Rolling the dice on this all-business side of him, she dug through her mint green Dooney & Burke nylon drawstring bag and pulled out her phone.
He took it from her hand and dropped it into his half full beer. A surprised squeal escaped from her slack jawed mouth.
Her life was on that phone.
“You need to get off the grid,” he said. “Diamond Tommy has spies everywhere. If he finds out you’re making calls or gets a GPS location on you from anywhere but in the middle of nowhere, we’ll lose what little edge we have.”
The evolved part of her brain saw his logic, but it was hard to heed it when the rest of her was screaming to snatch her phone out of the beer and put the phone into a bag of rice until it dried out. She nearly had to sit on her hands, but she managed to calm her freak out.
“When this is over, you’re buying me a new phone,” she said.
“You got it, partner.” He dropped his own cell into the beer. “Until then, you’re stuck with me.”
She couldn’t lie to herself. The schadenfreude of seeing his phone sink down in the amber liquid helped. “Paranoid much?”
“It’s kept me alive in real and concrete jungles for almost thirty years. I’m going with it.” He delivered the declaration in a tone drained of any emotion.
He could have been commenting on the weather, but she knew an emotional cover up when she heard one. Maybe there was more to him than the kind of fast-talking charm that could make a woman forget the consequences of trusting someone she shouldn’t. And damn it, she was starting to trust him—at least when it came to staying alive. If they kept their heads in the game and their hands to themselves, maybe she would make it out of this mess after all.
“So what now?”
His jaw tightened, his spine lost his signature hey-bro slouch, and he moved into investigator mode. “Let’s start with your connection to Diamond Tommy.”
In a heartbeat, she was seventeen again, her world imploding. The arrest. The trial. Her father’s death. Her mother’s suicide. She was alone, scared, and totally vulnerable. “He’s not connected to me. He’s connected to my father. It’s an old story and isn’t relevant.”
“Tell me anyway.” His soft and calm request pulled her back from the brink and reminded her of how far she’d come.
Thanks to her, he was in this up to his neck too. He deserved to know the truth.
“You heard what the reporter said about my dad.” She almost controlled the tremor in her voice that always appeared when she talked about her parents, which was why she never did. “What they failed to mention was that before everything went to hell, Diamond Tommy had sunk his fingers into my father’s business. According to my mother, it started off as a shady investment. For Tommy, it was a way to launder money. My father saw it as a way to keep his struggling business afloat. Then the asshole decided to milk the business as another revenue source. His hand-picked accountant skimmed funds off the top and stole millions from the resident’s accounts.”
“And your dad was the fall guy.”
“Basically.” She nodded. “My mom said that when families started to complain about financial irregularities, the cops got an anonymous tip about my father.”
“Anything to back up your mom’s take on things?”
“No.” She fought to get the words out. “She told me the night of my dad’s funeral and killed herself a few weeks later.”
The same officer who’d arrested her father had told her about her mother. She’d slid down the foyer wall of the house she’d grown up in—the same house the authorities seized a month later for restitution—leaving her, an almost high school graduate, homeless.
She’d said nothing to the social workers, the school teachers, or anyone else brave or curious enough to see how she was holding up. She’d skipped her high school graduation ceremony and instead spent the day sweeping up hair from the floor at the Beautiful You hair salon.
“So how is Diamond Tommy connected to Natasha Orton?” he asked.
She’d give up her $200 Bobbi Brown makeup brush collection to get the answer to that. “No clue.”
“Then we need to find one.”
She laughed. If only it was so easy. “Only one clue?”
“One leads to another.” He slid his beer glass halfway to her Jack and Coke. “Which leads to a third.” He pushed the glass until it tapped against hers. “And eventually we have everything we need.”
Did he never doubt that he’d come out on top? “You sound confident.”
“Always.” He winked, slid out of the booth. “We know Tommy’s somehow connected. We’ll figure out the rest. Let’s get out of here. We need a good night’s sleep before we take on Diamond Tommy and the Harbor City Police Department.”
“We can’t go back to my place.”