Chapter Two #2
The cops. Leo had a contact at the St. Louis Police Department from a domestic violence case involving a client’s brother two years back.
He had a friend-of-a-friend at the FBI’s St. Louis field office, a special agent who’d come up through college baseball and remembered Leo from his playing days.
Both were almost certainly clean, but there was no way to verify it.
The instant he walked into either building with a thumb drive and a dead man’s note, he would create a paper trail that others in the same building would see.
Vic had insinuated that they have people inside places you would never guess, and Leo understood that Vic had not chosen those words by accident.
Vic used places in the plural. He’d said would never guess in the indicative.
Vic had told Leo, in the gentlest possible language a dying man could manage, that the cops were not safe.
A clean job meant a pro. Pro meant money. Money meant organization. Organization meant reach. Leo had no idea how far it went. He had no idea where the safe people lived.
He needed somebody outside of the sports world and any institution Vic’s enemies could touch.
Someone whose loyalty Leo had not bought with a paycheck or earned through a favor, because both of those forms of currency could be counterfeited if you had enough leverage.
They had to owe Leo nothing, and vice versa.
This had to be somebody whose competence Leo trusted with his own life.
The list of contacts who matched all those criteria was literally one name long.
She lived four hours away, in a town on a lake in southern Indiana, on a compound owned by the only private security firm Leo would entrust his cousin to. His mind drifted back to the only night that mattered when he thought about her now.
Five months ago. Chloe and Kayne’s wedding at Duquesne Park.
He could still picture Anja standing at the edge of the gathering during the ceremony, reading the space out of habit, even surrounded by friends. He’d watched her watch everything. Then she’d caught him at it, and neither of them had looked away.
Leo recalled her apartment afterward. How she’d stepped into him without asking permission or offering any. How she’d kissed him.
He thought about the morning after, with the light coming in through her blinds in flat silver bands. Her voice, low against his shoulder, telling him to get some rest when they hadn’t slept all night. He’d left at six because he had to. She hadn’t walked him to the door.
Five months. He’d respected the closed door for every one of them, and it had cost him a piece of his sanity he hadn’t realized was on loan.
He’d drafted, by his count, in the neighborhood of a hundred text messages he’d never sent.
Some had been jokes. Others had been honest. Those had been worse, so he’d deleted them first.
Now he had a reason to call her that didn’t involve any of the things he wanted to call her about, and the relief he felt about that was its own special category of pathetic.
#
The Range Rover crested the rise on his street, and the lights of the Central West End opened up in front of him.
Leo’s condo occupied the top floor of a modern glass-and-stone residential tower sitting just east of Forest Park, in a tree-lined neighborhood where most of his neighbors were doctors or lawyers.
He’d chosen it for the floor-to-ceiling, east-facing windows offering a sweeping view of downtown St. Louis.
The furniture had been selected by a designer Chloe recommended.
The kitchen included a six-burner Wolf range, a massive marble island, and a wine fridge.
Leo cooked in it maybe twice a month. He ate at the island when he ate at home at all, which was less often than his cardiologist would have preferred, not that he actually had a cardiologist. Yet.
He let himself in, threw the deadbolt behind him, and walked straight to the kitchen without turning on the overhead lights.
The reading lamp in the corner of the living room was enough.
He dropped the mailer on the marble, placed his briefcase on a bar stool, shrugged out of his coat, and draped it over the next stool down.
Then he poured himself two fingers of Woodford Reserve from the bottle on the bar cart.
Leo held up the glass of bourbon, knowing it would smooth the edges.
He recalled Vic Shaw pushing a ribeye around a plate at Tony’s with a tremor in his glass and thought about how much he was about to ask of a woman four hours away.
He’d need every neuron he possessed firing at full power for the next several hours.
Leo poured the bourbon down the drain.
Then he made coffee. The good stuff. Strong and black. He had drunk it like that in spring training when he was twenty-two years old and certain he was going to play until he was forty.
While it was brewing, he walked to the windows.
Downtown St. Louis rose in the distance, and the skyline gathered together in a tight cluster of glass and steel.
In the evening, the buildings seemed less imposing than luminous.
Office towers glowed in grids of white and yellow, thousands of windows forming geometric patterns against the night sky.
Some floors were dark, others lit with the stubborn brightness of people finishing late work.
From this height the city noise didn’t quite reach the windows. The movement below was visible but distant. Headlights flowed along the highways in thin rivers of red and white ribbons. Traffic moved with a slow, constant rhythm that made the entire city feel alive.
The tallest buildings stood together near the center of the view, their crowns illuminated in clean architectural lighting.
A few aviation beacons blinked patiently at their summits, red lights pulsing at calm, measured intervals.
The glow from the skyline reflected faintly off low clouds drifting overhead, giving the night sky a muted bronze haze.
The city appeared orderly from here. Peaceful. A skyline arranged against the horizon like a promise that inside all that light, something important was happening.
A noise drew Leo’s attention. His cell phone lit up on the counter.
The notification was a text about a sale at one of his favorite stores.
Then he noticed one missed call. It was a twenty-eight-second voicemail from a blocked number, at 11:42 the night before.
He’d been asleep when it was left, and he’d somehow overlooked it all day.
He pressed play.
For a second, there was only the muffled sound of a television in the background, some announcer talking too quietly for Leo to make out the words. Then Vic’s voice came through, thinner than it had sounded at Tony’s, stretched tight at the edges.
“Leo. It’s Vic. I know you’re not gonna pick up a blocked number. Smart. I’m leaving this so it’s on record somewhere besides paper.”
A pause. The television droned on behind him, followed by the brief swell of what sounded like a commercial.
“I already mailed you something. You’ll have it by tomorrow, maybe the day after.
Read the note first, do exactly what it says, but I need you to know the drive isn’t all of it.
There’s more than what’s on there. I didn’t have time to copy the rest before I had to move, and now I don’t know if I’m gonna get the chance. ”
Another pause, longer this time. A door slammed somewhere in the distance, followed by the faint rattle of a heater kicking on.
“I should’ve gone to you a while ago. I had pieces of this, and I sat on it because I told myself it wasn’t my problem, and now look. I’m sorry for that too. Add it to the list.”
A short laugh that didn’t sound humorous at all.
“If something happens before I can call you again, the rest of it’s—”
There was a small gasp, and then the message cut off abruptly to dead air. An automated voice told Leo when it had been received and offered to delete or save.
He played it twice more.