Page 37 of The Mob and his Messenger

The Chief of Police, Clarissa Kerkenwall, turns to me with a deep frown on her face. She’s about fifty-five with deep brown skin and knowing eyes, and when she sighs I can hear the weight of her position in the sound.

“This is the sort of thing terrorists do, Mr. DeLuca. We can’t have this in our city. We’re lucky nobody’s been hurt already.”

“Because my men closed off the streets,” I growl. “Because I identified the pattern in time and used my authority to act with speed. Don’t forget that, Ms. Kerkenwall.”

She grimaces and then allows a nod.

“Something has to be done about this man,” she says. “We’ve lived in peace for all these years, slowly taking the city back from the degradation and hell it used to live in. And now what? Some crazed lunatic is going to come along and shatter our equilibrium in a matter of days? First the explosion, then the murders, now this …”

“Find him, then,” I say. “Arrest him.”

“We don’t know where he is.”

“Then I’ll have to find him,” I growl.

“And do you have a plan of action as far as that’s concerned?”

“Events are in motion,” I murmur, wishing I was back in bed with Dallas and Poppet, both of them enveloped in my arms as I listen to the sound of them breathing together.

She sighs again and stands up straighter, hands behind her back, staring as the men pick up every piece of poisoned candy they can find. They’ve been over the street twice already and will do so another ten times, just to be safe, just to make sure Patty doesn’t win.

He poisoned every street with a mob-owned bar.

It didn’t take me long to work out the connection since the candies had Italian Scum written on them in tiny letters, as though they were pills at a rave. I sent my men out to recon the areas and was proven right. Then it was a small leap to bring in our police contacts and round up my men to close off the streets and swiftly deal with the problem.

But that doesn’t solve the larger problem, which is that Patty fucking McGuinness will do anything to win this war.

Especially now that he thinks I’ve killed two of his men.

“I’ve had word from my superior,” Ms. Kerkenwall murmurs.

“And?”

She swallows and pops her head to the side, upper lip curling in either distaste or anger. “And it wouldn’t be the end of the world if this Patty character found his way into a hole in the ground.”

“You need to be careful,” I murmur, fists clenched, rage boiling through me. “Because this man is the scum of the earth. He kills children, dogs. He’s a rapist and I’m fairly certain he murdered his own father. If you’re giving me permission to put him in the fucking ground, I need to know there will be no repercussions.”

“For performing a public service?” she says wryly. “Why on earth would you be punished for that?”

I nod and stride away before anybody finds an angle into the closed-off street and can photograph us. It wouldn’t be good for the Chief of Police to be seen with a man shown executing two Irishmen on video. I walk to the end of the street and climb into the back of a sedan, Gabriel glancing over at me.

“Skip, what’d she say?”

Gabriel’s face looks drained, the weight of this war hanging on him. His hair lays matted to the side, not combed over like it normally is, and his eyes are rimmed with dark circles of sleeplessness.

And when he finds out about Dallas, then what? Will that make him happy?

I tell Gabriel about us having free reign on Patty and his face lights up, seeming younger.

“Really?” he grins gruesomely. “Then he’s a dead man walking.”

I sigh. “I don’t know, Gabriel. Killing is not something I take lightly. If we can get Patty alive, he’ll serve the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison. He’ll be locked in hell all day and all night, and he’ll have to think about how he failed, how he couldn’t take the city from us, from me. That seems like a harsher punishment to me. I haven’t killed anyone since those bastards murdered my parents in front of me. And for all your bluster, neither have you.”

“We fought,” Gabriel mutters, looking strangely at me. I’ve never explicitly mentioned my parents to him before. “Didn’t we? Maybe we didn’t kill, but we fought. We bled for our empire. And now this prick’s trying to take it all away.”

I sigh, letting my head fall back. “Any rat can take a life. It takes a wolf to show restraint.”

“Is that what we are, eh? Wolves?”

“It’s what we’ve always been,” I snarl.

Gabriel shrugs and turns to the window as the driver guides us through the city, back toward my offices.

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