Page 66 of Tesio
I stood up and brushed the dust off myself, before I reached down to help Micro up, and then the prospect, before I glared down at Rocket, who’d stayed down while I fought to breathe.
“I’d spit on you, but you’re not worth wasting the saliva. Watch yourself, cunt. When you’re sober, we’ll finish this, and I don’t think you’re gonna like how it goes.”
I slapped Micro’s back as I passed him, murmuring an apology, because I genuinely didn’t have a beef with him, but Rocket? That fucker was dead meat. I just wasn’t down for killing someone who was as helpless as a fucking kitten right now. I’d fight him for real when he’d be aware of the pain.
Ah pain. And now I was thinking of her again, my little pain. The fucking medicine my exhausted body needed. The remedy for fucking everything wrong in my life. And I couldn’t even risk reaching out to her, because I’d get her killed.
Jamie
Ididn’t hear fromGrease at all that day, but I’d done what I could to look into those bastards I’d seen at thecompound, and I didn’t like what I found. The registration number on the helicopter was registered to a shell company, and tracing that led me to another, and another, and pretty soon I was so tangled up that I couldn’t figure out what the hell I was doing, so I reached out to someone I know in the Digital Crime division, and he followed the threads for me.
It was late that afternoon when he called me up to meet him in the cafeteria, and when I got there, he was looking edgy.
“Hey, you got something for me?” Eddie, the guy I sent the details to, paled and looked over his shoulder.
“I don’t know what you’re getting caught up in, but this’ll get you killed.”
Huh? I mean, I figured they were bad guys, but how bad is bad?
“You traced the reg number?”
He cursed, leaning really close. “You don’t fuck with mafia unless you want to die, and thanks to you, I’m the one the fucking trail will lead to, if they trace my blundering through cyberspace!”
Mafia. Hadn’t I even considered that? I mean, I’d convinced myself not to be so stupid, because mafia here? In a small town in Hampshire?
“Mafia? Seriously? Like with a Don running the ‘family’, and all that crap?”
“Keep your voice down!” He hissed at me, grabbing my arm and dragging me out into the hall.
“Ed, you’re freaking me out.”
“You should be freaked out. There are ears everywhere in this place, in every place. You can’t know who’s in their pocket, but they always find out when someone’s snooping into their business.”
I was panicking now, because it was bad enough that I might be dragging myself into this mess, but Eddie? I didn’t meanto put him in danger. There was only one thing I could think of to try and protect him, and it meant putting myself in the crosshairs.
“Give me their names, and walk away, Eddie. I’ll sort this.”
“How? How exactly are you going to sort this? Fuck it, I’m going on sick leave, and you need to stay clear of it!”
“The names!”
He cursed, glancing around us again. “Look, I’ve never looked into them, but we have a few names on file that are ‘people of interest’, but nobody actually looks into them. The Don,Jesus, I’m really doing this…” he took a deep breath, “the Don is Massimo Rossi, and I have two other names. Luca Vanotti and Tesio Agosti. I don’t know who they are to the Don, but they’ve all come up in some way at some point.”
“Okay, go on your leave. I’ll make this go away.”
He caught my sleeve as I started to walk down the hall.
“How?”
“By putting myself on their radar instead. I’m sorry, Eddie.”
I tugged my sleeve from his grip and hurried away, going straight to the desk I had access to for paperwork. I logged in, and started dropping their names into search engines. If someone was flagging these names, they’d find me.
My god, I didn’t want to die, but I couldn’t let someone else take my heat. If I’d just stayed out of this, fuck… if I’d just minded my own business, just like Grease tried to get me to do every damn time… it was too late now though. I’d made my bed, hadn’t I?
Now all I had to do was wait for them to track me down, and pray that they’d kill me quickly.
Chapter Thirty-Five
