She straightened up from putting her skate guards on. The look she turned on me was one I was not used to seeing on her. It was compassionate. Kind.
It gave me the heebie-jeebies. “Don’t look at me like that. I know what you’re thinking. It’s not the same at all. Charlie got what he deserved. He wasn’t a nice guy. He burned every bridge he’d ever crossed and left a trail of broken hearts back and forth across the country.”
That got me the eyebrow again. “Okay, maybe not a trail. But several.”
Her eyeroll put us back on familiar ground. Thank God.
She sighed heavily, a sound I associated with her deep affection for me. “Okay. Fine. Josie and I will make it happen. Meet me outside.”
Miranda was frowning at her phone when I reached the car.
“What’s wrong?”
She shook her head slowly. “I just got an email from one of my contacts in the Miami FBI field office.”
“Good news?” I asked with a forced grin.
She ignored me, as she should. Of course, it wasn’t good news. It never was. “Do we know who’s targeting Leo yet?”
She shook her head. “We have a bigger problem.”
“Bigger problem than Leo’s townhouse blowing up and Charlie’s house getting searched?”
“Someone is trying to get an order to have Charlie’s body exhumed.”
“Exhumed? They want to dig up Charlie’s grave?” Rude. Couldn’t a man rest in peace anymore?
“It appears so.” Her expression was unusually troubled. Which was not good. I’d seen Miranda negotiate deals between governments and arms dealers and not look so concerned.
“Hmm.” I tapped my car keys against the roof of the car while I thought. “Well, then, we’ll have to get to it first.”
“Get to what first?” Miranda asked suspiciously.
“Charlie’s body,” I said, giving her my biggest smile.
Her blink was long and slower than her usual. “Charlie’s dead and buried body?”
“That’s the one!” I could just picture it, Miranda and me dressed all in black, sneaking into the cemetery in the middle of the night, shovels over our shoulder, ready for an old-fashioned grave robbing.
Miranda tapped her perfectly manicured fingernails against the roof of the car in counterpoint to my tapping. Since she had her thinking face on, I bit the inside of my cheek to stop from saying something stupid, which was my usual instinct in response to any kind of prolonged silence.
The tapping stopped. “If I recall correctly,” she said slowly, “Charlie had at multiple times expressed his desire to be cremated. I’m sure his estate followed through with his wishes.”
I nodded sincerely. “I’m sure they did. But maybe, just to be sure, we should check?”
“Absolutely.” She got into her car.
I tapped against the passenger’s window, doing it harder when she ignored me. Miranda was much too refined to sigh visibly, but her aura definitely sighed as she pressed the button to roll down the window. “Yes?”
“What should I do now?” I asked, feeling a bit at loose ends.
Her grin was all teeth and anger. “You just stand around and look pretty.”
“I can do that,” I said.
“And lie low,” she added.
“Miranda. I can’t. I have to find out what’s going on.”
“No.” She stuck a perfectly manicured fingernail into my chest. “Go find some secluded mountain cabin somewhere and hide.”
“But there are no cabana boys in mountain cabins,” I pouted.
“And yet somehow I’m sure you’d find one. Seriously, get lost. If I catch as much as a glimpse of your face, I’m telling Josie to shoot you.”
I had zero doubt she would do just that. “Fine.” I knew the perfect place.
1 Carson
Fatigue dragged my eyelids down as I stared out the windshield at the ribbon of gray unspooling into the darkness beneath the glare of the headlights. The night pressed against the SUV as we drove north through Iowa. The car was quiet for a change, the four other men either asleep or engrossed in whatever was playing through their headphones.
It had been two weeks since everything had gone to hell, starting with Davis’s mom shooting him, the FBI raiding Charlie’s mansion, and ending with someone blowing up Leo’s townhouse. A week of crisscrossing the country, paying cash for everything, and staying in no-name motels and the odd safe house, not quite sure why we were running or who we were running from. The FBI? Charlie’s killers? The mob? Someone from our various shady pasts? Whoever or whatever it was, the fact remained that someone was after us. Maybe more than one someone.