Page 17 of The Woman with the Wallet

He lived over in Hell’s Kitchen in an apartment one floor above a nightclub.

It wasn’t even late, but the noise coming through the floor as I went up the stairs vibrated into my shoes and up my legs.

Zeno, it seemed, must not be bothered by noise.

“You can just leave it there,” a distracted voice called through the door after I knocked hard enough to make the door shake in its jamb just to be heard over the music below.

“Zeno, open up,” I called, raising my voice to a near yell.

“That’s the oh-so-important sounding voice of a member of my family, isn’t it?” he called as something knocked to the ground inside the apartment before, suddenly, the locks disengaged, and the door whipped open.

I was pretty sure right then that I’d never actuallyseenZeno before. Because the man was memorable.

Like his brothers, he was tall.

He was a bit on the thin side, and he seemed to be on a mission to out-tattoo his older brother Cesare with how much of his body was covered already. And I knew that because he was wearing nothing but a pair of pink sleep shorts printed with a bunch of ice cream cones on them.

That, a cross around his neck, and a towel wrapped around his head the way my sisters wore one after a shower, was all he had on.

His nails were short but painted black. And he had a ring in one of his eyebrows and one that peeked out on his tongue when he spoke.

“Oh, interesting. Miko, right?” he asked, reaching up toward the towel on his head and pulling it off, making shoulder-length black hair fall in a surprisingly untangled mass.

He reached up, running his hand through the mostly dry strands.

“Sat down after my shower to rest and lost track of time,” he said, waving at himself. “You know how it is.”

“Not really, no,” I admitted.

“Executive functioning,” he said, waving toward his brain. “Not always my strong suit. So,” he said, clapping so loudly he caught me off guard. “You need something from me, I’m assuming.”

“If you’re not busy.”

“I’ve been watching fuckers on social media clean carpets for three hours,” he admitted. “You’d be saving me from myself.”

“The cleaning thing,” I said as I stepped into his apartment. “It’s a spectator sport for you, not a hobby, huh?” I asked, looking at his cluttered kitchen cabinets, the bag of trash sitting behind the door, the desk littered with a dozen coffee cups and energy drinks.

It was a surprisingly small apartment, considering his place in the Family. Just your average-sized studio with the bed wedged against the wall in the corner and the kitchen on the other side. Directly in the center, where you might expect both the living and dining area, instead featured four desks put together to make one big square around a fancy-ass computer chair. Screens of various sizes and elevations were on the desks. There were several laptops open. And one was showing someone power washing some filthy red and tan rug.

“Yeah, I mean… I got this bad habit where I want to clean everything all at once, then start, lose interest, and end up making shit worse than it was to begin with. Here,” he said, finding a folding chair and setting it in front of his desks as he moved behind. “So, what do you need?”

“I was wondering what kind of access you might have into the cameras at an intersection.”

“In my experience, if you’re patient enough, you can get into anything,” he said, taking the address from me and starting to click around on three separate keyboards, each of them making different sounds. “Creamy, right?” he asked, making my brows squint.

“What?”

“The keyboard. The sound it makes? Smooth. Creamy.”

“Ah, yeah,” I agreed.

“Now, when I get in, what am I looking for?”

“Me,” I told him.

“And then a woman ramming into me.”

“She lifted your wallet, didn’t she?” he asked, shooting me a bemused smile.

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