Chapter 2
RAFE
The dot on my computer screen is still blinking in the exact same spot it was ten minutes ago and I haven’t heard from Joel, either.
Not being in control of things drives me insane.
I can't sit still or think straight and I won't until I get the banker's body back here where he belongs so I can make sure none of my enemies, including the cops, find out about this.
"She's scared, Boss," Feodor grunts as he stands with his arms crossed over his thick chest and a scowl on his face. "She ain't gonna do it."
"Maybe Joel should move in," I muse, staring at the damn blinking dot like it's going to tell me something I don't already know. I'm fucked. Don Ferretti will have my head over this, or at the very least, he'll make my life hell as I dig out of the mess I've gotten myself into.
"I don’t think so, Rafe." Feodor mores toward me and points at the screen as the threads of tension in my shoulders turn to ropes. "If you turn her to ash on the side of the highway, they'll find the banker's blood in her trunk."
He's right, of course. If we'd only just gotten to the garage where we knew Marco was parked after his meeting, we'd have been able to stop all of this.
As it is, the video of the Caruso hitman is evidence enough to make sure I'm not found to blame over this, but those idiots stuffed his body into the wrong car and now I'm playing hide and seek with an innocent woman who will definitely pay with her life for no good reason.
We just can't do it on the side of a highway, and we can't leave evidence behind.
"Call her again," he says, and I grumble under my breath.
Feodor has been my right-hand man for years now and I've learned to trust that he's not wrong about most things, but my gut tells me I should be out there, not parked behind my desk.
Sending Joel to do my job was a bad idea.
Lombardi is a loose end now, and tying it up will take finesse.
But I punch in his number and wait, keeping the phone on speaker mode to make sure Feodor can hear what this woman says to me and tell me exactly what to say to make her follow my orders.
"What!" she spits angrily, and I hear the clang of a tire iron being dropped onto a hard surface. Good, she's at least changing the tire.
"What's taking so long, Riley?" I ask, and all I hear is a slew of curse words she spouts off. She's feisty and angry, and my guess is the instant she plugs her phone in to charge, she'll be on the horn to the cops. I just hope I've scared her enough to make sure she doesn't do it.
I don’t have eyes on her, but Joel can report if she does something so colossally stupid like that. He's the one who visually confirmed Marco's body is still in the trunk.
"You're asking a woman to change a tire in the middle of the night on the side of a dark highway after digging the spare out from under a dead body. What the fuck do you think is taking so long?" She's huffing, probably out of breath. "I should just call the fucking cops. You're a sick—"
"Now, now, name calling isn't very nice.
" I don't let anyone speak to me the way she's speaking to me, but I'm the one with everything to lose here.
She has a knife to my jugular and she doesn't even know it.
I just have to make her keep thinking I'm the person in charge and that she will suffer if she disobeys me.
"Fuck you. I don't have time for this. This seems like a you problem and you're trying to make it a me problem and I—"
"Riley, I'm being patient with you because you don’t seem to understand your situation. Do you understand," I say calmly as I look Feodor in the eye, "that I could consume you so fully that no one would ever see you again or know where you went or what happened to you?"
Feodor nods and smirks, almost chuckling at how ruthless I am. Sick son of a bitch.
"Christ," she groans. "I'll do it. Okay? I'll bring your precious dead body wherever the fuck you want me to and then I have to go out of town. Do you understand? I can't miss my sister's bachelorette party tomorrow."
Wedding festivities are the least of her problems right now.
Riley Maddox is a witness to something that never should’ve happened and it's going to destroy my entire empire if I can't get it under control and stop the bleeding.
And it's not just Marco Lombardi's dead body in her trunk—it's his missing ledger, the men in other camps he was working with and the federal government breathing down my neck.
"Good girl," I tell her and I suck in a calming breath as Feodor looks down at his phone. The line is quiet for a moment, only the grunts she makes as she works, and Feodor looks up at me.
"Joel has her almost finished changing the tire," Feodor mouths, which is perfect.
"Don’t do anything stupid, Riley. I'll see you soon."
Another slew of curses spills from her lips as I slide the phone to unlock and turn to Feodor.
"Go to the warehouse now. Meet her there and then bring her to me.
We have to decide what to do with her, but the car will definitely need to be stripped and cleaned.
We can't leave a single drop of his blood, not a stray hair…
" I scowl. "And turn it out. Make sure we find that ledger.
The search Joel did earlier didn't turn anything up in his car, so it's either been stolen or he stashed it in Riley's hunk of shit. "
"You got it, man."
"And don't harm a hair on her head. We can't have evidence showing up of her anywhere that it could lead back to us."
Feodor stalks toward the door, off to do his job, and I sink behind my computer to dig into the mystery of Riley Maddox.
My earlier browser is still open behind the GPS tracker page I've been on, and the NLETS system has Riley's file in detail.
She was easy to find by simply typing in the license plate of her little junky sedan after watching the parking garage footage of Caruso's man shoving the banker into her trunk.
It was even easier to track where she was going and keep up with her movements when the tracking chip we hid inside the banker's phone started moving.
I never had a worry in the world over whether we'd get his body back—it's the ledger I want, and as few strings to tie up as possible.
But Ms. Maddox here poses an interesting opportunity.
My fingers sweep across the keyboard searching for her Facebook profile based on the image on her state ID.
She's not a very private person at all and that's such a shame for her.
I scroll her profile like I'm shopping for Christmas gifts on and find more than enough information to sink my teeth into.
Riley's life seems boring as hell. She shares posts of kittens and memes of math jokes no one normal would understand.
It appears her family is big on holidays—there are tons of posts shared to her wall about Thanksgiving meals and thankfulness.
And there is a public event being held for her sister at a bar in downtown Buffalo tomorrow, just as Riley said, for a bachelorette party.
So big sister is getting married and Riley's expected home for the holidays, and only one of those things will likely proceed—assuming her sister isn't so heartbroken over the disappearance of a family member that she can't go through with it.
As long as Feodor and the guys do their job, there will be nothing linking her back to me, either.
But I keep scrolling, hoping to find anything else that might raise a red flag, and several more posts down the page, I see something very interesting. It makes me pause and stare for a good, long minute.
Riley stands proudly holding a wooden and gold plaque, smiling at a camera with a man I recognize very well standing beside her.
Her hand is joined in his and the post reads, First National's Employee of the Month.
Harold Juniper, branch manager at the same fucking bank Marco Lombardi worked for before his untimely demise…
"Well fuck me…" I mumble as I click on the link and follow it to the bank's business page.
Not only does Riley Maddox work at the same bank as my dead former colleague, but she's a teller at that bank with access to some of their systems, and likely, a lot of the same knowledge as Mr. Lombardi. "Very interesting…"
My search continues, digging deeper into the bank's website, which proves to provide no further help for me. Then I meander back to Riley's Facebook page to see that she's connected to King's College, where she's studying finance and is almost finished with her degree.
I'm mesmerized by it, how the hands of fate have intervened on my behalf, and the pieces start to drop into place.
Lombardi used the same parking garage as the woman because it's within blocks of the bank they both work at, and he likely parked close enough to her that Caruso was confused when they gunned him down.
They shoved him in the wrong trunk on accident.
And poor little Riley Maddox had no clue any of that happened when she got into her car to take off for the weekend.
Joel's fast thinking of laying down a stop stick to take out a tire on her car and force her off the road was genius when we tracked the banker's phone moving and knew he was in her car.
Now this?
The universe has smiled on me again.
I click over to the GPS tracker page and watch as the blinking dot moves now, returning back toward the city where I ordered her to go. She's being compliant with the mistaken notion that I'm going to let her go when she delivers the body, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
My initial intention to have her car cleaned and left stripped out as if it were stolen and left somewhere has shifted now.
Riley could be useful. She may not be able to do the things at work that Lombardi could do, though there's a good chance she knew of him or heard his name before.
But with her background in finance, being a teller and running numbers, and with the fact that she's still in college to finish her degree, she may just have the knowledge to decipher Lombardi's ledger and the codes within it.
God knows I can't read the damn thing. I've seen it before and all I could pull from it were dates and a few names scrawled in the side margins.
He used some cryptic cipher to make sure no one but him could read it, which is smart.
Safer than doing everything on the internet where viruses and hackers could worm in and steal information. But it was dangerous too—for me.
That bastard went behind my back at the worst possible time and he got what was coming to him. If Caruso wouldn't have ordered that hit, I'd have done it myself. Lombardi was a dead man walking the instant I found out he screwed me.
But without his ledger, I can't rebuild the records I need at all, and definitely not fast enough to keep my businesses on the up and up as far as the IRS goes.
And if they dig even a little, they'll expose it all.
It could bring down the entire Ferretti name. My uncle would never speak to me again.
My eyes drift between the blinking light showing Riley driving closer to her doom and the smile on her face in her profile picture. I don't think I'm going to kill her immediately, after all.
She may just be useful.
And I may have just found the silver lining to the storm cloud that threatens to ruin this holiday season.