Shay Savage - Otherwise Unharmed

With minimal additional protest, we collected Odin and his stuff, and I called a taxi from Lia’s phone.

“That’s going to be expensive,” Lia remarked.

“No one’s going to let him on a bus,” I said, nodding toward the dog.  “A big tip goes a long way with a taxi driver.”

“I don’t have that much cash.”

“We’ll take care of it when we get back to my place.”

When we did get there, the apartment was a disaster.

The scene was almost enough to remind me of a warzone, but not quite.  There was still crime tape up on the door, but I tore it away and shoved the door open to reveal most everything I owned spewed out all over the floor.

Papers, boxes, even dishes and shit from the cabinets in the kitchen were lying all over the floor, the counters, and the dining room table.  My desk drawers were all pulled out, and papers were everywhere.  All the cords and shit for my laptop were there in a heap, but the machine itself was gone.

“Wow.” Lia breathed out the word with a huff of air.  “This is a mess.”

“I’m going to guess the housekeeper hasn’t been by recently,” I joked.  Nothing about it was funny to me, but I didn’t want her to see just how irate I was.  I was pretty particular about my place and my things.  Seeing them just…everywhere was increasing my blood pressure by the minute.  I wondered what was missing besides the laptop.

The back of the closet in my bedroom, which should have contained my firearms and a couple duffel bags filled with around eighty grand in cash was empty.

“Fuckers,” I mumbled as I moved over to my dresser.  All the drawers had been pulled out and dumped, but no one noticed the envelope secured to the underside of the dresser’s top.  I pulled a few bills out of it, ran down to pay off the cab driver, and then returned to check out the rest of the mess.

Odin was standing by the sliding glass door to the balcony, staring at his upturned dog bed.  I used my boot to shove the crap on the floor to the side, righted the bed, and put it back in its usual spot.  He sniffed at it, climbed inside, and spun around a few times before curling up and placing his head on his paws to watch us.

I went around to all the places where I had cash and weapons hidden.  Most had been found and presumably taken as evidence, but I did come up with a few thousand in cash—no weapons, though, which pissed me off.  My phone was also missing.

“I need to make a side trip.”

My Mazda was gone from the garage, presumably impounded pending my trial.  With my CTA pass in hand and Lia staying at my apartment to start cleaning up, I headed over to Moretti’s office.  I watched all around me as I approached, but I didn’t see any familiar cars in the parking lot and no one visible walking around.  I made my way to my Audi—still hidden behind the dumpster from the night I’d killed Terry and Bridgett.  Under the driver’s seat was a Beretta PX4 Storm .40—my backup handgun.  In the trunk, hidden under the spare tire, there was another, larger envelope of cash.

I shoved the piece down my pants and felt myself relax at the familiar feeling of the barrel against my back.  There was also a shoulder holster for it, but I didn’t want to take the time to put it on in the parking lot.  I looked around quickly, then got in the car and headed to the nearest place where I could get a phone set up without a contract or anything like that.  I kept looking over my shoulder, but no one appeared to have noticed me, and no one seemed to be following me.  Still, I took a random route back to my apartment building.

All was quiet in the parking garage, so I made my way upstairs and back to my unit.

Lia was inside, folding clothing that had been dumped all over the place and neatly stacking it in piles on the bed.

“I wasn’t sure which drawers you used for what.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said.  I wasn’t sure why, but I felt a little weird and maybe embarrassed to have her doing something like that for me.  It seemed very…intimate.  I didn’t think anyone other than I had handled my laundry since I was a kid.

I grabbed the dresser drawers off the floor and inserted them into their slots, then picked up a couple stacks of shirts and laid them down in their rightful drawer.  It didn’t take too long before we had at least managed to straighten out the bedroom to where it didn’t look like a recent tornado had been hanging out there.

The rest of the apartment was a much bigger disaster, and it took us most of the day to get it cleaned up.  About the time we were done, when Lia had gone to take some spoiled food to the dumpsters outside, Odin started to growl.

I looked up at the door.

“Having fun?” Trent asked as he leaned against the wall.

Nothing could have pissed me off more than seeing him at my door.

I resisted the urge to pull out the Beretta and shove it in his face.

“I assume I have you to thank for all of this,” I muttered back.  “What the fuck do you want?”

“Just wanted to make sure you weren’t packing up to leave town or anything stupid like that,” Trent replied.  “I also wanted to make sure you realize I know exactly where you are and what you’re doing—at all times.”

I watched him closely.  He crossed his arms as he leaned casually against the door—too casually.  He was making a point of looking nonchalant, which meant he didn’t completely feel that way.  My eyes searched for other clues about him, but he was practiced in the art of being a complete and total asshole, which was throwing me off my game.

In an attempt to gain some ground, I snapped my fingers and pointed to Odin’s bed.  He quickly moved from my side and went to his place but continued to growl low at the federal agent.

“I told you I would take care of it all,” I reminded him.  “Fuck off and let me do it.”

“You’re quite the conversationalist,” he said with a snide laugh.

“I don’t converse with feds,” I snapped back.  I was immediately pissed off at myself for letting him get to me.

“Just don’t forget to take your dick out of your slut long enough to get your job done.”

I clenched my teeth and glared, trying to keep myself from just walking over and beating the living shit out of him.  I had no doubt that Johnson was nearby, and assaulting a fed in my apartment while I was out on bail wasn’t the very best idea.

“Are you going to spend a lot of time keeping me from getting shit done?” I asked through my teeth.

“I’m going to spend a lot of time making sure you are getting shit done,” Trent retorted.  “If I feel like you’re stalling, I’m going to take it out on her.  What do you think of that?”

“I think that’s an invitation to an underground party.”

We locked stares for a long moment.  Trent eventually cracked half of an insincere smile and then nodded.

“I’ll be seeing you around.”  He turned and walked out the door.

I dropped my ass on the couch and rubbed my temples.  Odin assumed he was free to leave his bed because he came up and leaned his fuzzy mug on my knee.  I rubbed at his head and tried to calm myself down a bit.

None of this was going to work.

Despite promises to Trent, I had no idea how I was going to get into Greco’s confidence—none whatsoever.  Even if I did have a plan, it certainly wasn’t going to be easy, and part of my strategy was going to have to include figuring out a way for Moretti to believe I was still working for him.

I was, really.

He just wasn’t going to know it.

But I had to make him think he knew it.

Fuck, none of the shit even made sense to me, so how was I going to pull it all off?

Lia came back just a few minutes later.

“That was odd,” she said as she walked in.

“What was?”

“There was a guy downstairs near the dumpsters,” she told me.  “He started asking me a lot of weird questions.  I guess maybe he was the building super or something.”

My stomach churned.

“What did he look like?”

“A little older,” she said.  “Maybe as old as fifty.  He was wearing a suit and tie.  His hair was getting pretty gray, and he had a beard.”

Agent Johnson.

“What did he want to know?”

“He asked if I lived here,” she told me.  “I guess he wanted to make sure I wasn’t just dumping my trash in his dumpsters.”

Fucking bastards, tag-teaming me like that, one of them delaying Lia so the other could harass me.  My skin felt hot at the thought.  I took a couple of steps toward her and grabbed her arms.

“What did you tell him?” I demanded.

“Evan!” Lia yelled as she pulled from me.  “What the hell?”

Her eyes blazed, and I realized how it must have seemed.

“Sorry,” I muttered.  “I’m a bit on edge.  I don’t want people bothering you.”

“He didn’t bother me; he was just asking weird questions.”

“Like what?”  I tried to calm myself and released her arms.  The whole “hiding my identity” bullshit was seriously frustrating.

Maybe it would be easier to just come clean.

Nah.

“He asked what apartment I lived in, and he asked if I had a dog.  Isn’t that weird?”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said I was just visiting a friend.  He wanted to know who, and I said I had to go and came back inside.”

I reached behind my back to make sure my Beretta was still in place before I stood up from the couch and went over to her.

“If you see him again, come right back up here,” I told her.  “Don’t talk to him.  Don’t even make eye contact with him.  I don’t care what he says.”

“Who is he?” she asked.

“No one.”

“Could you provide slightly less useful information?” she quipped.  “I mean, there could be a Guinness record for it.”

“Nice,” I replied.  Normally I would have been pissed off by the sarcasm, but for some reason, hearing it from Lia just made my cock jump.  I took a deep breath and let it out.  “I know who he is, and he really just wants to harass me.  I don’t want him annoying you as well.”

“Who is he?” she asked again.

“Never mind.  Just tell me if you see him again.”

“Jesus, you are frustrating!”

I shrugged.  I couldn’t argue with the sentiment, and it didn’t matter if I was frustrating her or not.  It wasn’t going to change the answer at this point.  It wasn’t that I wanted to piss her off, it was just the way it was.  I couldn’t exactly come out and tell her the dude was a federal agent, monitoring me because I was supposed to infiltrate and bring down a rival mob organization.

Yeah, that would go over well.

So I was stuck with her being upset because I wouldn’t answer her.  I wondered how many times we were going to end up playing the same game and wondered how others dealt with this kind of shit.  Rinaldo was married, but his wife worked at one of his clubs, so she knew what the deal was before they were involved.  Mario was also married, but I didn’t have any idea where his wife came from.  She only spoke Italian, and I only understood her about a third of the time because she talked so damn fast.

How many times would Lia put up with my evasiveness?

I ran my hand over my face and growled under my breath.  It wasn’t that I was angry—not with her, anyway—but the whole situation had me as tense as I could be.  Johnson talking to her was crossing a line as far as I was concerned, and it reminded me that I should really just get her the fuck out of town.

“I also wanted to make sure you realize I know exactly where you are and what you’re doing—at all times.”

If Trent wasn’t full of shit, and I doubted he was, he would know if I were to take her out of the danger zone.  If that were the case, and he decided to go after her once I’d returned, I would have no way of keeping her safe.  I had to make sure she was safe.

Where was the safest place for her?

With me.

It was also probably the most dangerous, but a lot of that was because she had no idea what she was dealing with, and I wasn’t going to tell her.  Telling her could result in anything, up to and including her taking off.  If she took off, he might decide to follow her.  If she was on her own, I still wouldn’t be able to protect her.

Another option was to forget about the whole deal with the feds, take Lia, and leave town.  I would probably be able to manage getting us both away without being followed, though it would take some effort.  At least then I wasn’t going to have to balance keeping Rinaldo off my trail and Greco convinced I was on his side.