted by his finger pressing against her lips.
Joey’s eyes met hers to make his intentions very clear. “You’re stuck with me, Layney. Hell or high water. I just need you to be on the same page. And, until you are,” his hands moved to embrace her face, “I’m going to slay any demons standing in your way to get you there.”
Words were pretty things. Layne wondered if they would hold the course of time or would he end up another chapter that abruptly closed in her life?