Ace Is Wild (7 page)

“And the ones who arrested you?”

“Were cops.” Which said it all, as far as she was concerned. Cops were taught to believe only what they saw with their own eyes and heard with their own ears. So were FBI agents and lawyers.

She’d learned as a child, at the foot of her gypsy grandmother, that Don Quixote might have been noble, but he’d been a fool, too. Unfortunately, she needed Daniel to believe her, so she had no choice but to tilt. “People come to psychics because they want to know if they’re going to fall in love, or strike it rich, or get that dream job, but they don’t really want to hear the truth. They want me to reassure them that everything’s going to be okay, no matter what I see.”

“And you always tell the absolute truth.”

“Do you?” she shot back. “You never get up in front of a jury and skew the facts to make a defendant look even more heinous? You never omit evidence that doesn’t bolster your own case?”

“I’m trying to get criminals off the street.”

“And I’m trying to be as honest as I can.” Except for those rare occasions when she saw something horrible in someone’s future. She couldn’t bring herself to make predictions about death. Instead she tried to steer the subject away from that particular path. Except in Daniel’s case.

“Making a prediction means handing someone the knowledge to change their own future,” she said. Or not. In her visions, she’d seen Daniel die in the Oval Room during the bachelor auction. Clearly that hadn’t happened. It didn’t mean she’d altered the ultimate outcome. “Revealing what I see today doesn’t mean it will come to pass, but it doesn’t prevent anything, either.”

“That’s a handy dodge.”

“Spoken like a true skeptic.”

“You have an alias,” he pointed out, as if that justified his disbelief.

“I use my grandmother’s name in the shop because it makes good business sense not to have to build a new reputation.”

“Doesn’t make it any less dishonest.”

Big surprise, she thought. The elevator dinged for the first floor, the door opened, and Daniel got off, clearly expecting her to follow. She did, of course. What other choice was there?

“You’ve been arrested,” he felt a need to remind her, “and sued.”

“And your point is?”

“It doesn’t say much for your rate of return.”

“I’m not a mutual fund.”

“What you do isn’t all that far off.”

“Being arrested and sued has nothing to do with my ‘rate of return.’ People get predictably angry when I don’t tell them what they want to hear.” And some of them weren’t in possession of the most stable psyche’s to begin with. Best, she decided, not to point that out to Pierce.

“So tell them only good things.”

“Now you’re suggesting that I lie? What would that do to my rate of return?”

Daniel apparently felt that was a rhetorical question because all he did was turn down another boring corridor, one that led to a back entrance. Or maybe it was a side entrance. Either way there was a man in a black suit waiting there, young enough to be stuck with babysitting duty, old enough to have learned comportment from Daniel’s friend upstairs.

“This agent will make sure you get back to Boston,” Daniel said.

Vivi caught him by the sleeve and hauled him to a stop. “You’re just letting me go?”

“Yep.”>

“And the Boston P.D. isn’t going to show up at my door?”

“Only if they’re selling tickets to their annual ball. But I’d steer clear of Officer Cranston if I were you.”

“You’re going to take precautions, right?” she asked him.

“Yeah. Taking precautions.”

He curled his hand around her wrist, and for once she had no trouble ignoring the skin-to-skin tingle. “I went to a lot of trouble to save your life.”

“Okay, but it’s my life.”

“But—”

“Good-bye.” Just to be sure she got the message, he transferred her wrist to the other guy’s hand, then turned on his heel and walked away.

As if it was his decision to make.

Chapter 5

DANIEL’S GUT WAS TALKING, BIG-TIME, AND WHAT
it said was, “trouble.” It didn’t stop him from following through with his plans. After all, he’d been feeling some level of alarm since the moment Vivienne Foster had bulldozed her way into his life and told him he was up for a hit. And then two guys had tried to kill him.

He hated to admit it, but he was spooked, over the woman more than the hit. Having a target hanging on his back was nothing new. Being stalked by an obviously deranged woman who claimed to be a psychic in order to hide her connection to whoever wanted him dead was.

And he’d decided not to think of Vivienne Foster tonight. Or ever again—

“This is you taking precautions, Ace?”

—which was pretty hard to do with her sneaking up behind him. “Still in stalker mode, I see.”

“No FBI tail,” she said, sticking to her own agenda, “you aren’t armed—that I can see anyway—and you’re on foot in South Boston.”

“I have a date.”

“With a bullet? ’Cause this would be a good place to get in the way of one.”

She had a point. An FBI shadow wasn’t going to prevent him from catching a bullet, though. Neither was the clutch piece strapped to his ankle, but it was reassuring. Having Mata Hari following him wasn’t. He didn’t know if she brought the trouble with her or just showed up at the same time, either way it was the wrong neighborhood to be tempting fate. She was right about that much.

Some of South Boston had been invaded by young professionals, but it was still a stronghold for what was left of the Irish mob, which was constantly at war with the Italian Mafia to see who was going to run the Boston underworld. The war had been at a slow simmer for the last couple of decades, the Italians running drugs and numbers in their neighborhoods while the Irish families carved up chunks of South Boston and held them by right of might. It was an uneasy peace, elastic, stretching to allow a wily and enterprising man to make his way to the top, snapping back to crush those who weren’t worthy.

Daniel and Vivi were walking through one of those chunks, a narrow South Boston street crowded with old brick buildings. Maybe not the wisest choice to be on foot, but he wasn’t expecting another attack. This engagement wasn’t on his calendar, work or home, and no one else knew he was here except the woman he’d come to meet. And Vivi Foster apparently, which pretty much destroyed his confidence, since there was no way of knowing who’d told her where to find him.

“You’re wondering how I knew where you’d be tonight.”

“Let me guess, the voices in your head told you?”

“They’re not really voices, they’re more . . . impressions, suggestions. They help me to get in touch with whatever feeling I’m having.”

“I’m in touch with a couple of feelings right now.”

“Then there’s my grandmother,” she continued with a you-asked-so-spare-me-the-sarcasm shrug. “I actually talk to her a lot.”

Daniel’s eyes cut to hers, he couldn’t help himself. “Your grandmother is haunting you?”

“She’s not jumping out of dark corners shouting ‘Boo!’ if that’s what you’re asking. She doesn’t even talk back. It’s more of a Jiminy Cricket sort of thing. You know, a conscience, like I ask myself what would Madame Totchka do in this situation? And it helps guide me. Unless I have a vision, which is what happened in your case. There’s not much interpretation required with a vision, just figuring out who, where, and what. And ‘what’ isn’t usually a problem, either. Especially not with you.”

“I take it back. You’re not just a kook, you’re crazy.” And she was trying to draw him into her insanity. “There’s medication for that, you know.”

“Predictable,” she observed.

“Is there any way I can convince you to go away?”

“You could get a restraining order, but you won’t.”

Nope, Daniel thought immediately, not his style. Restraining orders were for people who didn’t have any other resources or skills. Women with drunken exes got TROs, so did kids being bullied in school . . . He caught Vivi’s smug little grin and scowled. “There are other ways to deal with stalkers.”

“You could shoot me,” she said, “but you don’t have a gun—at least not one you can get to easily. You could pick me up and stuff me into a cab, but cabs don’t frequent this neighborhood.”

“I could carjack the next slow-moving vehicle, drive you out to some rural area, and hope you can’t find your way back.”

“Hmmm, the unwanted puppy treatment. Might work if the carjacking portion of the program didn’t go against everything you stand for.”

“Breaking the law seems like a small adjustment to make in your case.”

“You don’t make small adjustments, Ace. You don’t make any adjustments. That’s one of your problems.”

Vivi Foster was the only problem he had at the moment. “How about if I ask nicely? Would you go away then?”

“I might, if your teeth weren’t clenched. And if you actually asked me.”

Daniel unlocked his jaw. “Would you please stop following me?”

She didn’t say anything, but a glance at her face answered his question. She was bubble gum on the bottom of his shoe. Until he found a way to scrape her off.

He turned a corner, slowing as he came to a storefront pub in the middle of the block. Despite its rundown appearance, Cohan’s had people spilling out the doorway and congregating on the sidewalk in the early evening twilight.

“You’re not eating here,” Vivi said.

Daniel ignored her, fighting his way inside and taking a moment to familiarize himself, and not just with the furniture. Some of the waitstaff—the male waitstaff since the mob hadn’t heard of equal opportunity—would be armed, though you’d never know it to look at them. There’d be armed guys in the kitchen, too, who weren’t even trying to blend in. And no one was getting past the dragon at the front door without her permission.

“Pierce,” she repeated when he gave her his name. Her voice was blurred by the lilt of Ireland and heavy with displeasure, “that’d be English, wouldn’t it?”

“It’s American,” Daniel said. “I’m looking for Patrice Hanlon.”

The glare cooled down to subarctic.

Vivi caught him by the arm. “You can’t have dinner here. This place is a gang stronghold. Half the waiters are carrying guns.”

“I’m aware of that. The question is: How are you? Grandma spill the beans?”

She snorted softly. “Their suits could be cut a little more generously.”

“Not much of a deterrent if people don’t know they’re packing.”

“But—”

“I’m having dinner here. You’re not.”

“But—”

“Prosecutor!”

They both turned toward that booming voice. A tall, stocky, ginger-haired man in his late forties strode toward them, a huge smile on his broad, freckled face, and a shrewd glint in his blue eyes. He held out a hand wide as a dinner plate.

Daniel took it, shifting so he stood in front of Vivi. No point, he told himself, in anyone making a connection between the two of them—although he didn’t take the time to ask himself why he’d rather she stayed unmarked by a man known to use whatever weapon fell into his hands in order to get what he wanted.

He went through the whole who-can-squeeze-harder routine, more for the sake of his bones than his ego, giving all his attention to the man trying to crush his hand. It wasn’t wise to do otherwise. “Flynn,” he said by way of acknowledgment.

“What brings you to our humble establishment?”

“Lawyers have to eat, just like everyone else.”

“Not having Italian for supper tonight?”

“I’m saving up.”

Joe Flynn let out a laugh that drowned out even the prodigious noise of the Irish crowd. “You get a guilty verdict for that wop bastard, Tony Sappresi, you can eat free in South Boston for the rest of your life. Give that son of a bitch a one-way ticket to the federal pen and you can write your own check in this city. You’ve a hankerin’ for City Hall, or just to be a hero in Washington, it’s yours.”

“That didn’t work out so well for John Connolly,” Daniel said, referring to the FBI agent who’d used Irish mob boss Whitey Bulger as an informant back in the ’80s. Not such a bad plan, if not for Connolly’s looking the other way while Whitey broke every city, state, and federal law on the books, then tipping him off before he could be arrested. Whitey had never been caught; Connolly hadn’t fared so well.