“Go ahead, Becca.” Rinaldo waves his hand at her to continue.
“As I was saying,”—she glances at me briefly as she sticks a pen behind her ear—“the accounts you pointed out do represent most of the missing funds. Do you have any idea who has access to them?”
Rinaldo looks at me and Jonathan, and we glance at each other.
“Nothing concrete,” I say. “The money is being funneled through several countries. It will take a while to track it down.”
“Well, get on it!”
“Yes, sir.”
Jonathan lets out a breath and starts fiddling with the unlit cigarette in his hand. Rinaldo looks between the two of us, and I would have kicked Jonathan for being so obvious, but that would make it worse.
“You two going to share?” Rinaldo asks.
I glare at Jonathan, and he shrugs.
“Not yet, sir.”
Rinaldo huffs and lets Becca get back to her numbers.
“It’s a significant amount,” she says, “and it definitely goes back a couple of years.”
“Justin was clearly involved,” I tell her. “He’s got a brother in the area. We think he may be involved with the gangs down south.”
“Justin was with us a long time,” Lucia says. “Why would he have been skimming?”
“Because he liked money,” I say simply. “He was also an asshole.”
Lucia puts her hand on her hip and eyes me.
“Enough, Evan.” Rinaldo sounds tired.
“Justin would make sense.” Becca nods and gathers up her papers. “I’m going back to the office to see if everything balanced out prior to his involvement. I’ll report back what I find.”
“Thank you, Becca.” Rinaldo lies back in the bed and rubs his eyes as Becca leaves. “How’s the security system at the warehouse?”
“It’s got some issues,” Jonathan says as he looks over at me. “I’m gettin’ close to figurin’ them out.”
I nod. We’ll discuss it later.
“It would be nice to know that’s all done,” Rinaldo says with a sigh. He glances over to a tray of untouched hospital food and rubs his eyes. “I’m tired, boys. Let’s continue this conversation tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Evan—one more thing.” Rinaldo lifts his hand slightly in my direction. It seems to take a lot of effort. I gesture to Jonathan with my head, and he waits outside the door as I go to Rinaldo’s side.
“What is it, sir?”
“Lucia.” He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “You need to take care of her.”
I blink, trying to understand just what he means. That sentence could imply a lot of things.
“In what way?”
“She isn’t going to be happy when this is all over,” he says. “When I’m gone, she’s going to find out it’s all going to you.”
“Put it in her name,” I tell him. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
“No, you have to have all the control.” He turns his head to face me a little better. “Lucia has to feel like she’s getting her share, and there’s only one way to do that.”
My skin crawls a little as I realize what he means.
“No…Rinaldo, I can’t possibly—”
“You can,” he interrupts. “It’s the best way.”
“You always said I wasn’t right for her.” I sit in the rolling chair by the bed and put my face in my hands. “You can’t believe I’ve changed that much.”
“Maybe not,” he says, “but it will placate her.”
“Placate her by marrying her? I thought she and Beni—” I stop the sentence, wishing I hadn’t started it.
“Not him.” Rinaldo furrows his brow. “You don’t trust him.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then why would I let him near my daughter? You’ll take care of her.”
“Did you talk to her about this?”
“Not exactly, but I think she knows it’s what I want.”
My head is spinning. Marry Lucia? I have a hooker about to move into my apartment. I just killed her father and found pictures of myself in his possession. I do not need further complications.
“Does she want it?”
“Ah, Evan.” Rinaldo smiles and shakes his head at me. “Don’t you know all the women want you?”
I pull back a little.
“What, sir?”
“Look in the mirror sometime.” He chuckles softly and keeps shaking his head. “Go now. I need some sleep.”
“Yes, sir.”
I meet Jonathan in the hall, and we both leave quietly. I glance at him as we get in the truck, and I know we’re thinking the same thing.
“He’s fading fast,” I say as I buckle up.
“Yeah.” Jonathan lights a smoke before handing me the pack. “Not sure how all this is going to play out.”
“He’s leaving it all to me.”
“Are you shitting me?” Jonathan shoves the truck back into park and turns sideways. “He’s giving it all to you? Not Beni or Lucia?”
“Lucia can’t handle it.” I light a cigarette and roll down the window a crack to blow the smoke out. “Family or not, I don’t think he really trusts Beni to run it right. He says I’m the only choice. He wants me to marry Lucia.”
“I don’t know if I should say congrats or condolences.”
“Me either. I don’t want to run it all, but I can’t exactly refuse his request. I have no idea what Lucia is going to think.”
“Damn, brotha.” He whistles long and loud. “That’s major shit.”
“I’m gonna need you.” I look at him seriously. “I don’t trust anyone else but you, not even Lucia.”
“Always, brotha.” Jonathan nods.
“You found something about the security software, didn’t you?”
“Definitely Beni,” Jonathan replies as he shifts back into gear. “I had to go through the journaling to find his profile’s footprint, but it’s definitely there.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I trust he understands it.
“So we know Beni mislead you to get you out of the way before the ambush,” I say. “We also know he’s definitely in business with Joshua and skimming from Rinaldo’s profits. Joshua was in with Marcello’s gang and probably took our guns.”
“I think there’s another link on the inside,” Jonathan says.
“Who?”
“Don’t know for sure, but there has to be someone.”
“Why do you think?”
“Because Beni’s login was just part of it.”
“What else did you find?”
“There’s not just a backdoor into my app. There’s also a whole other app collecting information from my data.”
“Where’s it going?”
“A server in the Ukraine.”
“What the fuck?”
“That’s where they keep a lot of hackers these days.”
“What data?”
“All of it, as far as I could tell. I shut that part down, but I don’t know how much was sent.”
“Stay on that.”
“Will do, boss.” Jonathan smirks at me.
“Stop that shit.”
“Might as well get used to it.”
Jonathan drops me off, and I immediately grab a beer and chug it. There is far too much going on in my head, and I need to shut down for a little while before I can start sorting through it. Mundane tasks work well for that, so I start getting ready for Alina’s arrival.
The landlord came through with my request for a bigger place, and it takes me all of about two hours to move my stuff from one apartment to another. All I really have are my clothes, guns, and cash. There’s just enough in the kitchen to make a lame yard sale.
Maybe I should get new dishes.
The new place is definitely roomier. There are two bedrooms, and they come completely furnished. I have no idea if Alina will want to move in furniture, but I figured this was best for now. We can always get a di
fferent place if this one doesn’t work out.
“You think she’ll really put up with you long-term?” Ralph asks as I shove some clothes into a drawer.
I don’t respond because I don’t have an answer. I hope she can put up with me. I plan to behave the best I can, but that isn’t always good enough. Hell, I’m not even sure what it means.
After all, why would anyone put up with my shit for an extended period of time? I’ve been hit on by enough girls to know I’m a decent-looking guy, even without Rinaldo’s comment, and I’ve always kept myself fit, but that only works for a couple of nights. All a woman has to do is sleep in the same bed with me to know how screwy I am.
Alina has. She’s seen that side of me.
Seeing it occasionally and seeing it every night are two totally different things, though. After a week, will she still be all right with me crying in my sleep? A month?
“Fucking doomed,” I mutter. Ralph seems to agree.
There is definitely something different about Alina. I can’t deny that. She seemed to get me from the first night we spent together. When other hookers refused to have anything to do with me after a single night, Alina kept coming back.
“Because she already knew who you were.”
Did she? Yes, I found that picture in a box of things that were obviously left from her childhood, but did she know the men in the picture, or did her father happen across the photos and just throw them in there with the other junk?
I toss some utensils from a box into a drawer, and I’m reminded of yard sales again. Mother Superior used to haul the kids to them in pairs during the summer, looking for toys and games for us without spending much. She’d be dressed in her full habit, and half the time, people would give her the shit for free.
I think she did it on purpose.
I finish transitioning my stuff and give the key to the old place back to the building super. Sitting in the new place feels strange, and I find myself just staring out the window. I’m on a higher floor now, and the view of the city is really beautiful as the sun sets, and the Magnificent Mile is awash in brightly colored lights. It reminds me of the view I had in the old place down the block, and I almost turn around to look for Odin.
Alina will be here tomorrow, and I need to get some actual food into the apartment, so I do a little shopping. I stock the pantry and the refrigerator with anything and everything I think she might want. I even buy fucking tampons and some bubble bath to put in the bathroom. This place comes with a tub; the other only has a shower stall.
With everything as set in place as it can be, I sit on the edge of the bed and stare into space. Ralph sits on the floor near the doorway, unmoving in the silence. He must be waiting for her, too.
I don’t know what to do with myself. I thought the move would take longer than it did, and though I probably ought to be digging into Beni and his relationship with Joshua Taylor, I’m far too preoccupied with the whole photograph thing.
There’s nothing I can do but wonder until Alina is here to ask, so I try to push it to the back of my mind. Unfortunately, that only brings thoughts of Rinaldo to the forefront, which is even worse. I opt for television because I know sleep isn’t going to happen, but after twenty minutes of channel surfing, I turn it off.
With nothing else to occupy me, I start going over my mental list of Rinaldo’s tasks. The accounts he wants set up are all but complete. I just need to get access to the right people, and they’ll be done. Jonathan can handle that. He still thinks I’m looking into Felisa’s death, but there isn’t anything for me to actually investigate there. I may just turn that over to Paulie as a security issue and let him go kill off whoever he wants to nail with the deed. It’s not like he would ever figure it out anyway.
What else did Rinaldo want me to do?
“You should call him.” Ralph swings his legs at he sits on the kitchen island.
I narrow my eyes at him, trying to figure out just what he meant. Then I realize he isn’t making a suggestion—he’s reminding me of what Rinaldo said.
I pull up my laptop and do some minimal research. Jonathan has me connected to all kinds of skip-tracing databanks, and finding a phone number for Sebastian Stark isn’t difficult. Typing it into my phone and hitting send prove to be a little more challenging.
What do I say to him? Do I ask him how he’s doing first or just come right out and tell him we share a father? He doesn’t even know who his parents are. He may not even believe me. The last time we were together, we were ready to kill each other.
I sit on the couch with my finger hovering over the button for a good five minutes while I try to figure out what to say. Nothing good comes to mind, so I just hit the button and hold my breath.
“Yeah?” I recognize his voice when he answers. With my eyes closed, I respond.
“Hello, Bastian,” I say. “This is Evan Arden.”
“Fuck me,” he mutters. “Give me a sec.”
I can hear movement and muffled words on the other end of the line, then silence. A moment later, he speaks again.
“Why are you calling me?” He’s angry, and I’m not quite prepared for that.
“Just checking up on you,” I say. I shake my head at my own stupid words. I open a window, grab a smoke out of my duffel bag, and light it.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” he says. “You can’t be calling me. Someone will figure it all out.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I say. “Seattle is in shambles. No one gives a shit about Franks anymore.”
“Someone might. We aren’t supposed to be taking any risks.”
“I…I have some information for you,” I tell him. I need to get him off his current line of thinking before he hangs up on me. “Something I thought you’d want to know.”
There’s a long pause before he tells me to go on.
“I have a guy who’s really good at research,” I say. “He did some checking into you, into your background.”
“Yeah? And?”
“And he found something I thought I should share. It has to do with your father.”
“My father? I don’t even know who the guy is.”
“I know who he is. Well, who he was.”
“Go on.”
“His name was Alexander Janez.”
“But he’s dead, is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yeah, he’s dead now. Buried in Ohio.”
“What exactly am I supposed to do with this information?”
“There’s a little more to it,” I say. I take a deep breath. “You see, Janez was my father, too.”
The silence on the other end lasts far too long. For a moment, I think he’s hung up on me, but my phone says we’re still connected.
“Bastian?”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“Yeah, I am.”
“When did you find this out?”
I consider telling him the truth but decide against it. It might be easier for him to accept it if I don’t reveal that I had known about our relationship the whole time we were fighting for our lives.
“Just recently.” The phrase is innocuous enough. “I didn’t know what you’d think. I wasn’t sure if I should tell you at all, but Rinaldo thought it was a good idea.”
“Holy fuck. You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“It kinda makes sense,” Bastian says. “The timing is about right. You were born in Chicago, too?”
“I was.”
“Did…did he raise you?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t think he was interested in parenting. Hell, we could have a dozen siblings out there.”
“Fuck. You really think so?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
“What about…what about my mother?”
“I have her name,” I tell him, “but that’s it. I can give you the information, but I don’t know anything else about her. Your mother is not the same as mine.”
“Half brothers,” Bastian
says quietly. “I don’t know what the fuck to think.”
The man does like his f-bombs.
“Are you good with this?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Bastian replies. “Yeah, I’m good with it. It’s going to take a little time to get used to the idea.”
“I just wanted you to know.”
“Yeah, I’m glad you told me. I don’t know what this means, but it’s good to know.”
“I’ve never had someone I could call family,” I say with a chuckle. “It’s kinda weird.”
“Yeah.” Bastian laughs, too. “It is weird. We probably have the market cornered on sibling rivalry.”
“Hey, I didn’t kill ya.”
“You mean I didn’t kill you.”
“Maybe next time.” We both laugh.
“Look,” Bastian says, “I’m out with Raine and some friends of hers from work. She’s gonna start looking for me if I don’t get back in there.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “We can talk some more another time.”
“Yeah. I think that would be good.”
“Later, then.”
“Later.”
I disconnect the call, feeling pretty good about the whole thing. Bastian knows all about it now, and I’ve managed to kill some time. I toss the phone onto the counter and head off to take a shower. Afterwards, I rearrange shit in the kitchen and refold all my clothes. It’s two in the morning, the bars are closed, and I have nothing to do. With my head full of Zach and Bastian, I go back to staring at the ceiling until the sun brightens the windows.
*****
“I still can’t believe you actually changed apartments.”
I just shrug like it’s no big deal. It wasn’t, but I can tell from Alina’s expression that she’s pleased, and that definitely counts for something.
“I didn’t know what all you’d be bringing,” I say, “so I figured it would be best to make sure there was room.”
“You went to a lot of trouble.” Alina steps up and kisses my cheek. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure.” I watch her backside as she carries a small suitcase into her room.
“I doubt this bed will get much use!” she yells.
“Hope not!” I yell back. “Hey, I bought actual food, too!”