Page 44 of Working for the Mob

The person didn’t move. I took a couple steps into the room and said louder, “Get up!”

The figure jolted out of the desk chair and screamed. “What?”

“HOLD STILL!” I didn’t want to shoot in case I absolutely had to.

“What the hell?” a voice I recognized asked.

“Christ, Lance. What are you doing in my office?” I asked, and de-cocked the gun. I returned it to the safety of its holster.

Lance rubbed sleep from his left eye and glared at me with his right. From the glass in front of him, I could tell that he’d helped himself to my whiskey cabinet.

“I’ve been looking for you all day. Where have you been?”

“I went into the city. I had to buy a new oven.”

“You mean you had to wave around a wad of cash in front of Genevieve Baker, to convince her that a surly mobster is a solid husband?” He chuckled at his own joke.

I overcame the desire to reach for my gun and pistol-whip the smug grin off his face. He could tell his words hit true, and laughed harder. “Yep, that’s it. What do you think she’s going to say when she finds out what you do?”

It didn’t matter. She despised me and I wouldn’t let myself get close to her. It was safest this way.

“Why are you here?”

“I came to tell you something,” Lance said. He paused to lord it over me.

“Well?” I asked when he didn’t continue.

“That drifter that stole Genevieve’s clutch––George said there’s been sightings of him in West Lannington,” Lance said. George meaning Officer Brighton.

“Sightings?” I asked him to clarify.

“He’s been in and out of town. Never stays in one place.”

I don’t know what it meant, but it couldn’t be good. “You think he’s working for them?”

Themmeant the Valuncias.

“As far as I can tell, he’s never talked to them. But apparently, he disappears every time George drives into town,” Lance said, which made sense because we were looking for him. “And we’ve got another job.”

“The last one didn’t do a damn thing except piss them off and I’m struggling to feed the town. Why are we doing another one?”

The Valuncias aren’t paying us anymore,” Lance said.

Shit. That meant they were no longer under our control. No longer a subservient town to us, West Lannington had become its own city.

“But the Valuncias have got to be bleeding right now,” Lance said. “They may think we’re pussy-footing around, but they can’t afford to carry on without our business. Especially without their cathouse. We just need to nudge them in the right direction.”

“Who is it?” I asked, regretfully. I wanted this war over. I wanted to return to how things were before the Valuncia’s trade embargo. Before Genevieve.

“Darrell Valuncia,” he said.

“No.” At twenty-five, Darrell sat fourth-in-line to the Valuncia monarchy. He had a wife and two kids.

“I have it on good authority that Darrell has been the one hitting our vans,” Lance said. My fingers tightened into fists. We had lost a couple good men to them. “We can’t let that go unpunished.”

“How am I supposed to get him alone? I won’t hit him at home. Not with his family there,” I said.

Lance’s face mutated into a grotesque grin.

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