Claimed by the Detective and the Don

Chapter 12 — Footsteps

COLE

I made him on the third night.

That was the part that should have scared me more than it did. A careful man doesn't get made in three nights, not by someone who knows his business. I'd started to understand exactly what kind of man Sal Conti sent when he wanted a job done right. I caught the shape of him first, a shadow that crossed Fenmore half a block back and matched my pace too well to be coincidence. Coincidence doesn't slow down when you slow down.

I tested it twice more before I trusted it. Once outside the pawnshop on Halsey, doubling back like I'd forgotten something. Once at the corner by the courthouse, stopping cold to light a cigarette I didn't need. Both times, the shadow adjusted a beat too late, the small correction of a man who was good but not perfect, good enough to have done this before, not good enough to have done it to somebody who used to do the same job from the other side.

Twenty years reading rooms teaches you to read streets the same way.

By the fourth night I'd stopped pretending I didn't know. I led him instead, down through the narrow run of alleys behind the fish market where the gas lamps gave out and the only light came bleeding sideways from a window two streets over. If he wanted to watch me, I decided he could do it close enough that I got a good look back.

He didn't announce himself. He just stopped being a shadow and became a man, stepping out from the mouth of the alley with his hands loose at his sides, the particular stillness of somebody who'd been in worse spots than this one and hadn't lost a night's sleep over any of them.

I knew him. Not by name, not yet, but I'd clocked him once at the Tin Violin, standing near Sal's shoulder, close enough to matter, far enough to look like nothing.

"You're better at this than most," I said. "Not good enough."

"Wasn't trying to be invisible tonight." His voice came out even, almost pleasant, the tone of a man delivering a message rather than starting a fight. "Figured you'd want to know you were being watched. Easier conversation that way."

"Conti send you?"

"Mr. Conti doesn't send men to answer questions like that." He said it without heat, a simple correction, the kind you'd give a child who'd gotten a fact wrong. "He sends men to be seen when he wants them seen. Tonight, I wanted to be seen."

I studied him under what little light made it down the alley. Older than the muscle Sal usually kept close, gray starting at his temples. This wasn't hired trouble. This was somebody who'd earned a longer leash than the rest, and men like that didn't waste words on threats they didn't intend to keep.

"You've got a name?"

"Enzo." He offered it plain, no weight on it, the way a man gives you something he isn't worried you'll misuse. "I've worked for Mr. Conti's family longer than you've had that badge you don't carry much use for anymore."

That landed harder than he probably meant it to. He knew about the badge. It was the part that stayed with me longer than the rest. Not that Sal knew. That he'd let a man like Enzo say it to my face, which meant he'd already decided I wasn't worth the effort of a second warning.

"So this is a message," I said. "Say it plain. I've had enough of Conti's riddles to last me the rest of whatever's left of my life."

"No message. Not tonight." Enzo shifted his weight, unhurried, a man settling in rather than squaring up. "Mr. Conti wanted you to know you're being watched. That's all. He didn't send me to hurt you. He'd have sent somebody younger and stupider for that, and he'd have told me to make it look like an accident by the harbor." A pause, small, almost courteous. "This is just the truth of your situation. I thought you'd rather hear it than keep wondering."

"Generous of him."

"He's a generous man, when it costs him nothing." Enzo's mouth moved, not quite a smile, something colder and more honest than that. "Right now, watching you costs him nothing. That's the only reason you're still walking around with all your teeth."

I kept my hands loose at my sides, the same trick I'd used on Sal in that dark-wood office, though I doubted it worked as well on a man who'd probably invented it before I was old enough to shave. Something about Enzo made the threat feel less like a threat and more like weather, an unavoidable condition of the city I'd chosen to keep living in.

"And if I don't like being watched?"

"Then you go on disliking it." He said it without malice, the flattest kind of fact. "Doesn't change anything. I'll still know where you sleep. Still know what time you leave that office over the laundry, still know which door you knock on after midnight." His eyes held mine, steady, patient in a way that made Sal's own stillness look almost frantic by comparison. "You're a careful man, detective. I respect that. Careful men make my job easier. They don't do anything stupid enough to force a different conversation."

He touched two fingers to his hat, the small, old-fashioned courtesy of a man raised in a different era, and turned back toward the mouth of the alley without waiting to see if I'd have the last word.

I stood there a long moment after his footsteps faded, listening to the harbor somewhere behind the buildings, the low groan of a ship

easing into dock, the rain starting up its same tired rhythm on the tin roofs overhead. Days ago I'd been a man working a case nobody wanted opened. Now I was a man being catalogued, hour by hour, by somebody who'd clearly done this kind of work long enough to make it an art.

I'd been telling myself I was working this alone. That had been a lie I could afford right up until tonight, the same kind of lie Lenore told herself every morning at that vanity mirror, the kind that only holds as long as nobody says the truth out loud in the room with you.

I wasn't alone. I'd never been alone. I'd just been the last one in the city who hadn't figured out I was being carried, watched, and measured by a man patient enough to wait as long as it took to decide exactly what to do with me.

Whatever came next, Sal Conti was going to know about it before I finished deciding to do it.

That should have felt like fear. Standing in that alley with the rain coming down harder now, running down the back of my collar the way it always did in this city, it felt instead like the first honest thing anybody had told me in a week.