“So back to why you called her…” Wiley said, leading him.
“Mistakenly, I thought that crossing paths with her the night before the hit—especially with a local cop on her tail—would rattle Mickey and Panella enough to cancel it. At the very least postpone it. Which would have given me time to hang with Mickey, work from the inside, possibly track down Josh and, more particularly, Panella. But, instead of telling us to back off, Panella ordered Mickey to go ahead, to pop her then and there. I couldn’t let that happen.”
He paused and locked eyes with Jordie, willing her to remember what he’d told her before sending her out to Joe Wiley.
She said nothing for a moment, then a terse “Thank you for saving my life.”
“You’re welcome.”
But he was far from forgiven. Still seething, she grated out, “Why did you do the rest of it?”
Without excuse or qualification or missing a beat, he answered. “Because I want that goddamn fucking Panella.”
When he’d appeared in the open doorway, Jordie had barely contained a cry of joy. Now she wanted nothing more than to scratch out his damn lying eyes.
“I have nothing to do with Panella,” she said. “Since you have the skinny on me, you should know that. Once Mickey was out of commission, why didn’t you tell me you were FBI? Or just leave me there and drive away?”
“Because your brother is a friggin’ fugitive, Jordie. You’re the one and only link to him, and Panella is at the end of that chain.”
“In other words, you decided to use me as bait.”
“Okay. If you like that word better. I called you to the bar primarily to jinx the hit. But it served a dual purpose.”
“What was the other?”
“To test your loyalty to Josh. I dropped his name; you burned rubber getting there.”
“You bastard.”
He didn’t blink. “It’s been said.”
She rolled her lips inward, clinging to her temper by a thread which was unraveling a little more with each word from his mouth. Clearly, he shared Wiley and Hickam’s suspicion that she had been, and possibly was still, involved on some level in her brother’s criminal activity.
Joe Wiley said, “Ms. Bennett, did you know that Josh reneged on his deal with us and had run off?”
“No. Not until he told me.”
Shaw said, “For whatever it’s worth, Wiley, she seemed shocked when I told her that Josh had been missing for four days. I don’t think she knew. But that didn’t cancel the possibility of her knowing something. I knew she would be afraid of me because she’d seen me kill Mickey. I figured I could use that fear to get information from her.”
Hearing him admit it snapped her control. She shot from her chair and, planting her palms on the tabletop, leaned across it toward him. “You badgered me for hours about that damn phone call!”
“Only after you lied about it.”
“You terrorized me.”
“I guess. To some extent.”
“There’s no extent to terrorism.”
“You’re right,” he said, raising his voice to match hers. “I kept at you, thinking that I’d wear you down until you let something slip about Josh or Panella, which could have proved vital to their capture.”
“You browbeat me about that call, and all along it was you.”
“What matters more than who called is that you responded. You came running in record time. You made sure you weren’t followed. When your surveillance failed to show up, either inside the bar or out on the parking lot, you flunked the test.”
“To hell with you and your test!”