A pause. “You’re lucky I’m awake. Send the screenshot.”
“I don’t have one. I can tell you.”
“Give me the digits,” he said.
I described the car, the scrape on the rear bumper, the way the “O” in Ontario was half gone. He was silent for a minute, keys clacking on the other side of the line, then he grunted.
“Registered to a numbered company. Shell corp, out of Richmond Hill. But here’s the weird part—car’s been rented out ten times this month, each time by a different name.” He paused. “None of them turned up in my usual databases. You want me to dig?”
“Dig,” I said. “And let me know if anyone tails me back to the hotel.”
“You expecting company?”
“I’m expecting Victor to be at least as careful as me. If he’s not, I want to know who’s paying for his mistakes.”
The PI whistled. “Old man would be proud.”
“Have you heard from him? Marco and I disappeared so quickly…”
“He knows you’re okay,” he replied.
He hung up before I could ask anything else. My breath fogged under the eaves as I killed the call, pulse still hammering from the adrenaline. I stood in the alley with my hands jammed deep in my pockets, listening to the muted thrum of the city, feeling the old paranoia settle into my bones. The PI’s answer meant less than nothing—Richmond Hill was a black hole for paper trail, and every shell company in Ontario probably ran out of the same six mailboxes. But it was a start.
Victor’s shell company was textbook. So was the car, the shifting faces, the trail of receipts that went just deep enough for a background check to hit a dead end. If he was on Caruso’s payroll, he’d have used a different pipeline. This was something else. Something new.
Back at the hotel, I let myself in quietly. The room was still. Marco was snoring on the bed, spread-eagled like a murder victim, empty ginger ale bottles rolling near his feet. Jade was awake, staring at the TV with the sound off, one hand absently tracing the line of her belly. She didn’t look over when I came in, but I could tell she was watching my reflection in the window.
“Find what you were looking for?” she said.
I nodded, shrugged off my damp shirt, and toweled my hair with the reckless abandon of someone who didn’t have a bullet with his name on it. “Victor’s not Caruso’s. He’s working for a shell up in Richmond Hill, using a rental. My guy’s digging, but I’m guessing it’s biotech money. Or a government contract.”
She didn’t say anything for a long minute. Just tightened her hand into a fist, then let it go.
“Is that good?” she said, finally.
I considered it. “It means we’re not walking into a mob hit tomorrow. But it means they want you more than they want me.”
She snorted, almost a laugh. “That’s been obvious since Buffalo.” She glanced at Marco, checked to see if he was listening, then turned back to me. “Does it change your plan?” she asked.
I shrugged. “We go to the meeting. We do the tour. You ask questions, I pull security. If I get a bad feeling, we bail.” I paused, watched her face for any sign of doubt. “If you need to say no, we’ll make it out. But I need to know you’re not going to freelance a double-cross while I’m handling the muscle.”
She rolled her eyes, but there was no edge to it. “You’re the only one here who wants to fight. I just want to survive.”
I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that I didn’t want to fight at all. That I hated the violence and the running and the constant, gnawing ache in my chest every time I pictured her alone in a lab with a stranger holding the keys. But I didn’t. Instead I said, “We’re not just going to survive. We’re going to win.” I said it because it sounded good, and because I wanted to see if saying it out loud would make it true.
Jade looked at me, nothing in her face but tiredness and a curious, dangerous hope. Maybe she wanted to believe me. Maybe she just needed someone to say it.
“You know, we can afford our own hotel room,” I said, looking over at Marco.
“Yeah, but he’s still recovering from his surgery, so it’s all touch and go.”
I gestured at Marco, planted on his back in the center of the sheets like he was modeling for an anatomy class. “He’s not going to die in his sleep. Tomorrow, we move on. After that…we’ll see.”
Jade huffed, then flopped onto her side of the bed, rolling away so I couldn’t see the worry lines in her forehead. “You know he’s not the problem, right?” she said, voice muffled by the pillow.
I shrugged, even though she couldn’t see. “I know.”
Maybe she was trying to spare me. Maybe she just wanted to wall herself off from whatever came next. I got it—I’d been doing the same thing for years. I scanned the room, triple-checked the bolt on the door, then dropped onto the mattress with all the grace of a man who hadn’t slept in a week.
