Page 29 of Jacking Jill
Kay’s face paled briefly. She swallowed, then shook her head. “He won’t find anything. Nothing that implicates you, anyway.” She paused, stroked her lovely throat with the back of her hand, her jacket sleeve pulling back just enough to give Romeo a glimpse at that intricate tattoo which looked like a dragon or some kind of serpent. “But maybe we back off on this deal for a bit, Romeo. I’ll toss my burner phone, check out of the hotel, stay at the mansion through the weekend. We haven’t gone far enough with Diego and the Zetas to implicate us yet. We haven’t crossed the point of no return yet, Romeo. Maybe we shouldn’t cross it at all.”
Romeo’s gaze hardened. He shook his head firmly, held Kay’s gaze until she blinked. “I need this deal, Kay. Every other mafia family is already deep into drugs. Legalized online gambling has killed the bookie business. Protection isn’t much of a money-maker these days. Neither is loan-sharking.”
“You still have deep connections in the dockworkers union,” Kay pointed out. “You still collect fees for placing paroled gang-members in fake union jobs which will cover for them with parole officers. You still own a bunch of parole officers too, Romeo. And your legitimate investments are still solid.” She sighed, her eyes suddenly looking tired. “Romeo, look, we’ve managed to close down the bookie businesses and launder all the money so that you’re pretty damn clean now. Sure, you’re still running all those kickbacks to the union bosses and you’ve still got your fingers into some other illegal pies. But drugs are a different game, Romeo. Especially the kind of drugs that the Zetas will ship up from South America.” She shook her head. “Meth. Heroin. That cheap Chinese-made Fentanyl. It’s all poison, Romeo. It’s killing people. Just like it’s killing Bobby, your own flesh and blood.”
“My only complaint is that it isn’t killing Bobby fast enough.” Romeo chuckled darkly. “And you know my feelings on this whole flesh and blood crap, Kay. I’ve always hated the mafia obsession with bloodlines and lineage, about tracing your ancestors back to some Italian olive-patch where some paisano banged your grandma under the Sicilian sun. The whole thing is bullshit. I built myself up from nothing, and I know that it’s the struggle to succeed that’s the real prize. Not the money. Not the mansions. It’s the fight that makes the man.” He rumbled out a breath, leaned back in the leather chair that he’d paid for in this mansion which he’d paid for. “Nobody’s going to be entitled to my empire just because they happened to slide out of the right vagina with the right fucking genes. This is America. You don’t inherit the throne. You seize your own.”
Kay rubbed her eyes, looked up and sighed. “Then why not let Bobby build his own drug empire like he wants? Let me connect Diego to Bobby. Then we can both step aside. Let Bobby take his chances with the Zetas and the drug trade.”
Romeo shook his head. “Bobby has the Carmine name. I might not give a rat’s ass about bloodlines and family, but the other mafia families do, and so does the FBI and DEA and ATF and every other federal law enforcement agency. The kid is full of that mafia-machismo from the movies. Bobby will toss the Carmine name around like it’s his brand. I’ll be implicated whether I’m a part of it or not. Besides, he doesn’t have the stones to build an empire worth shit. Bobby’s a lazy fuck-up, just like his miserable piece-of-shit dad was.” He sighed. “Wish I could just kill the kid, but it would break his mother’s heart. And she’d know it was me, even if I made it look like an accident.” He shook his head again. “Anyway, hopefully Bobby will be out of the picture soon enough. He’s a junkie, and he’s about to marry another junkie. Two junkies with unlimited access to cash and no real-world responsibilities? They’ll both be dead from overdoses or straight-up heart-failure before their first anniversary. And my sister’s thankfully too old to pop out another bastard child, so that’s the end of the fucking bloodline, good riddance. You’ve seen my instructions for what happens to my estate and operations after I’m gone, Kay. Though with the life-extending miracles coming our way thanks to medical breakthroughs, it’s possible I’ll live forever, right?”
Kay gazed at him with that unreadable expression which Romeo sometimes thought was admiration but was painfully aware was something more clinical and analytic. She was just trying to figure him out like a puzzle, a case, build the narrative for the judge, spin the story for the jury.
Fuck, she used to be a damn good prosecutor, Romeo reminded himself. The woman put away more gang-members than any other U.S. Attorney on the East Coast.
But you can never put away all the gang members.
And sometimes the ones left outside come for the bitch who put their buddies away.
And they show her there are things worse than death.
“Let this Diego thing die a natural death, Romeo.” Kay’s voice was low now, that hint of a tremble still discernible. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
Romeo snapped forward in his swivel chair, jamming his elbows onto the table and leaning across the desk. “To hell with your bad feelings, all right? I need this deal to happen.” He took a breath, exhaled slow to calm himself, then leaned back in his chair and tried to recover his poise. “Look, you remember all that money I invested in that hedge fund run by the Northrup brothers?”
Kay blinked twice, then nodded quickly. “Northrup Capital. Kyle and Kenneth Northrup.” She frowned, tilted her head to the left. “They were both killed along with their wives a few months ago, right? Some kind of messed-up domestic dispute, apparently. On board a cruise ship, if I’m remembering right.”
Romeo nodded. “The Rivington. It almost destroyed the hedge fund, but then at the last minute Northrup Capital got bought out by an offshore investment company called IMG Corp.”
“Right,” said Kay. “You had me look into IMG a few weeks ago. It’s a complicated network of anonymous shell companies incorporated in jurisdictions with airtight bank-secrecy laws. Cyprus, mostly, but also the Cayman Islands and a few other up-and-coming offshore havens. Couldn’t trace it all the way to the actual owner.” She frowned. “Didn’t you sell your stake in Northrup after IMG took over the assets? I advised you to get out of it, Romeo.”
Romeo sighed. “My finance guys told me to stay in. It was generating serious cash every month.” He rubbed his jaw, thought back to that strange phone call he’d gotten from IMG Corp, wondered how much he should tell Kay about Northrup and now IMG’s connection with the Zeta Nation via those junk bonds. “Look, I take your advice on a lot of things, but you aren’t my financial lawyer. IMG generates too much cash for me to simply sell the investment and walk away.” He hesitated, then decided that since Kay was going to be making first contact with Diego, she should know everything.
It wouldn’t matter soon, anyway. Kay was already getting close to wanting out of this life, this game, this trap, Romeo knew.
Which meant he would have to get rid of Kay as soon as this deal with Diego got done.
Even though it would hurt him to do so.
Because there was something so tragic about this wounded woman, this broken butterfly, Romeo thought with a stab of uncharacteristic pity. But she was beyond pity, beyond salvation, beyond rescue. She would never heal, and the damage made her deadly, the wounds made her vicious. Romeo could sense that Kay was beginning to think she’d paid off her debt to him, was ready to walk away from this world. Sure, she might have to give up some of the addictive power Romeo had given her through his connections with prison gangs—connections forged from his long history of setting up gang-members with fake union jobs so they could look clean on parole while getting back to their dirty businesses. But by now Kay had made those prison-gang connections her own, and Romeo sensed that if he let her live after this deal, Kay would continue to find ways to dispense justice inside prison walls, with or without him.
“I can’t do this without you, Kay,” he said quietly, keeping his voice steady. “I need you to get a read on this Diego guy for me, see if he’s for real. You’re the best I’ve ever seen at getting a read on a person, nailing the narrative, seeing the story. Do this last thing for me, and I promise I’ll let you walk away after things are up and running with Diego and the Zetas. I just need you to be my go-between for the next few months.”
Kay studied his eyes like she was trying to read his mind. “Why?” she said finally. “Attorney-client privilege doesn’t apply if your lawyer is part of a criminal enterprise, Romeo. Me being a go-between doesn’t protect you in a court of law if I’m cutting deals with drug-dealers on your behalf. You know better than that.”
“I do know better than that.” Romeo grinned. “You trained me well, Kay. I understand how attorney-client privilege works. Which means I understand that so long as I don’t ask you to break the law on my behalf, you cannot be forced by a judge to reveal our private conversations in a court of law.”
Kay sighed, then raised a thin black eyebrow that looked like it had been tattooed on her pale face. “So you just want me to get a read on Diego Vargas, work out the details of how this deal will work, then pass on the messages to you without committing to anything on your behalf.”
Romeo nodded. “Just like always. In fact, you’ve already communicated to me that you believe it’s a bad idea. Therefore, your legal advice to me is to stay away from this deal. Which means that attorney-client privilege will apply, and so I never need to worry about you being compelled by a judge to testify against me.” He took a breath, exhaled slow to let his words sink into Kay. “And I’ve got enough on you that there’s no way you’ll ever turn state’s witness against me. Years of arranging your little vigilante assassinations inside the walls of federal prisons will get you locked away for life. Which locks us in a comfortable stalemate, Kay. There are incentives for both of us to trust each other once our business relationship has concluded. It’s airtight. I can let you walk away without worrying that I’ll see you on a witness stand in a year.”
Romeo smiled when he saw a flicker of brightness in Kay’s eyes, like she saw where this was going, saw that it might indeed lead to freedom for her.
Of course, she was sharp enough—and most certainly distrustful enough—to know better. But they’d been close for years now, close enough that Romeo was damn sure there was nobody else in Kay’s life. No friends. No family. No lovers. No pets. Even someone as brilliant as Kay might have a blind spot.
She just might trust him enough to believe he would actually let her walk away.
“All right,” Kay said quietly, unable to hide the hope in her voice. “But you need to tell me everything about Northrup Capital and IMG Corp. You also need to come clean about who told you to connect with Diego Vargas and make a deal with the Zeta Nation.”