ORSE LED ME. I was shaken. We took a back way out of the café and left the building through the basements, by the carpark and then out to a service entrance and loading bay. Before we left, Horse stopped and held up his hand. He took out a throwaway phone to call Noah and set up a meeting.
He peered into the street, ready to go. When he looked back to me, he stopped.
“You’re a little pale, Vesper.” His voice was like a cool shower. I trembled as he pulled me against him. I felt the words in his chest more than I heard them.
“You were ready to see that. And you knew it. But you didn’t want to know.”
And he held me. Close. His kindness, his tenderness and his understanding were almost more of a shock than what had just happened. In a good way. Still, a lump of breath almost shook a trickle from my eyes.
At the precise, perfect moment, right on my heartbeat, he took my face in his hands. Bent his face down to mine. His voice was smoky.
“You’ve got this, Vesper. You can do it.”
I felt a well of strength open inside me. “We can do it.” But I almost went over the edge when he said, ‘we.’
As he held my shoulders, I straightened up and rose, feeling like I actually grew taller.
He smiled. “We’ll have to get some more changes of clothes, and we should have gotten four hooded jackets instead of two. For right now, we’ll take a cab.” He pulled the battery from the phone.
I pulled a smile back. “Yeah. Carmine’s going to be pissed about his Jeep.”
“He’ll get over it.”
He hailed a cab. No small feat mid-afternoon in downtown Manhattan.
In the cab I said, “About last night.”
His face was stone. Unreadable. He lifted a hand.
“Conversations that start with ‘About last night,’ you can have with your girlfriends.”
“I don’t have any girlfriends.” My answer was too quick.
He looked at me sharply . My emotions were obviously too near the surface. I had told him a lot more than I had intended, in that and in the way that I said it. My unconscious trusted this criminal a whole lot more than my conscious mind thought was sensible. There I was, in turmoil over this man all over again, and we hadn’t even said anything. Not really.
But he didn’t pick up the thread. He just kept it. It could have been him taking care of me, but I told myself it wasn’t that. Inside I was persuading myself to be more careful around him. While I was doing that, I was trying hard not to notice the disrupting effect he was having on me.
Particularly the effect his cock had on me. I coughed as I almost blurted out the thought. This wasn’t like me at all. Especially not when I’m in danger. Under threat, I close in and rely on myself, wary of anyone and everything else.
That should apply now more than ever. I couldn’t deny that the Bureau, maybe even my SAC, but certainly someone in the Bureau was trying pretty damn hard to get me killed. Both of us killed. And through it all, the only thing on my mind was how and when I could be stretched around his enormous shaft again.
I still wanted to have the conversation. He watched me draw breath and he cut me off. “Look,” he said, “Those kinds of conversations are for when two people,” his eyes flicked up mischievously, “Maybe more, depending on the circumstances,” I had the urge to slap him again.
His grin widened. “However many are involved, can all share their feelings. So everyone says what it all really means to them. Everyone takes out their emotions for a show and tell. Compares them with each others’ like little charms or Pokémon characters.”
I didn’t say anything. I kept my lips shut by pressing them closed with my teeth.
“That’s not me.” He said. “As far as I’m concerned, you do what you do, and you take care of how you feel about it in the privacy of your own head.” Combat philosophy. I knew that’s what I should have expected. But it wasn’t my feelings I wanted to talk about. Not his either. Well, not exactly. I wanted to put him straight about the arrest.
At that moment I nearly did. The sentence began to form, what do you think happened to make the DA come to you with a deal? My heart was in my throat, as I knew how close I was to telling him. How close I had come to exposing myself.
The thought was hard to shove back down, but I told myself it was just a momentary need, a passing hunger. When he had held me in the parkade I had such a strong feeling, not only that he understood what I was feeling, but that we were combined. Bound together in the moment.
I wanted it again.
Still, my instinct for self-preservation kicked back in and helped my composure return.
He might be better off knowing what had really happened, but I was definitely better off not telling him, so I should shut up. I knew that I should. Nothing good would come of spreading myself wide open for him the back of a New York taxi. Emotionally or physically.
We got out of the cab by the park. Horse got us straight into another one headed the opposite way. He looked around as we got in. So did I. As the cab pulled away, we both scanned the traffic for anything turning.
He made the driver turn a number of times, always right at the last second. The first few times the driver was pissy about it. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” and “I’m in the wrong lane, can’t you see?”
Then, after about a dozen turns but still only a few blocks from where we had hired the cab, we nodded to each other, asked the driver to stop and ducked out of the car to head into a big department store.
We gelled so well it was as if we’d been on the same counter-surveillance course.
Noah met with us in the locker room at back of a small gym. He must have known the owner. Either he got it opened for us, or he got it closed for everyone else while we were there.
Noah’s dark eyes stayed on me as Horse told him about the morning raid on the loft and explained in detail where he had stashed the weapons. As Horse told the story, I saw him notice me noticing him not mentioning the part where I made a call on my cell phone. With the quiet, alert way that he listened, I thought that Noah might have made a pretty good interrogator himself.
Noah’s eyes registered the gap in the story all the same. Interviewing suspects and witnesses, you develop a talent for noticing how someone listens. What gets their attention. Sometimes what doesn’t. But the message I was getting loud and clear was that Noah Braxton didn’t trust me.
Horse keeping back that part about the call I made, gave me a swirl of confused emotions. Instinct told me that it meant he didn’t trust me. Otherwise, he wouldn’t feel a need to cover up for me. That was what he was doing, covering. At the same time, whatever his motives were, however he reasoned it, the fact that he was acting to protect me, made my heart leap in my chest.
He told Noah about the meeting at Washington Square. The undercover operatives who had gathered in wait for us. For me. And the fate of the Jeep.
Noah laughed. “I want to be there when you tell the mob boss that you filled his car with mops and got it shot to shit by the Feds.”
Horse and I shared a glance.
Still smiling he asked Noah, “Do you think we should call Vassily? Maybe see if I can get him to help us along?”
Noah’s drew breath in, long and slow. “Man. You really are swimming in the big shark pool now, Horse. Carmine Monreale, the Russian mob, not to mention the Feds — there’s a lot of murky water there, and it’s all a long way down.”
He shook his head slowly. “He already took a meeting with you two.” He looked at me for a long time and I had a strong sense that he would have spoken more freely if I hadn’t been there. He told Horse, “You know how those guys operate. You got something from him, on Carmine’s say so. You want something more, you’ll need to have something to exchange.”
He looked back at Horse. “Can you think of anything that would do that job for you?”
They both looked at me, and then back at each other. Horse thought for just a moment.
Then he looked back at me. He spoke quietly. “Can you think of anything that could might work as an incentive for Vassily?”
My cheeks were hot. “If you mean what I think you mean, which is, would I like to share some intelligence from the Bureau with a Russian mobster?” Neither man spoke as I looked from one to the other. My blood was rising but I kept my voice calm. “No, Horse. I can’t think of anything that I’d like to share with him in trade for his help.”
Noah was watching me. I told him, “If I gave Vassily anything, it would be information that was out of date, or already contaminated, otherwise something completely fake.”
Now they were both watching me. “I know my Bureau office is compromised, and I can’t even say how badly. And, yes, I know that means there’s very likely more corruption within the New York Bureaus, as well as in other law enforcement agencies.” The men watched me, quiet and still. I thought hard about sharing the suspicions we had in AC about the NYPD Chief Paul Butler.
Now it was me who was in a textbook interview situation. As they both looked at me, and I knew that we needed something, I felt that I ought to put something out. That I owed it to them to share something. I recognized the impulse, but that didn’t make it go away.
“I was attached to the New York Anti-Corruption branch to investigate other agencies and some government offices.” Even saying as much as that was unwise. It was a way of telling them there were things that I knew, but without saying what they were. Again, I felt like I should give more.
I looked at Horse. Surely he would understand. I’d heard him talk enough about what a big thing ‘honor’ was, how it was such a huge deal for all of the mobsters. Surely he could understand that honest people have honor, too?
“I wouldn’t sell out the Bureau, not any part of it, to a gangster. Not for any reason at all.”
Noah’s voice was low, “As I understand it, that last thing the Bureau knew of you, you were in a Jeep in several lines of automatic fire.”
“And still, I’m certain that it wasn’t sanctioned. I have faith in the system in the Bureau. Even if I have to go to D.C., I’m certain the Bureau will straighten it out.”
Noah shook his head and looked down before he looked back at horse. I was about to speak. Horse kept his eye on Noah as he raised his hand.
His voice was gentle. “That’s enough, don’t you think, Noah?” he was rescuing me. “There’s no point in going any further with that.”
Noah looked hard at me. He spoke slowly and, I thought, still with reluctance. “Yeah, I guess that’s enough.
Noah and Horse came up with a plan. It wasn’t the kind of a plan that I would have chosen, but seeing how wary Noah had been of me all the way along, I kept quiet. Anyway, I thought of a wrinkle I could add to the plot that might make us all a little safer.
My idea was something I should have shared and I knew it. Keeping a detail back from the team you’re operating with is definitely not good procedure. But I knew how it would go, and what they would both say if I told them.