“If it was, do you think the cops would question me about his disappearance? I mean he was clearly a stalker if he was posting up pictures of me at his place.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, sitting back in his chair, a pen between both hands. “But the cops will cover their bases. Especially so if he has links to any of the syndicates in town.”
Right.
The syndicates.
You couldn’t live in Navesink Bank and not know who really ran things. Not the cops or whoever the hell was in charge of them.
But the guys they were supposed to keep off the streets.
The Henchmen MC who ran guns.
The Grassi family who ran the local Italian mob.
The Third Street gang and their heroin and prostitutes.
The weird paramilitary camp on the hill known as Hailstorm.
And while I couldn’t be sure about this, I was pretty certain something illegal was going on at night in the abandoned elementary school on the other side of the woods behind my house.
So if this guy was somehow connected to any of that, and the cops had the greased palms I was sure they did, then they would help out the guys who slid them money every month find out what happened to one of their men.
“I hope he’s just a nobody,” I heard myself say, sounding a little defeated.
“Chances are, he is. The organizations around here run a pretty tight ship. But we need to make sure of that. So as much information as we can get about him, the better.”
“I think I have given you all there is. Oh, aside from the notes.”
“The ones in your kitchen drawer under the utensil organizer?” Quinton asked, the very edge of his lips curved up slightly.
“What? How–”
“Finn is thorough,” he cut me off. “He cleans up what he needs to clean up. Then he does a sweep.”
“Looking for what?”
“Anything that looks suspicious.”
“But… why?”
“Second rule of our business. Never trust your client.”
Okay, maybe I found that mildly insulting but I imagined they dealt with a bunch of scumbags on a daily basis, and that such a rule was more than necessary.
“And what is the first rule?”
Quinton sat back forward, putting his elbows on the desk, leaning toward me a bit like he was about to share a huge secret. “Don’t get caught.”
Oh, well.
Duh.
Yeah.
That would be the first rule.
A silence fell after that as I tried to focus.
This was as far as he had told me to think. I had followed all the steps he had laid out for me. I had no idea what was going to happen next.
“What’s going on in there?” he asked, making my gaze shoot up.
“What is going to happen now?” I asked, hearing a bit of vulnerability in my tone that I really hoped he didn’t pick up on.
“Now, I am going to lead you upstairs where you can have a private room that locks with your own bathroom. And you can sleep. Or break down in private. Whatever you need to do while Finn finishes at your place. My guys will deal with the dog, and look for leads on who this fucker was.”
“And after that?” I asked. At his questioning look, I shrugged a shoulder. “It helps having the steps,” I explained.
To that, he nodded, like that made perfect sense, making me feel a little less needy than I had a moment before. “After that, you can come back out, have some food, and sit in on a meeting with me and my team about what has gone on. After that, you are going to go back to your life. You get one day, and one day only, to lose your shit, Aven. After this, you need to go back to your house, even if it means you need to sleep in your basement to keep away from the images your mind will throw at you when you step back into that space.
“You will need to get up tomorrow, get dressed, smear on some special makeup Jules will give you to cover up those bruises, and take yourself to work. You will engage your coworkers if that is your norm. You will wax all the pussies that come your way. And you will keep it together. Everything has to go on as if nothing at all happened. Because as of about five hours from now, nothing will have.”
He made it sound a lot easier than I knew it was going to be. Sure, I could follow the steps. I could get up and go to work. I could force myself to do things on auto-pilot.
The problem wasn’t daily activities.
The problem was going to be existing in that house again.
It didn’t seem to matter that he was dead.
The entire place somehow still felt unsafe.
And tainted.
But going back there was not the next step.
I needed to focus on that instead.