“Where are you, little girl? This is Paulo Scarabelli.” She took in a deep gasping breath. She’d seen the man before but never ever thought about speaking to him. Paulo ran the mob in all of southern New Jersey. He was a powerful man. She was too frightened to respond.
“Tina? We had some serious shit go down. But you know all about that, don’t you? Your little girlfriend? She killed five people. She also took a lot of money.”
Girlfriend? She shook her head. She didn’t have a girlfriend. Even if she did, no one Tina knew was dumb enough to go stealing from the mob.
“Mister Scarabelli. I don’t know nothing about no money or about no girl that hurt anyone.” Her voice shook.
“Don’t believe you, girly.” He was quiet for a moment and she could hear his raspy breathing. She recalled that he smoked big, fat cigars, and back before her mom had started getting stupid, the man had come by a few times and seen her. Last time Tina had seen her “Uncle” Paulo, the man had been coming out of her mother’s bedroom late at night, stinking of red wine and one of his cigars.
When he spoke again, his voice was deadly calm. “Tina, I knew your daddy. He wouldn’t have wanted anything to happen to you, and so I’m trying to give you a chance. I got Tony and three other guys say they saw you and then they saw the girl that came in after you left the room. All of them said the same thing, girly. They said you and her, you were probably working together.”
“I-” She shook her head, forgetting that he couldn’t see her. The words didn’t want to come. This was crazy! She’d never, ever do the family wrong.
“You listen to me. You got maybe three days to get back here with my money, little girl, before they have to drag your skinny little ass out of the river and plant you next to your momma.”
His words had sounded like hammers inside her head and she’d started crying right then and there, like a little baby. She couldn’t help it. She was so scared, more terrified than she’d ever been in her life.
She hung up. After two minutes, she pulled the battery from the disposable phone and then threw the phone as far as she could into the scrubby bushes behind the motel. Just in case they could track her. She’d heard about that sort of stuff. People tracked by their cell phones. She wasn’t ever letting them do that to her.
Then she’d come back to the room and gone to sleep.
She seemed to be sleeping a lot. More than was healthy. Normally Tina slept for maybe six hours a night, but lately she was losing extra hours. Maybe it was grief. Maybe she was just shutting down. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? She’d heard that grief was like that. She’d never known anyone who was dead, not until now. Well, except for her dad and that had happened when she was just a kid.
She’d watched the news and tried to see if there was any news about Tony Parmiatto. There was nothing. She was starting to worry too much about that. If Scarabelli was waiting to talk to her and waiting with Tony, it maybe meant he blamed Tony for the money. And that could be bad for Tony. If he was dead, there should be something. If he was alive, he might be one of the people who came looking for her and he would be so angry Someone knocked on the door very hard. “Tina Carlotti? I got a telegram for you.”
Tina’s heart hammered in her chest and she sat up fast, barely even aware of whether or not she was dressed decently.
She opened and closed her mouth half a dozen times without saying a word. No one knew she was here. She’d signed the register as Anna Smith, and that was all she had put down.
She stood up and made herself go over to the door. Her hands shook, but she forced herself to be brave. If someone knew she was here, well, there had to be a reason for that.
She opened the door and looked up at the man standing there. He was young, somewhere close to her age, but he was dark and he was muscular and he was handsome. His eyes looked her over from head to toe and he flashed her a smile that was too short lived to be sure she’d even seen it.
“You Tina Carlotti?”
“Maybe.” He handed her an envelope. His eyes took her in and he must have decided she was as broke as she looked because he turned away, not waiting to see if she would offer a tip.
Just as well, really. She wouldn’t have.
After she’d relocked the door, Tina opened the envelope and read the contents.
It read: Tina,
You have questions.
I have answers.
Meet me in Boston, at the Stevenson Hotel.
Bring enough money to get here. Hide the rest.
A Friend
She read the note several times and then threw it away. Then she paced the room like she was doing laps.
Twenty minutes later, she pulled it out of the trash and read it again.
She really had very little to pack.
Thirty minutes later she left the dive behind and started walking. Most of the money made it as far as the bus station in town. Once there, she locked it in one of the lockers you could rent and shoved the key in her jeans. Four thousand dollars, mostly in twenties, wound up in her pockets and the insides of her shoes. If there was one thing she was certain of, it was simply that money would spend, even if it smelled like her feet.
She bought another disposable phone while she waited, and ate food because her stomach reminded her that she hadn’t for almost two days. She climbed aboard the bus and stared at the other people already there, making sure to meet each of them eye to eye. No fear. Not ever. Fear got you killed or worse.
There was nothing left for her but to maybe get some answers. And really, it beat the hell out of waiting for something to happen.
Most of the people on the bus couldn’t have cared less about her, but there was one guy, sort of cute, who checked her out as she walked toward the back of the long vehicle.
Tina closed her eyes, tired for no real reason, and when she opened them again, the bus was just pulling into the station in Boston.
The cute guy was gone. Typical.
Getting to the hotel was easy. She handled it the way she handled everything, with a hard look in her eyes and a big bluff about how confident she was. Down where it counted, Tina was a wimp. Up on the surface, she could fake it with the best. So she did. The Stevenson was a big, sprawling affair with the sort of architecture that the oldest parts of Camden had. Classy, expensive. The difference was that Boston was alive and Camden was too stupid to know it was dead.
She shook her head and pushed her grief aside. Her mom was dead. She couldn’t fix that. Her life sucked. She was working on fixing that part. Crying about Mom wasn’t going to help, but getting angry would. Getting pissed off about all the crap going wrong in her world would go a lot further than dealing with the blues, so she set her face and walked into the hotel with long, fast strides and a calm expression on her face.
First person to mess with her was getting kicked in the nuts. No more Ms. Nice Guy.
Chapter Twenty-One
Hunter Harrison
The hotel room was different this time. Much nicer. Also, there were clothes, real clothes, the sort he could wear without having to hold the jeans up. They were in his size, or close enough that it didn’t matter.
Hunter looked around the room warily. If there was one thing he’d gotten used to, it was being played by the man who was keeping him enslaved. He wanted to be angry, but it was hard. He couldn’t keep the fury going. Instead he was tired, and much as he hated it, he was getting used to his life in hotel rooms.
Someone knocked at the door and he realized that the sound was exactly what had awakened him. “Room service!” The voice was friendly enough. He walked over to the door and looked through the tiny lens that allowed him to see a distorted version of what was on the other side. A man was there, young, dark haired, with a uniform
