Page 23 of Forbidden Bond

“Sure, that’s why he took a bullet for you. Thing is, if he’s off the table, who’s around to look out for you? You can be damn annoying, Scamp. Sometimes I want to shoot you too.”

They rode a couple of blocks without words. Whatever thoughts he was lost in, she could only stick on one.

“He can’t be dead. I’d know if he was dead, right? I’d feel it?”

“Yeah,” Strat said. “One fucking bullet’s not gonna take down a guy like Ire McDade.”

“But with his cousin, Biz, the bullshit he’s pulling with the Manzanis… What if they come for him? If he can’t defend himself—”

“Think about it,” he said and turned on the radio. “If Ire McDade had been found dead in your grandfather’s house, fuck, it would be everywhere. The guy accused of murdering the alderman is taken down in the same building? Shit, Scamp. And there’s you, granddaughter and girlfriend of the victims, gone.”

“Does that make me like a black widow or something?”

“It’s newsworthy. I don’t have to tell you, this is what you do every day. You telling me if you were outside this situation looking in, that you wouldn’t want it? You wouldn’t think there’d be a story to tell.”

“There is a story to tell. My father’s been trying to get me to tell it his way all week.”

“Point is, Scamp, if Ire died the night you left, if he died in that room, we’d know it.”

“All week my dad kept the TV off. I had no way to know if it was in the papers.”

“I’m telling you it wasn’t,” he said. “Yeah, me and the cop were on your tail, trying to track you down, but we were paying enough attention to know that. You and Ire’s names are linked now. Even if the world doesn’t know it, we do.”

She tried to take solace in that. “If they found him after he was gone, his people, they’d get him out of there. They wouldn’t let him be found like that, not to be a public spectacle.”

“You talked about it?” Strat asked. “What’s the contingency plan?”

“Closest we got to one of those was Conn making it damn clear he’d hurt anyone who tried to hurt me.”

And him saying she would never go before him, that he simply wouldn’t let it happen. Too bad she couldn’t deliver on the same promise for him.

“If the way you tell it’s right, he backed that up by taking a bullet for you.”

“Yeah, but don’t you see how frustrating that is? He has that power, those resources, what the hell have I got?”

“You think the McDades’ll shun you? If Ire’s gone, you lose that connection, that army?”

“Depends who takes his place,” she said and squeezed her eyes closed. “No talk of that, we’re being optimistic here.”

“Okay. So let’s say he’s alive. His people got in there, discovered him bleeding, then what? What’s the first thing they do?”

“Call Niall. He wasn’t there. None of our usual people were there.”

“So none of the guys on the street had the authority or smarts to figure it out. Okay, that’s good.”

“How is that good? That means they wasted time. Valuable time. What if they couldn’t get Niall on the phone? What if they waited for him to arrive?”

“They’ve gotta have a plan, a procedure, for what happens when McDades are hurt.”

Like a SOP. They weren’t exactly a corporation with an employee handbook.

“They have a doctor on their ledger,” she said. “When Daly was hurt, he rested up at the doctor’s.”

“Where is that?”

“I don’t know. I asked to visit Daly. Conn wouldn’t let me. I don’t know where the doc is, if he’s in McDade territory, or even in the damn city.”

He eased her hand from her leg, extricating her nails from the denim marked by her infuriation.

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