Charlie had always taken seriously the advice he’d gotten from Pete Hudson, and he looked up at him for a moment with big, ponderous eyes. “But what would I do? Where am I gonna go?”
“Do something. Go anywhere. But now’s the perfect time for you to get out. Before we’re supposed to go back to Pensacola.”
Charlie looked off. “Okay. I trust you, Pete. But what about you?”
Charlie’s question made Jake consider the thought that had been bothering him immensely, the choice that he had been delaying. There was something he needed to do. It was something he questioned. But he couldn’t think of another option given the situation he was in.
And he couldn’t tell Charlie what the idea was. So he just said, “I’m gonna take care of things here.”
Chapter Six
A two-story, blocky, side-street house with mint green-painted brick walls; decorative filigree iron ornamentation and railing on the second-floor balcony; tall wooden shutters. All of it very New Orleans.
Jake pulled back to rap a knuckle on the door. And stopped. He felt eyes upon him. Turned.
A block away, past several more quintessentially New Orleans homes, one of them canary yellow, a man watched him, an outline of a figure hidden in the shadows bounding a pool of streetlight. The moment Jake’s eyes found him, the man darted away, around a corner.
Jake gave a half moment of consideration to running after him. He could be with Moretti’s gang. Or, worse, he could be one of the mystery assailants who’d been intercepting the Bowmans’ payments.
Or it could just be someone from the neighborhood and Jake’s imagination was running wild with him again.
He faced the door again and knocked. It was his second attempt, as he’d also tried before spotting the man and had waited several long moments with no reply. But this time, as soon as his hand retracted from the knock, the door opened. He already knew someone was standing behind it; he’d seen a shadow move across the glass of the peephole.
The door opened, slowly, tentatively. Kip Bowman’s pleasantly uncomely face peered out, fright in his eyes. “You said we had until tomorrow! You said that not two hours ago!”
“We need to talk,” Jake said.
“Please, you promised you’d never come here. My family! We have until tomorrow. Tomorrow!”
The door opened a fraction farther, and Kip peered outside, eyes darting left and right, scanning for Jake’s partners.
“You don’t understand,” Jake said, pausing before his next words, the revelation he’d been debating, the only way to avert a disaster.
He could delay no longer. He was out of both options and time.
So he said it.
“I’m an undercover cop.”
Inside, there was plenty of oak furniture along with oak trim and an oak bookshelf, all of it stained the same dark brown, matching perfectly. The sofa that Jake was seated upon was modern but homey, with a floral pattern that was subtle, classy. A lived-in feeling emanated from the home, its nooks and crannies, the warm scent, all of it bearing the comfortable weight of family memories.
Kip faced Jake, in an armchair, which was much older looking than the sofa, and standing to the side was Wesley, his hand on his father’s shoulder. The two of them wore the same clothes from earlier in the evening—Kip, a green flannel work jacket over a faded blue polo shirt; Wesley, a black V-neck T-shirt and a pair of baggy, light-washed jeans.
Seeing the outfits again not in the warehouse's dark parking lot but in the bright, warm light of the living room, sent a wave of melancholy over Jake. He pictured Kip on the asphalt, screaming, Glover kicking him in the side.
A woman of Kip’s age, her brown hair streaked with white and eyes filled with dread, sat in the adjacent loveseat beside a pale-skinned teenage daughter wearing wannabe goth clothing. A boy of about three was splayed out on the round, red area rug smashing Hot Wheels cars together, and when his mother commanded him to stop, he huffed and ran the cars in parallel lines along the pattern of the rug.
“Pensacola Police?” Kip said. “Florida … I don’t understand.”
Jake was taking a hell of a chance revealing himself to Bowman, but there was still only so much detail he could provide. So he said, “The men you’ve seen me with, the two I was with earlier, are part of a gang out of Pensacola. There’s an organized crime connection between that gang and Nick Moretti’s. I need you to tell me what’s happened here. From the beginning.”
He pulled his PenPal notebook from his pocket, a brand-new one he’d picked up at an office supply store on the way to the Bowman’s. The cover was bright orange; the pages were clean and fresh. He took the mechanical pencil from the binding.
Kip looked up at his son—who squeezed his shoulder encouragingly, walked away—and then faced Jake again.
“Three months ago, one of Moretti’s men comes to my shop. Says that we were lucky enough to be selected for protection service. We were told that we were to pay an annual fee of ten thousand.”
A classic protection racket—a scheme in which a group of ne’er-do-wells guarantee “safety” from violence to individuals who pay up. But the protection they’re providing isn’t from any genuine threat; rather those who have offered the protection will supply the violence should payment not be made.
Jake nodded. “You went to the police, I hope?”
“Of course. But what are they going to do? Everyone knows Moretti runs the show around here, but no one can touch him. And besides, it’s not like the man we saw officially announced himself as one of Moretti’s men.”
“So you gathered your money.”
“Ten thousand is a lot to pay, but what choice did I have? I made a withdrawal from our bank and was on my way to the place Moretti’s man told us to meet, and
