Carla
Carla felt a strange sense of surrealness creep over her as she looked into Gio's eyes and shook his hand. She'd only been undercover once before, in a minor role as a drug buyer during another agent's sting operation, and she wasn't used to giving a fake name when she introduced herself.
Also, being in the same room with Gio and feeling his palm pressed against hers after spending so many months staring at his photograph made her world feel like it had turned upside down. Even though she'd dealt with plenty of criminals in her career, she somehow expected Gio to be different—to exude some otherworldly aura of sinister menace.
Now she realized how silly she'd been to think that. He'd killed her partner and he was a bad person, to be sure, but he was still only a person, no more evil than the dozens of lawbreakers she'd arrested before.
The most peculiar thing of all, though, was how much he lived up to the nickname “Handsome Gio” in person. Carla realized that during all those hours obsessing over his photos, her anger and grief had caused her to project a kind of malice onto his facial features. His eyes had seemed cold and dark, and his lips had seemed curled into a perpetual sneer.
But now that the same face was right in front of her, smiling and animated, there was a boyish charm to his features that she couldn't help but find alluring.
“Please, call me Gio,” he insisted, flashing his straight white teeth in a movie star smile. Flirtation danced in his eyes like sunlight shimmering across the ripples of a pond, and if it were anyone else, Carla was sure her own eyes wouldn't have been able to resist flirting right back at him.
Snap out of it, Carla scolded herself. This isn't some magazine model you're shaking hands with. He's a thief and a killer, not to mention a sadist.
She felt torn. If she played it too icy, Gio wouldn't feel comfortable enough to confide in her about his crimes and she wouldn't be able to gather the evidence she needed. If she played it too friendly, he would almost certainly get the wrong idea and she'd find herself dodging his sexual advances, which could get messy in terms of getting the job done.
Inwardly, she bitterly cursed the fact that male undercover agents didn't have to deal with these kinds of problems.
“Gio it is, then,” Carla replied, hoping her smile was professional and genuine without seeming flirty. She sat down, and the others did as well.
“So Louie,” Mario said, “where have you been hiding this bright young woman? How come I've never seen her before?”
Louie's face flushed, and Carla saw his stubby fingers twitch nervously near the buttons on his shirt, as though he wanted to fidget with the mic on his chest.
Goddamn it, Louie, can't you try to keep it together for just a few minutes? Carla thought angrily. You lie in front of judges and juries almost every day of your fucking existence. Can't you muster up a halfway-convincing lie now?
“Uh, well, I've mostly been, y'know, keeping her busy with clerk stuff, filing, typing up motions and complaints and all that.”
Carla saw Mario's eyes narrow.
Oh, you stupid asshole, you're making it sound like I'm some kind of secretary who doesn't know her ass from her elbow, she fumed silently. There's no way they'll want me to work with Gio now. We gave you a very simple cover story, Louie, and now you're wiping your ass with it.
“But, but, um, but she's good, though,” Louie added quickly, swallowing hard. “She's very sharp, she's helped me out on plenty of cases, and she's got, y'know, a brilliant legal mind. She was the, uh, daughter of one of my professors at Stanford Law, Phillip Hackton, and he was one of the most respected criminal attorneys in the country, so...”
Carla tried to keep her expression neutral, but rage erupted inside her like a volcano. She couldn't believe her ears. How could he make up such outrageous lies on the spot like that? All it would take was ten minutes on Google for anyone to see through such transparent bullshit.
She wondered whether Phillip Hackton was even a real law professor at Stanford, or if Louie had simply decided to wing it on that one too. She tried to imagine the look on Don's face as he listened to this remotely.
Mario turned to Carla. “That's some kind of pedigree you got there. What does your old man think about you working for guys like us? He doesn't feel like you're tarnishing the family legacy, or nothin' like that?”
“Maybe that's why she uses a different last name,” Gio pointed out.
Carla registered Louie's slight wince out of the corner of her eye.
Yeah, you couldn't even bother to remember the last name of my alias to make it match your dumbass fairy tale, could you? she thought. If this whole thing goes south because of you, Louie—if Fred goes unavenged because you fucked us here—I swear to God I'll wipe my ass with that guarantee of immunity and make sure you get locked in the most miserable hole the federal penal system has to offer.
“Actually, he died the year before I went to law school,” Carla said. “I decided to use my mother's last name because his tends to cast such a long shadow, and I felt I wanted to succeed on my own merits rather than his reputation.”
Mario nodded slowly. “You wanted to earn your career instead of inherit it. I respect that. I'm hoping with your help, my little Gio will be able to do the same.”
“You don't need to talk about me, Papa,” Gio said tightly. “I'm sitting right here.”
Carla could hear the resentment in his voice, and she noted a subtle, defensive slump in his posture. When she'd first entered the room, he had seemed lively and confident, but the more his father talked down to him and dismissed him, the more he appeared to regress into a sullen teenager.
She had taken numerous classes on criminal psychology at Quantico, and she knew that in many family-based criminal organizations, sons found it difficult to live up to their larger-than-life fathers, which often resulted in mental or emotional problems—addictions, abusive patterns with their own children, violent behavior toward other authority figures, and even disordered sexuality. She had no doubt this was somehow tied to the rumors about Gio's kinks, and wondered whether she might be able to find some way to exploit that.
Besides becoming one of his subs, of course.
Mario continued to talk to Carla as though he hadn't heard Gio. “If he's gonna make it in this life, he's gotta establish himself as more than just my son. He's gotta show people he's his own man. They won't be loyal to him if they think he had everything handed to him.”
Carla raised an eyebrow. “I was under the impression that you just handed him this restaurant.” She knew it could be risky to seem like someone with a smart mouth, but she also knew it would be better to offer an incisive observation—even if it seemed disrespectful—than to look like nothing but an empty-headed brownnoser. She could always apologize if she overstepped her bounds. Establishing her credibility was far more important.
But Mario nodded vigorously. “See, you get what I'm saying. In fact, that's gonna be your first job. You're gonna move some money and papers around so that legally, it looks like Gio bought this place for himself. That should make sure nothing that happens here can be connected back to me or vice versa. And to the other guys in our thing, it'll dispel rumors of, whatchamacallit, nepotism or the like.”
Carla nodded. “I understand. That shouldn't be a problem.”
The door opened and Shimizu entered with a bottle of grappa.
“Finally!” Mario exclaimed. “I'm parched as hell over here. Louie, let's get out of these kids' way so they can work out what they need to. I got some of my own business to go over with you anyway.”
Mario left, and Louie shambled out behind him. As he did, he gave Carla an awkward glance which she pointedly ignored. They closed the door behind them and Shimizu turned to Carla and Gio.
“Would you like to order something?” he asked.
“Actually, before we start, I'm going to duck into the ladies' room for a moment,” Carla said, standing. “I drank a little too much coffee in the car on the way over.”
“Hey, that's kinda too much information for a guy you just met, ain't it?” Gio smirked.
Carla shrugged apologetically. “Sorry. I spend most of my time around male lawyers, and they're fairly open about that kind of thing.”
“Well, try not to do it around me, okay?” Gio said. “I like my women to act classy.”
Yeah, I'll just bet you do, Carla thought. And I'm not one of your women, asshole.
“I'll try to remember that,” she said, stepping out the private room's side door.
She found the bathroom and went in, carefully locking the door behind her. Then she dialed the number to connect directly with Don. He picked up immediately.
“Can you believe that jackass Louie, runnin' his mouth off like that?” Don asked furiously. “Screw federal prison, we oughtta save the taxpayers money an' just tar an' feather him!”
“That'd be too good for him,” Carla said. She kept her voice as low as possible in case anyone was listening at the door. “Listen, about what he told them...”
“Yeah, yeah, we got our tech guys workin' on all that,” Don assured her. “If anyone tries to look it up, they'll find an obit for Phillip Hackton from a few years back, sayin' he was survived by his lovin' daughter Carolyn. An' no, in case you were wonderin', there wasn't never any 'Phillip Hackton' who taught at Stanford Law, so our people are workin' with the Stanford IT staff to get him added to their records as fast as we can.”
“Will it hold up?” Carla asked.
“It should leave enough of a trail for anyone who's casually lookin' into it,” Don said, “just like the fake social media accounts our guys set up for you, so it didn't look like you just popped outta thin air. Most people search for someone, a few pages here an' there are enough to satisfy 'em. But if the Mancinis get someone more savvy to look into it, like a private investigator...well, now that Louie's muddied the river with his tall tales, darlin', I just don't know.”
“Fuck,” she hissed. Her first hour undercover, and already everything was turning to shit.
“You sure you still want to go ahead with this?” Don asked. “'Cause with things off to a bad start like this, there'd be no shame in scrappin' the whole deal. Hell, half the guys I know would probably do the same thing.”
Half the guys you know, Carla thought. Not half the agents, but half the men. Because you know I'm worried that if I backed off now, they'll say it was because I'm a woman and I just couldn't cut it as an undercover agent after all.
But she knew she couldn't do that. Not because she owed it to herself or to any of the other women in the Bureau.
Because she owed it to Fred.
“I'm still in it to win it, Don,” she said. “As long as Louie doesn't do anything else to fuck it up, like yanking off his mic and running around the room with it.”
“The way things are goin' so far, hon, that could be a distinct possibility. Just watch yourself out there.”
“I will,” Carla said, hanging up.
But in her mind, the click of the call ending sounded like a heavy steel door swinging shut and locking behind her, and she suddenly felt very trapped and alone.