“I met with Alessandro last night,” I replied. I might as well get straight to the chase.
Flint’s smile slipped off his face in response to my answer.
“What happened?” he asked gravely, his face back to its usual morose frown. He hadn’t always been so somber. His drastic personality change was just one more thing that I held the mafia responsible for.
“The Family’s involved with the case,” I replied. “I’m not sure exactly how, but I received a friendly warning last night advising me to quit the investigation. Alessandro didn’t outright admit it, but it was pretty clear that someone in the Family has their hands in this.”
“I see.” He clasped his hands together on the desk in front of him. “What do you want to do?”
“What do you mean?” I asked him, confused by his question. “You’re the director, you tell me.”
“I mean about quitting the case.” He clarified. “Do you still feel comfortable staying on as a consultant?”
My eyes went wide as I realized what he was asking.
“Of course, I’m staying on the case,” I retorted. “I’m not going to let them cow me into submission.”
“I understand your feelings,” Flint sighed. “But you have to be reasonable right now. You’ve been a tremendous help to the SDCT up until now, but this will be the first time you’ve gone up against your own former Family. Are you really okay with that?”
He was asking out of concern for my safety, but that ship had already sailed, considering how I’d made the first move by shanking Giovanni last night.
“Doesn't matter now.” I shrugged. “I already declared war on them, so there’s no going back now.”
“You did what?” Flint gasped, alarm clear in his voice. He was showing an unexpectedly wide range of emotions this morning.
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to hear the answers to.” I smirked. “Let’s just say something went down at the bar, and I highly doubt they’re going to take it lying down.”
“Oh, Nick,” he groaned in frustration. “All right. Well, if you’re really determined to carry on with this, go stake out the bar with Jase. If they really are involved, the quickest way for us to find something will be to catch them in the act. How privy are you to which businesses in Miami are owned by the mafia?”
“Oh, I think I can remember most of them,” I replied. “I wouldn’t know about any that were established in the past three years, though.”
“Okay.” Flint nodded. “Come up with a list and give it to Agent Stein. I’ll have him comb through their bank records to see if any suspicious transactions pop out at him.”
“Most of them are used as money-laundering fronts,” I scoffed. “They’re all going to have suspicious transactions.”
“We’ll focus on ones for the past three months in the five-thousand-dollar range,” Flint replied. “That’s the number that keeps coming up during each of the cases.”
“Okay.” I agreed. “I’ll get started on that and let you know when it’s ready.”
“Good,” Flint grunted. “Let me know if there’s anything else you need.”
That sentence was a dismissal, so I got up out of the chair and headed out into the office. It had come alive while I was having my meeting with Flint, and the familiar hustle and bustle immediately surrounded me as agents moved and chattered around me.
I spotted Jase sitting at his desk by the entrance and grinned impishly. I hadn’t been able to scare Flint, but maybe I could still get Jase.
I crept up behind him. It was loud enough in the office that I was able to sneak up close to him without being heard. He hunched over his desk, working on something, so I leaned in as close as I could before slamming my hand down on his desk and yelling his name.
“What the--” He yelped and jumped in his seat before turning around to stare at me indignantly. “What is wrong with you?”
“Lend me your desk,” I replied instead of answering his question. I pulled a chair away from an unoccupied desk and pulled it up to sit opposite Jase. “I need to write something down for Agent Stein.”
“When did you even get here?” Jase asked as he looked up at the door. “I didn’t see you come in, and I didn’t hear Bette yelling at you, either.”
“I’m sneaky,” I replied vaguely as I racked my brain to remember all the mafia-owned businesses I could. As the underboss, part of my duties had been to stay aware of all the mafia’s business ventures and keep track of our records, so I was pretty familiar with everything the Family was involved in.
Still, it had been years since I’d even thought about it. Once again, I frowned as I realized how easily I was slipping into old habits, as though I’d never left at all. I told myself that it was different now since I was doing this to solve a crime. It was all I could do to convince myself that I wasn’t making a mistake in pursuing this.
32
Jase
After he’d given Stein the list of all the mafia-owned businesses that he could remember, Nick and I headed out to the bar to conduct the first night of our stake-out. Even though we’d been joking and chatting for the entire day as we waited for nightfall, now that we were here, he seemed a little sullen. Normally we would play cards or something while on a stakeout, but today he only seemed interested in staring at the bar, and people walked in and out. At first, I just thought he was just really focused on the case, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was getting into another funk.
To be honest, it hadn’t shocked me to learn that Nick’s former mafia Family was involved in the case. I’d already suspected as much, but I still felt bad
