The BMW sportscar growled through the night as they drove toward the freeway out of Atlantic City. The grimy haze of light pollution from the casinos and urine-color streetlights drowned all but the brightest stars in the night sky above them.
Micah drove quickly, aggressively, slamming his BMW through the Monopoly-named small streets toward the freeway, but Kylie was accustomed to New Jersey drivers. His driving didn’t scare her.
Admitting to Rita, Alma, and Priyanka that she’d screwed things up with Salvatore Grande scared her.
Kylie made the call anyway.
After only half of a ring, Rita answered. “Hello? Kylie? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Kylie said. “Is everybody else okay?”
The four of them worked together to accommodate Atlantic City tourists who desperately wanted to do something wrong. They were a team, best friends, and four work wives.
Or as the four girls liked to joke, future co-defendants.
Rita told her, “Alma and Priyanka are getting ready for tonight. Where the hell are you?”
Beside her in the car, Micah must have overheard her call because he growled, “Don’t tell her anything.”
Kylie ignored him and told Rita, “I’m leaving town.”
“What?” Rita yelled into the phone. “We can’t work without you. What the hell is going on?”
“I’m really sorry. I had a problem with Salvatore Grande.”
“You what? What do you mean you had a problem with Salvatore Grande?” Rita demanded.
“Don’t give her any more information,” Micah said. The car accelerated as they took the exit to the Garden State Parkway. “Just hang up. You shouldn’t have told her that we’re leaving town.”
Kylie brushed her hand at him and told Rita, “I’m with that guy I met a while ago at the Borgata casino, Micah Shine.”
“Dammit,” he muttered.
Rita said in her ear, “Kylie, we’ve had this conversation. We don’t sleep with marks, and we sure as hell don’t go to the second location with them. I know that time you slept with him was a one-time thing because he was hot, but you need to stop this and come home.”
“I’m not going to the second location with him. I need to leave town, and he’s leaving, too.”
Micah growled, “Stop giving her information.”
Kylie wanted to slug him. Instead, she said to Rita, “I made a deal with Micah, remember? I signed a contract with him for a month that will make me a hell of a lot of money and give us all a cushion for a while. And he isn’t from around here, so Salvatore probably won’t know about it. We could keep all the money.”
Rita’s voice was dry as she grumbled, “And let me guess. It all went south. As in, there is no money.”
“Sort of,” Kylie sighed.
Rita’s retort was sharp. “Shit.”
“I mean, I’m still going to get the money,” Kylie tried to reassure her. “You’ll still get your cut, and then we’ll all have some money in the bank even if I’m not here anymore.” She turned to Micah, who scowled as he drove. “Right?”
“Yes,” he said. “We have a deal, but that deal was that you obey me in all things for a month. Now hang up the phone.”
Rita’s voice sounded like scraping metal as it came out of the phone’s tiny speaker. “I’m not the one you have to worry about, Kylie. We all have to worry about Salvatore. And if everything went south with Salvatore, your Micah Shine guy isn’t going to give you any money because he’s going to end up in the Schuylkill River.”
A fetid wave of sick sweat broke over Kylie. Bloated corpse, her father, his lower jaw hanging and the back of his head blown off.
Animal damage.
Rita didn’t know about Kylie’s dad. No one in her life did.
Except for Salvatore.
And now, somehow, Micah.
She said to Rita, “Yeah, well, Salvatore is why we’re heading north out of Atlantic City.”
Micah growled, “Stop telling her our location.”
Rita asked, “Are you in the car with him right now?”
“Yeah. We’re turning off the AC connector onto the Garden State Parkway and heading toward Boston. I think we’ll be there tomorrow morning. Probably sooner. The souped-up, midnight blue 840i BMW that he rented is fast. Boston is like, what? Six or seven hours from AC? I think our plan after that is for him to fly to San Francisco and me to get lost on the East Coast somewhere.”
Rita screeched, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Kylie! You need to come back and go to Salvatore on your knees—”
The phone slipped out of Kylie’s hand, leaping upward into Micah’s fingers. “Hey!”
Micah glanced at her phone while he drove with his other hand and crooked his thumb to power it off. As the screen faded, he tossed it in the back seat. “I said to stop talking to her.”
“What the hell, dude! You can’t do that!”
“Oh, yes, I can.”
She unclicked her seatbelt. “I’ll just reach back there and grab it.”
He accelerated, and the engine’s growl rose to a whine above the beeping seatbelt alarm. Force shoved her back into her seat. He said, “Sit down and buckle your seatbelt, or I’ll throw your phone out the goddamned window.”
“She’s my friend!”
“And you gave her far too much information about our location, the car we’re driving, and our plans. Betrayal is exactly why I don’t tell anyone the whole picture. People can’t rat you out if they don’t know what’s going on.”
Rage tore through Kylie as she jammed her seatbelt into the buckle. “I didn’t betray you! I’m not a rat!”
“You told her too much.”
“It probably doesn’t even matter. Salvatore probably put AirTags on those paintings and can see where we are on his damn phone.”
“Yeah, we’ll have to watch on our phones for a notification. But Salvatore Grande will interrogate your friends about where we’re going so he can get there faster.”
Kylie flipped her hands at him. “Of course, he will. That’s why I was giving Rita something to tell him!”
Micah’s aqua-flecked eyes flared as he glanced at her and then at the rearview mirror and started to change lanes. “That wasn’t something. You were giving away our actual location, vehicle, and plans to your friend so she could tell Salvatore Grande. Look, if you want to take your chances with the Don Grande, I’ll pull over and let you out right here on the Garden State. Or maybe you’ve been working for him against me all along. Have you?”
Kylie yelled at the stupid goombah driving the car, “No, I’m not working for him, against you! Rita has been my family these last few years. I can’t just throw her to Salvatore like, ‘So long and good luck, bitch!’ He’ll break Rita’s fingers or kidnap her niece or something to get her to talk. I had to give her something so Salvatore would get off her back!”
“You didn’t give her something,” he growled. “You gave her our whole plan, the car we’re driving, and where we’re going. That’s everything.”
“And yet, it probably won’t be enough! I have to keep Rita and my friends safe. When Salvatore goes after them for my betrayal, it’s my job to keep them safe.”
“Rita is not your responsibility,” he grumbled.
“Yes, she is. She’s more than just my responsibility.” Longing crushed her chest. “She’s my family, or the closest thing I have to one anymore.”
“Rita is not your family. How long have you been working with her?”
“Four years.”
“That’s nothing.”
“It is not.”
Micah huffed as he drove. “I’ve been working with a guy for over a decade, and he’s not my family.”
“Sounds like a you problem,” Kylie snarked.
“He was my friend when we were in school, but now he’s a business contact. Business is separate. Business is always separate.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t separate business and friendship. My girls are my fam. Just because you have some sort of trauma and can’t be friends with people you work with doesn’t mean it’s my problem, too.”
“I don’t have any goddamn trauma.”
“Yeah, sure you don’t.”
“You can’t just trust people like that in this business, and you mustn’t betray me just because you’re ‘friends’ with her.”
Kylie could hear the air quotes in Micah’s voice, and she flipped him off.
He continued, “Rita is not your responsibility, and she must have known the risks when she got involved with the garbage business.”
There it was again: the gah-bige business, an insider term for the Mafia, and spoken with a New York accent. “Sounds like you know a lot about the garbage business, what with you insisting that you’re ‘half Sicilian’ and all your references to Vincent Genovese.”
“I have no idea to whom you refer,” Micah said, and now his accent was hard-starched British.
“Bullshit,” Kylie accused him. “You’re a chameleon, aren’t you? No matter where you go, you blend in like a chameleon, but bits of the real you keep poking through. I see them.”
His sharp glance at her was a flying dagger. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Still with the British accent.
“Sure, you do,” she said. “You’re one of those guys who’s tough on the street like a capo dei capi but then slides right into regular society like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. When I first met you at the Borgata, I didn’t sniff any of the Family on you. You were like this generic guy in AC, just there to get into a little bit of trouble like all the rest. You could have told me that you were a farmer boy from Iowa City, Iowa, at the hotel for a white bread convention, and I would’ve been all, ‘Yeah, that checks out.’ But you slip sometimes, like when we were eating at Angeline, that Italian restaurant.”
“You’re mistaken,” he said, and the car accelerated under the sodium streetlamps in the dark New Jersey night.
“Nah, I don’t think so. The way you broke the bread with your hands and ate, you’re Italian. I could practically see the connections. If you’re Sicilian, who are you related to?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Small island, even if there are big families. After what we did, it would be creepy if we were cousins or something.”
He shook his head. “I’m not related to the Merlinos.”
So he knew her father’s people. “Oh, and so who are you related to, then?”
“No one,” Micah said, lower, harder.
“Oh, come on. You can’t be related to no one if you’re Sicilian. Even if you’re from the other side or your dad was, everyone is related to everybody over here.”
“I’m not,” he said, his voice chopping like an ax.
Kylie rolled her eyes and held her palms face-out to indicate hands-off. “Okay, Mr. Touchy. I’m sorry I asked.”
The car sped through the night. Kylie gripped the door handle as Micah accelerated through the turns.
Finally, she said to him, “If we’re going to Boston, I can help drive. It’s a long way to drive solo.”
He growled, “We’re not going to Boston anymore, and don’t call your friends.”
Great. “Where, then?”
He frowned. “I know a guy who lives in the city.”
Kylie kept her eyes wide so she wouldn’t sprain her eyeballs from rolling them so hard.
Micah knew a guy.
In the city.
Shocker.