Chapter 4
Ethan
Ipaced up and down the length of the penthouse apartment, infuriated.
For fuck’s sake. It wasn’t such a big fucking ask, for my Unredeemables in Seattle, to just keep tabs on my fiancée for a week.
Cover her ass, for that cluster of karate tournaments she insisted on doing.
I’d allocated eight men, two constantly rotating teams of four, to execute that extremely clear, obvious, non-subtle task.
And yet, my cadre of Unredeemable, all tough, battle-hardened ex-Special Forces, had failed. Once again, she had disappeared, poof.
That last time she’d pulled this disappearing shit, there had been near-fatal consequences. One would think that she’d learn from her mistakes.
And one would be, oh, so fucking wrong.
To be fair, this was Kat Banner, the no-nonsense berserker warrior maiden who could not be commanded. But some trust would be appreciated.
At least now, the situation was fifty percent safer for her than it had been before, now that the Petruzzis were de-fanged and defunded, forevermore.
With SmokeScreen, my powerful but problematic algorithm, I had drained the money the Petruzzi family had parked in off-shore accounts, and sent it trickling into a multitude of non-profits and charitable organizations, like rainwater into thirsty ground.
Even if the Petruzzi family hadn’t been mostly dead, it would be impossible to claw their fortune back.
The algorithm made it almost impossible to trace the money.
Even if someone managed it, the legal fees to contest each donation would exceed the sum they could hope to recover, and there were thousands of them.
Tony Petruzzi, Jr. was no longer a mafia mogul.
Now, he was just a broke-ass schmuck.
It would be fun to see how the world treated him now. Though the spectacle would get boring and repetitive soon enough.
Tony was barely hanging on, at the moment. Mrs. S.’s final whack had shattered a cervical vertebra, so at the moment, Tony was looking at possible partial paralysis. Maybe a wheelchair. Tough shit. Sucked to be him.
I was not sorry, I reflected. Not at all. Maybe that reflected badly on my moral fiber, but fuck it, it was the truth, no point in denying it to myself. But my foot jiggled with suppressed tension as I stared down into the greenery of Central Park.
The buzzer sounded, and I jolted up, electrified. I hit the button. “Who is it?”
“Mr. Masters? There is a lady here to see you,” Jamison, the doorman said.
“Is it Kat Banner?” My heart soared, thumped.
“Ah, no, sir. It is a Mrs. Sciancalepore. And she has, ah, cats with her. She says that they’re, uh…for you?”
I could well imagine that the doorman would be bemused by Ms. S. She was a lot to deal with. A very colorful character. But cats? What the fuck?
It was a risk, but considering what I had put that poor woman and her son through, I had to invite her up and offer her coffee. “Send her on up, Jamison.”
A few minutes later, Mrs. S was smack in the middle of my apartment, gaping up at the vaulted ceiling, the lofted upper floors, the thirty-foot picture windows, the gleaning plank flooring.
It was a very beautiful place, and I took credit for none of its classiness.
Not for the reno, not the furnishings or decor.
I’d just paid a top-notch interior design company to have good taste on my behalf, and they had delivered.
“Santo cielo,” she said faintly. “You didn’t say you was filthy rich. You live in this place?”
“Ah, not really,” I said. “I just keep it for when I happen to be in New York. I don’t like hotels.”
She turned a worried, accusing gaze on me. “Are you a mobster too?”
“No, ma’am, I swear to you that I am not,” I assured her. “I run a tech company, and I got real lucky, that’s all. But it’s all fair, legal and legit.”
Her brow furrowed in suspicion, then cleared. “Well, I believe you,” she said briskly. “And I don’t blame Franci if she believes you, too. I would, if I was her.” She set down the cat carrier. Tiny high pitched mewing squeals issued from it.
“What have you got in there, Ms. S?” I asked.
“Well, young man, after our conversation last week, I got to thinking, about Francesca,” she said.
“Like I told you, Raffi got her kitten from one of my Juno’s litters.
She wanted it to cheer her little sisters up after their mamma died.
Those poor girls just loved that cat. And then that bastard Tony killed her.
First the cat, then the girls. So I started thinkin’ maybe Franci might like two kittens that are related to Raffi’s kitty.
They’d be, let’s see...that cat’s grand-nieces.
I brought the calicos. Girl kitties, two months old, just old enough to leave their mama.
They’re already de-wormed, and had shots already, and they look just like Raffi’s cat. ..what was her name again?”
“Penelope,” I supplied.
“Yeah, exactly, that was it. Here, take a look. They’re cute as hell.”
“No, no, no, wait,” I said hastily, but it was too late. She’d unlatched the carrier door, and the kittens launched themselves out, catapulting into my apartment.
“Ain’t they cute?” Mrs. S said fondly, as the kittens pranced around, hopping and tumbling.
One squatted and left a little puddle of piss on the gleaning expanse of floor before leaping up upon her sister’s back.
The fluffy little animals hissed and snarled as they rolled, a writhing ball of mock combat.
Yeah, they were cute. I watched them play and thought it over swiftly.
Pros and cons. Baby animals were a pain in the ass, and required a lot of attention, but on the plus side, they could melt the hardest of hearts.
And a sensitive, sentimental gesture like that might help considerably in the shitstorm that awaited me when Kat discovered all the details. Because she would. It was inevitable.
Mrs. S. watched the conflict play out on my face, triumph in her eyes.
She began to chuckle under her breath. “Eh?” she said.
“Good idea, ain’t it? Franci would go crazy for those little sweetie-pies.
You’d rack up all kinds of points, eh? Eh?
” She jabbed him in the ribs with her finger with a ribald cackle.
The second kitten took a piss, and then walked through the puddle, and scampered off toward her sister, leaving tiny, pissy pawprints.
“So, then! It’s settles, then, eh? You suppose you could offer a tired old lady a glass of something cold to drink? I got all overheated, hauling them kitties around.”
I yielded to the inevitable, and led Mrs. S.
into the big kitchen that was around the corner of the L of the huge open-plan apartment.
She perched on a stool at the end of the long granite bar, surveying the room with approval.
“Nice kitchen,” she said. “Does Franci cook? Her mom was a hell of a cook, as I remember. Raffi, too. Not half bad. She helped me at the restaurant. She was a great worker.”
“Not Kat,” I admitted. “Or me, either. It’s not really in our skill sets.”
Mrs. S. harrumphed. “What a waste of a great kitchen,” she said. “Look at that. Three fornelli, plus a big grill, ahhh. Two ovens. Two sinks. Two fridges. And they don’t even cook. Santo cielo.”
I ignored that, peeking in the fridge at what the housekeeper had left for me. “I can offer you coffee, iced tea, or lemonade,” I told her.
“Lemonade,” she said promptly. “On ice. Something cool and refreshing. And I’m betting a fancy-ass place like this has a well-stocked bar, eh? You got something to splash into the lemonade? Some vodka, maybe some whiskey?”
I filled her glass with ice, then lemonade and pulled out a bottle of Absolut from the liquor shelf. I sloshed in a generous shot, added the lemonade, and then hesitated. “You’re not driving, are you?” I asked her.
“Oh, no. I got a ride from my neighbor lady, Carmela.” Mrs. S. tasted her lemonade, grabbed the Absolut bottle, and glugged more vodka to it. “She’s coming to visit her dad. He’s up at Columbia Presbyterian. Heart attack, poor guy.”
“Sorry to hear it. I’ll arrange for someone to drive you home.” I pulled up Amos’s number.
“Aw, honey, you don’t have to do that,” Mrs. S. protested.
But Amos had already answered. “What’s up?” he asked.
“Hey,” I said. “Could you be ready with one of the cars? I have a lady who needs a ride back to Jersey City. Mrs. Sciancalepore. You drove her and her son Joe home after the thing at Sable Point. She was the one with the baseball bat.”
“Ah.” Amos hesitated. “She doesn’t have her bat today, does she?”
I looked over at Mrs. S., who was slurping her lemonade through her straw with the gusto of a kid with a slushy at a carnival. “Nope,” I said. “But I’m thinking you’re going to need to walk her right up to her door.”
“Understood,” Amos said. “I’m at the ready.”
“Wait outside my door, okay?” I closed the call. “Your ride home’s all set,” I told Mrs. S.
“Thank you, honey,” she said. “You’re very sweet.”
“Hardly,” I said. “Hey, are you and Joe feeling okay, after what happened the other day? You’re not, ah, disturbed, or anything?”
The look she gave me showed a flash of pure steel. “Me and Joe sleep like babies,” she said flatly. “We sleep like goddamn angels. No guilt whatsoever. I will always be grateful for a chance to whale on that dirty piece of shit.”
“Well, good,” I said, cautiously relieved. “Then I’m glad to have provided it. That was my hope. I was just worried—”
“We’re fine, honey. Better than we’ve ever been since before Joey got hurt. I wouldn’t even mind going to jail if that bastard came after me. It would be worth it.”
“I’ll make damn sure that doesn’t happen,” I told her. “Like I told you and Joe before we started. If he gives you trouble, my army of top-shelf lawyers will come down on him like a landslide. And it’ll be on me. You have it in writing.”