I seriously considered it.
I had the intel on Benson, which was all I needed to do the job. And it wasn’t like Silvio was blameless in all of this. He’d stood by and watched Benson kill Troy, Derrick, and countless others before them. In a way, that made Silvio’s hands even bloodier than his boss’s. Besides, if what Silvio had said was true, and Benson could sense others’ ill intentions toward him, then I was better off cutting Silvio’s throat here and now, rather than letting him go back to Benson and risking that the drug kingpin would realize that his right-hand man was plotting against him—with me.
I looked at the photo of Silvio, Laura, and Catalina. His expression was somber, but he had his arm around his sister’s shoulder in a protective way, and Catalina was grinning up at him, like he’d hung the moon.
I let Silvio walk.
He stopped at his car, slowly turning his head in my direction, as though he expected to find me right behind him, raising my knife high for the killing strike. But when he realized that I was letting him go, he didn’t waste any time getting gone.
Silvio slid inside the vehicle, cranked the engine, and steered down the driveway, with the Pork Pit pig rune dangling from his rearview mirror winking at me all the while.
16
“I can’t believe that you agreed to kill Benson for him.”
I sighed, crossed my arms over my chest, and leaned back against the kitchen counter. “Really? Why not?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Finn said, his green eyes wide and accusing. “Because you didn’t even talk price!”
Owen chuckled, far more amused by Finn than I was. The two of them were sitting at the table in the breakfast nook off the kitchen. As soon as Silvio had left, I’d called and asked them to come over to Fletcher’s house for a powwow. Now I almost wished that I hadn’t, given Finn’s incessant whining about the fact that I hadn’t negotiated payment for the job.
I hadn’t called Bria at all—for obvious reasons.
“I mean, really, Gin,” he muttered. “You can’t just keep killing people for free. Pro bono is not a phrase that is in the Finnegan Lane vocabulary.”
“Oh, no,” I drawled. “But greedy, shameless hustler certainly is.”
“Damn skippy.”
Owen chuckled again. There was no use arguing with Finn, so I grabbed a spoon off the counter and went back to the pan on the stove. I’d already been through Silvio’s file while I’d been waiting for them to show up, and I’d decided to make us all some dinner while Finn and Owen reviewed the info. After the emotional roller coaster of the day, I needed some serious comfort food, and I’d decided on good, old-fashioned sloppy joes.
I’d melted a little butter in the bottom of the pan, before browning up some ground sirloin, adding ketchup, and letting everything bubble away together. I leaned over the pan and breathed in, enjoying the spicy tickle of chili powder and black pepper steaming up from the simmering mixture. I gave my sloppy joe filling a final stir, then turned off the stove.
While Finn and Owen flipped through the papers and photos, I sliced up a loaf of Sophia’s sourdough bread and started making sandwiches. I covered one piece of bread with a bit of mayonnaise, along with a thick layer of my spicy sloppy joe mix, then topped that off with some shredded sharp cheddar cheese and another piece of bread. I made six sandwiches, two for each of us, then grabbed the parmesan-dill potatoes I’d been roasting in the oven, along with parfait glasses filled with dark chocolate mousse I’d made earlier in the week. I put everything on a tray and carried it over to the table.
My stomach gurgled with happiness as we all dug into the food. The warm, hearty potatoes pleasantly offset the slow burn of the spices in the sloppy joes, while the mousse was a rich cocoa concoction. I washed everything down with tart, crisp lemonade.
Owen and Finn must have been as hungry as I was, because we all finished our food in record time. Owen cleared the dishes away, while Finn and I stayed at the table.
“We should get started. No rest for the wicked and all that,” Finn said in a cheery voice.
“Or the weary,” I muttered, but he didn’t hear me.
Finn grabbed the file, dragged it over in front of him, and flipped it open. “I have to hand it to Silvio. He knows what he’s doing. There’s thorough, and then there is what is in this folder. Photos, blueprints, dates, times, routes, contacts. It’s all in here, along with every corner, alley, and parked car where Benson’s dealers set up. Silvio even included what Benson’s favorite meal is at Underwood’s. The veal cutlets, in case you were wondering.” He shook his head. “This is as good as any file in Dad’s office—and better than some.”
I’d thought the same thing, although I would never say so out loud. It felt . . . disloyal.
“Yeah,” Owen called out, washing the dishes in the sink. “But is the information accurate? Or is he setting Gin up for some kind of fall?”
“It’s accurate,” I said, pointing to another folder on the table. “I dug out Fletcher’s file on Benson. All of Silvio’s info matches up with the old man’s.”
Some of Fletcher’s information was out of date, since it was more than a year old, given his death last fall. But the important things he had noted about Benson corresponded with Silvio’s file.
Finn let out a low whistle. “Well, it certainly seems like Silvio is serious about wanting Benson dead.”
“Wouldn’t you be, if Catalina was your niece?” Owen asked. “And how did you miss the fact that Silvio was her uncle?”
Finn shook his head. “I did a background check on Catalina, like I do with all the employees at the Pork Pit, but she started working there last year, well before . . .”
“Before I outed myself as the Spider by killing Mab,” I finished.
He nodded. “So I didn’t dig as deep as I should have. But Silvio is the one who paid for Catalina’s car, her apartment, all of it. He actually set everything up through my bank, if you can believe that. On paper, it looks like a monthly life insurance payout, but it’s actually a trust that Silvio established in Catalina’s name when she was born. She’s had access to it since she was eighteen, but she didn’t touch a penny of the money . . .”
“Until after her mom died.” I finished his thought again.
“Well, you can’t blame her for that, can you?” Owen murmured. “Wanting to get away from Southtown and all the memories there, good and bad.”