“How the fuck do you know that? We don’t have any kind of intel on their organization.”
And from what I heard, the attempted peace talks between our two Families were going nowhere. Not even our alliance with the Esposito Family had softened the Lombardis feelings toward us. Or, truth be told, ours to them.
“Pillow talk,” Cesare said, smirking over the memory of the dumbest mistake of his life. “Kind of smart, if you ask me.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, grabbing a towel to dry my hands.
“Because who the fuck would know? It’s the perfect way to get intel or sneak up and handle business without someone getting suspicious.”
That was fair.
“So what now?” Cesare asked, looking over at Whitney’s unconscious body, now almost completely covered in a sheet.
Cesare had tried to talk me into just pulling up her skirt and down her shirt, worried the woman would lose her shit if she woke up nearly naked. But with the way she was bleeding, I reasoned that it might have freak her out more if she woke up with giant stains of blood all over her.
“Now we wait until a respectable hour to call Lorenzo to see what the next move is,” I told him, tone a little pointed.
Cesare was used to working alone, to not needing to run shit past the boss. Things didn’t work like that in the city.
“Why not just call him now?” Cesare asked, checking his phone.
“Because he’s got a fussy baby that’s keeping him up all the time as it is. He needs to get some sleep here and there, or he’s not going to be thinking straight. We have this under control for the time being,” I told him, slapping a hand on his shoulder as I went toward the door.
As I moved out, I could have sworn I heard him mumble under his breath, “You call this under control?”
I didn’t bother responding.
Because, yes.
It was under control… enough.
The bullets were out. The bleeding had stopped. She was unconscious. There were no signs so far of her being in any sort of imminent danger.
We could give Lorenzo a couple hours to catch up on some much-needed sleep.
That decision had nothing at all to do with the fact that Whitney was the prettiest patient I’d ever had.
That would be fucking ridiculous.
I was way too goddamned old to base any sort of decisions on that kind of thing.
Going back to the waiting room of the defunct doctor’s office, I found her purse, and pulled the wad of cash I found sticking out of her bra, and slipped it into her wallet, bloodstains and all. Money was money whether it was covered in plasma or glitter from a stripper’s ass crack. It was the bank’s problem to take it out of circulation if it wasn’t fit to spread around.
There wasn’t much else in her purse.
Some hand sanitizer, a collection of hair ties that she likely needed for working in a restaurant, a bottle of aspirin, and a piece of chalk. Like… an actual piece of chalk. Which seemed to make no sense.
Judging from the contents of her wallet, she lived a couple blocks over from where she’d been shot. In a neighborhood where I would feel a little uncomfortable walking in the middle of the night. Which made me wonder why the hell she hadn’t taken public transit or a ride or something. She had the money on her to afford it, that’s for sure.
It was something I would have to figure out.
Because I had a feeling that the Costa Family was going to have some sort of lasting relationship with Whitney Carlton. Whether either of us liked that fact or not.
See, we executed people without much thought.
But those were people in the life.
We didn’t take out innocents.