“I don’t know. It’s not mine.”
“Who else uses this suitcase?”
“Just me. I mean, it’s mine.”
“When was the last time you used it?”
“I don’t know. Last summer. On a trip to Montreal.”
“You bought this carry-on new?”
Her eyes flashed. “Of course I bought it new. Who buys second-hand luggage?”
I smirked. “I was thinking more along the lines of something handed down in the family, Princess.”
She shook her head again. “I own a flash drive, but it’s back at the penthouse, next to my laptop, and it’s a different color. I wasn’t bringing my laptop on this trip, only my iPhone. But I left that…”
“All right.” I put the thumb drive in my pocket. My curiosity was stirred, and right now, I couldn’t be too careful. I returned to the search. A moment later, I found what I’d started to suspect. The AirTag was in another of the carry-on suitcase’s side pockets, way down low with a bunch of hair ties and a package of tissues and wet naps.
The AirTag was a tracking device made by Apple. They could be tracked by any Apple phone easily enough with an app. Any asshole could buy one over the counter. Despite having some safeguards to stop stalking, it was easy enough to bypass the systems in place if you knew what you were doing. I’d even used one on a target once. A guy who’d crossed one of the Sartini capos. Stuck it on the target’s car. Tracked him somewhere isolated. Shot him. Easy.
Sofia pressed close, the steam of her breath mixing with mine. “What’s that thing?”
“A tracking device. Sold over the counter.”
“How the hell didthatget in my luggage?”
I raised an eyebrow at her, playing it cool even though adrenaline pumped through my veins at my discovery. “I take it you didn’t add this to your luggage in case it got lost.”
“No…but that’s not a bad idea.” She stopped and squinted at the little silver circular device with the classic Apple logo on it. “Do you think it has something to do with that flash drive?”
I didn’t know, but I liked to be careful. And in the spirit of being careful, I needed to ditch this tracking device ASAP. Logic said ithadto be how they’d tracked us to the motel. But why hadn’t they come with more men? After all, I’d taken the daughter of the family don as a hostage. Even a cold-blooded monster like Giovanni Accardo had to be worried about his daughter’s disappearance after finding two of his guys dead.
“Get in the car,” I ordered, shoving the AirTag back into the suitcase and zipping it up again.
Something in my tone must’ve warned her not to push it this time. She climbed into the car without another complaint about her things scattered all over the hood and the ground.
I swept the rest from the hood onto winter-frozen dirt churned with the tire tracks of heavy machinery. I tossed the carry-on suitcase as far as I could because it had the tracking device inside. The carry-on sailed through the air, spinning with a kind of slow grace, and landed behind a trailer-sized construction waste bin.
That wouldn’t delay any pursuers for long once they followed the Bluetooth signal here, but there was no sense in making things easy for them. The foreman would be pissed when he showed up on Monday and found all these rich girl clothes and toiletries all over his work site. Would someone call the cops over something strange like that? Probably not, but it was hard to say.
It didn’t matter now; we needed to vamoose. As in, get the fuck out of here straight away. I opened the driver-side door and noticed the bullet hole in the rear panel of the car. That’s right, I remembered hearing the impact at the motel.
The bullet hadn’t hit anything vital. The trunk would now have hillbilly air conditioning. Still, I’d been driving around with a bullet hole in the Audi’s frame. Never a good thing if you were trying to avoid attention. Yet another in a mile-long list of reasons why I needed to ditch this car ASAP/
I hopped inside, started the car, reversed, and headed for the main roads. I kept expecting dark SUVs to appear out of nowhere, right on my tail, but there was nothing.
“Where to now?” Sofia asked.
Honestly, she sounded wiped, and the day had barely begun. It was the shock, stress, and the after-effects of all that adrenaline. I felt more than a little exhausted myself and could really use some coffee.
“I told you. Somewhere safe. We need to regroup and find out what the hell is on that thumb drive.”
“We?”
“I don’t know if you noticed in all the excitement, but those guys back there didn’t seem too concerned whether they shot you or not.”
“My father must’ve put the tracker in my luggage. He must have sent them.”
