Page 30 of Her Keeper
“Watch your mouth, Caruso,” I muttered. “I can have you killed in a heartbeat. I didn’t call to talk about Penny. I called to talk about you. What the fuck are you doing working with a reporter? The families don’t do the press.”
He laughed again, his laughter more confident this time. “Those are the old rules, Rossi. Times, they are ‘a changing. You got to do what you got to do, and no one can do otherwise. You take your friends where you can find them.”
I frowned at that, because that sort of attitude didn’t fly in our world. “Your dad know what you’re doing with her?”
Tony’s silence told me that Lou Caruso definitely did not know what Tony was doing with Monica Hart. That had been a lucky guess on my part. Two lucky guesses, actually. I hadn’t thought he’d admit to working with her—hell, I hadn’t known that hewasworking with her—and I certainly hadn’t thought he’d admit that his father didn’t know about it.
Of course I also didn’t trust Tony to be telling me the whole truth. For all I knew, he was lying his fat fucking ass off right now.
“I’m done talking to you,” Tony snapped suddenly. “Best of luck to you, Rossi. If I find you before your father does, I’ll kill you myself. Not that I expect you to live that long.”
He disconnected and I hung up the phone, my eyes on Penny.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked, her eyes narrowed.
“Probably,” I told her. “Tony doesn’t know as much as he’s pretending to know, or he would have been rubbing it in our faces. I don’t know if he’s actually working with Monica or not, but he’s in way over his head. And something tells me he knows it.”
Penny snorted. “Typical. So the entire phone call was a waste of time.”
“Not at all,” I said, my mind moving quickly and coming to some conclusions. “We know that Tony, at least, is connected to Monica. If he wasn’t, he would have sounded even more confused than he already did. Now we just need to figure out who they’re both working for.”
And that right there was the crux of the matter.
Because until I found out who they were working for, I didn’t have anything to use in negotiations with my father.
13
MICHAEL
“You better have something good for me,” I said, when I answered the call. It was Alfonso this time, and though we were still on barely speaking terms, courtesy of his blaming me for Penny’s current predicament—fair—I was hoping he was calling to tell me he had my back.
Because right now I needed allies. Alfonso had always been one of my best friends and his absence in my life felt like a gaping hole. Now would be the perfect time for him to decide to remedy that.
“I don’t,” he said sharply. “But I have news you need to hear.”
There seemed to be a lot of that going around these days. And I was getting pretty fucking tired of it.
“Okay, shoot me.”
A long pause. “Shoot you?”
“I mean you might as well. Everyone else seems to want to.”
He chuckled quietly. “I was hoping to be more on the saving-your-ass side of things, actually. After all, you have my sister.”
I couldn’t help the grin spreading across my face at that. “That’s very good news. So what do you have for me?”
I didn’t particularly want it if it was bad news, but if he was calling it meant that whatever he needed to tell me was important. And the sooner I knew, the sooner I could start figuring out how we were going to fix it.
Luckily, Alf had never been a man to delay. “It’s bad, Michael. I talked to some contacts in the press. People I trust. Turns out Monica’s been shopping this story for some time. Selling it on spec. She was counting on someone to come through for her with a lot of information, and now she’s got it. She’s going to publish it today or tomorrow. It... paints a bad picture, Michael.”
I gritted my teeth, feeling my fury rising. What the fuck was the woman after?
And who the fuck was she working for?
“How bad a picture?”
“It spills on a lot of what we’re doing. The jewel business out west. The valuables from Reno. All the shipments we have coming in, and the resales. It makes Joseph’s indictment look small time.”
