As the car slipped through traffic, questions from Kylie earned her a squinty stare from Micah. She stopped probing.
Weekday traffic was heavy as usual in Midtown, but once they survived the descent into the ceramic-tiled Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River and emerged to swerve onto I-95, the half-hour drive into New Jersey was merely dodging speeding drivers.
Kylie said to Micah, “I told you I have a problem with getting on a plane.”
More death stares, and then Micah resumed looking at his phone.
Kylie didn’t have her phone because Micah had confiscated it, so she watched the cars around them nearly crash into each other for a while.
When the oppressive silence in the car hung too heavily, she asked Micah, “If my lack of ID isn’t a problem, then are we not getting on a plane? Are we going somewhere else? Or are you just kicking me to the curb at the airport?”
More hairy eyeball from the grumpy hottie.
“Jeez, a girl would just like to know where she’s going,” Kylie said, rolling her eyes.
He finally ground out, “We’re going to the Signature Flight Support terminal at Liberty International Airport.”
“Well, I know that,” Kylie said. She’d been paying attention when he’d talked to the chauffeur. “But are we going to move in and live there, or are we going somewhere else?”
“You’ll know when you need to,” he said, with almost a snarl.
“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this again? I thought you were going to tell me things and treat me as an equal partner—”
“I never promised that,” he snapped. “Compartmentalizing information is important for operational security—”
“Like I care about operational security! I just want to know where the hell I’m going!”
“When it’s the appropriate time—”
“I’ve got your appropriate time right here, buddy.” She squeezed her right boob at him. “And I’ve got your operational security over here, too,” she said as she reached for her left.
“And we’re here,” the chauffeur shouted over their bickering. “We have arrived.”
“But the terminals are way over there,” Kylie said, pointing at the buildings hulking in the distance and the shark fins of airplane tails swimming above them. Kylie knew what the terminals at EWR looked like. Did these Bennies think they could pull one over on a Jersey girl?
Micah opened his car door. “This is the Signature Flight Support terminal for private planes.”
“But I—”
“Not here,” Micah said in a low voice that sent chills down Kylie’s spine. “Get out of the car.”
The low-slung building was midcentury modern with flat roofs and square angles, granite and glass, yet it was unmistakably new. The corners of the stone were sharp, not weathered, and the glass was unscratched.
Luggage handlers trotted out from the larger part of the building, pushing carts toward the trunk. One yelled, “Name?”
Micah took Kylie’s arm and steered her toward the terminal, calling back, “Micah Shine.”
Kylie had never flown before, but all the TV shows and movies she’d seen had shown jostling crowds pulling luggage in long lines waiting to get to customer service desks.
This building had none of that. Inside, the back wall was glass from the thickly carpeted floor to the second-story ceiling, allowing the autumn morning sunlight to perfuse the entire space. Some people lounged in oversized chairs, watching three enormous televisions set into a wood-paneled wall, and baristas whispered behind an espresso bar at the far end of the building. A few people sat at café tables, sipping their drinks.
Kylie teetered on her stiletto heels behind Micah as he walked up to a long desk on one side of the building and told the guy behind it his name.
The customer service guy wearing a burgundy-and-navy blue uniform checked his computer. “Your plane is ready, Mr. Shine. You can board at your leisure. Your luggage will be stowed within the next five minutes.”
This luxurious space seemed right out of the 1950s heyday of flying when people wore suits or cocktail dresses when they traveled on a plane. Kylie spun in a circle, gawking.
Micah took her hand and tugged gently as he steered her through the glass rear doors and onto the tarmac toward a waiting row of airplanes. Chilly October wind permeated her white dress as soon as they walked into the wide-open space behind the building, freezing her skin and making her break out in goosebumps.
Kylie rocked back on her high-heeled pumps and stopped dead, bracing herself so that Micah didn’t pull her off balance. “I need to know right now where the hell we’re going.”
Micah seemed to grit his teeth as he bent and whispered, “On a plane.”
“I ain’t got a valid driver’s license! I ain’t got ID!”
He whispered, “I’ve got you covered. You’ll be fine.”
“How in the hell are you going to fix me not having a driver’s license?”
“I know a guy.”
Kylie threw her hands in the air in the most exasperated exasperation she had ever exasperated. “I swear to God, Micah Shine, if you tell me you know a guy one more time, I’m going to start calling you Vinnie the Bull!”
He sighed. “I swear to God, I am not in the Mafia. Get on the plane.”
“Are we going to Mississippi or California?”
“London,” he grated out.
“London? Like the one in England? I am not going to let you strand me in some foreign country where I don’t even speak the language and have no way to get home!”
He squinted at her. “It’s in the United Kingdom. They speak English.”
“Not if they speak it like you do when you’re being all high and mighty. I can’t understand half of what you say when you talk like that. And besides, I can’t go anywhere without finding my sister and my mother. What am I going to do about that?”
Micah nodded. “A friend of mine in London can help with the thumb drive. If there’s any information on it, we’ll know, and soon.”
This was all highly improbable. Kylie didn’t like it when things were too neat. “How do I know you aren’t just making stuff up?”
Micah sighed and reached into his back pocket, palming his phone. “How much?”
“I beg your pardon!”
“This always ends with me reminding you of our contract or transferring money into your account. What’s it going to take to get you on the plane?”
“God, you are just so annoying sometimes. I don’t want your money. I want to be an equal partner in this business, which means knowing where we are going.”
“I told you. We’re going to Heathrow Airport, London, England.”
They were squared off at this point, arguing beside the row of private jets. “Yeah, but you didn’t tell me before.”
“I couldn’t tell you in front of the chauffeur or in Logan’s apartment. I assumed it was bugged, either by him or the FBI or both. I didn’t want Logan to know.”
“You could’ve found a way to tell me.”
“I didn’t want you to know our destination, okay? You would’ve told Rita and those other girls, who are a direct conduit to Salvatore Grande.”
Propwash or the wind tossed the hem of Kylie’s skirt in the air, and she grabbed the material, pushing it down before she flashed her panties at the airport. “If you don’t trust me not to tell them, then I shouldn’t be on this trip at all. I don’t know why you’re dragging me around with you if you don’t trust me.”
“I wish I could trust you,” he said, and a flash of real emotion laced his voice as the cold wind whistled between the planes. “I wish I knew that you were on my side and that you won’t tell those girls or Salvatore Grande himself.”
Kylie wanted to throttle him and see those pretty, glittery eyes of his bug out. “I have an obligation to keep them safe, but I’m not going to rat you out. Salvatore Grande doesn’t have surveillance drones hovering over Manhattan like he’s the goddamn Homeland Security. Yeah, I gave Grande specific information through my girls, but I didn’t give him important pieces of information that would have allowed him to actually find us. I’m not a rat. If you can’t trust me to not give him the important pieces of information, I should just leave.”
“I don’t want you to leave,” he said, his voice quieter.
“Why would you want me to stick around if you can’t even trust me?”
Micah ran his hand through his dark blond hair, releasing the curls. “Because I like you, okay? I keep hoping at some point I will be able to trust you, that we will be able to work together because we work together great. I keep hoping we will be a team and that I can trust you won’t betray me and leave me dead on the living room floor in a pile of bodies.”
Kylie gaped at him. “That’s awfully specific imagery.”
He looked toward the line of private planes. “Probably been watching too many movies.”
Warring anxieties flooded Kylie’s mind and shook her all the way down to her toes. She stamped her feet, undecided whether to run or stomp her stiletto high-heeled into Micah’s foot. “Well, you need to tell me these things. And just for the record, Mr. High and Mighty, I like you, too.”
A smile lifted one side of his mouth. “You do, huh?”
“Don’t push it.”
“And I wanted London to be a surprise,” he said, running his hand through his hair again, his dirty blond curls springing free of whatever pomade he used and flipping down over his forehead. “I wanted to show you the UK, take you to the best restaurants, maybe see a show or go somewhere to dance.”
“Oh.” That changed things. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”
She swished past him, striding toward the airplanes. “How do you know which plane is yours?”
Micah walked with her and tucked her hand under his arm. “Because I talked to my friend yesterday after everything went south with Don Grande, and he had it flown here overnight.”
“‘My friend.’ ‘I know a guy.’ Micah, you’re a stereotypical Sicilian wiseguy. I wish I had friends like yours with airplanes.”
A grimness settled over Micah as they walked toward one of the larger planes, a slim silver jet with a grayed federal-blue tail and a stack of three golden crowns emblazoned on it. “No, you don’t.”