The Mayor's Dirty Little Secret

CHAPTER ONE

I have a rule about Minnesota.

Do not trust anything that looks this clean.

New York at least had the decency to look exactly like what it was, loud and dirty and complicated, but Minnesota spread out in front of me like someone had ironed it out.

I dragged my bag through the station and out into the cold and stood on the pavement for exactly thirty seconds feeling sorry for myself before I shut that down. I did not have time to feel sorry for myself.

I had a target, a motel booking, and roughly four hundred dollars left in cash, and self pity was not going to make any of those things work better.

The motel was called The Lakeview which was crazy considering there was no lake visible from any angle I could find. The woman at the front desk did not ask me my name twice or look at my face long enough to describe it later, which made her my favorite person immediately. I paid cash, took my key, and found my room at the end of the ground floor corridor.

Window facing the parking lot. Fire exit close enough to matter. My mother would have approved.

I pinned Gerald Mast's photograph to the wall above the desk and stood back and looked at it.

Mid fifties. Heavy set. The kind of face you forget while you are still looking at it. Gerald Mast had been photographed twice in the company of men connected to a trafficking network that had been moving product through six states for the better part of a decade and I had been chasing the herd of it for two years.

I had gotten close enough in New York that two men showed up outside my building one night to explain to me in very clear terms that close was not something I was permitted to be anymore.

I had relocated.

Mast had been spotted here three weeks ago by my contact, who sent information in pieces and never from the same number twice. She had given me a hotel name and a window of time and I had built the rest myself. I was good at that.

I spent two days watching the hotel before anything happened worth watching. I mapped the entrances, logged the staff patterns, identified the cameras and their angles, and ate gas station sandwiches that I will not be describing further out of respect for myself and the rest of the sandwich community.

On the third evening at eight forty seven Gerald Mast walked into the hotel bar with two men I did not recognize.

I gave it twenty minutes. Then I put on the jacket that made me look like I belonged somewhere expensive and I walked in after him.

I took a seat at the far end of the bar. Ordered a club soda with enough attitude that it looked like a real drink. Set my phone at the angle I needed and settled in. Mast and his companions were talking without looking at each other very much, which told me this was not a social meeting.

I had been there about fifteen minutes when I got the feeling.

It was not a dramatic feeling. It was the quiet specific feeling of being watched by someone who was good at it, which is different from being watched by someone who is not.

I checked my phone. Adjusted my glass. Counted to thirty and then looked toward the door like I was checking for someone.

He was already looking at me.

I observed him the way I observe everything, carefully and without unnecessary feeling.

He was tall. Dark eyes that did not move when I caught them. The kind of stillness that is not relaxed but controlled, like something that has been trained to be quiet. He was not watching Mast.

He was watching me watch Mast and the fact that he had already worked out exactly what I was doing made my jaw tighten because I was supposed to be invisible and apparently I was not.

I looked away.

Thirty seconds later one of Mast's men shifted in his seat and looked in my direction with an expression that had gone from blank to interested in a way I did not like at all.

The man from across the room was suddenly beside me, so close I could feel the warmth of him, and his hand settled at my waist like it had been there a hundred times before.

"You're late," I said.

"Traffic," he said, and flagged the bartender without looking at the bar, which meant he had already clocked where the bartender was, which meant he was the kind of person who clocked things automatically, which meant I needed to be careful or I'm going to get killed.

"That's what you said last time." I gave slight smile, the corner of my eye trained on Gerald.

"Last time was because you," He leaned down and placed a kiss on my neck that made me jump out of my skin.

"Liar," I looked up and stared in the eyes of a complete stranger.

He was even more stunning up close and his eyes were deep but cold. His face was pulled in the perfect combination of a smirk and a lover's gaze but his eyes—they were empty.

"You were watching Mast," he said quietly, still smiling like we were having a completely different conversation.

"You were watching me watch Mast," I said, still smiling back. "Which means you are either law enforcement or competition and either way I work alone so you can leave as soon as they stop looking."

"They are still looking," he said pleasantly tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear.

"Then keep smiling," I said pleasantly back, cradling his face.

We stayed like that for another twenty minutes while I tried to focus on Mast and largely succeeded except for the parts where I did not succeed at all because this man was an entirely unreasonable physical presence and he smelled like something I could not name but wanted to and his hand was still at my waist like he had simply decided it belonged there.

"You are not law enforcement," I said at some point, because I had been running it and I was fairly certain.

"What makes you say that," he said, which was not a denial.

"Law enforcement would have moved differently," I said. "You moved like someone who makes their own decisions."

He looked down at me and something shifted in his expression before he went back to what I feel is default mode."You are very observant," he said.

"It is my entire personality," I said.

Mast's group stood to leave and I straightened automatically and the man beside me did the same and for a moment we were both just watching the exit and I was aware of how easily we had fallen into the same rhythm without discussing it and how strange that was and how I did not entirely hate it.

He reached past me and put cash on the counter for both our drinks without asking and I opened my mouth to object and he looked at me and said "be careful" in a tone that meant he had already assessed the situation and determined that careful was genuinely necessary.

Then he walked out the other exit and was gone and I stood there with his warmth fading from my waist and told myself very firmly that I had a job to do.

I ordered another club soda and got back to it.

He was already gone from my mind.

I am an excellent liar.