Fool's Gold: A Kisses and Crimes Novel (20 page)

I pull out the handle of the gun so that he sees the shiny trigger.

He scrambles for a resolution.

“No, no, no, please, please, sir.” He picks up the bar remote control in front of him. “We sit down. We talk.
We
talk. We watch soccer. ‘S okay. Any’ting!
Baseball
?
You like ‘Merican baseball?
I put it on for you.”

Desperate, he holds out a hand, trying to placate Mister Pistol and me. The channels change on the screen above our heads as he flicks continuously through the stations.

“We can talk,” I say to the nearly hysterical barkeep. “As soon as you tell me which officers you know…”

“Oh, please, Signore…”

I draw him closer.

“
Tell me which ones.
Mister Pistol is feeling awfully chatty today.”

I slide the gun out further, and the bartender nearly pisses his pants.

“
Un momento, Signore
…”

This time, I take the gun completely out, hiding it between my body and the bar so that the other patrons cannot see.

But the barrel of it is aimed right between the barkeep’s beady eyes.

I can see its reflection in his green irises, and it gives me a sick sense of pleasure.

Because this is what the Crow does best.
This is what he is. He has already mastered the fine art of intimidation. And he’s getting ready to move onto his PhD.

I smile wickedly at the double-dealing employee.

“You won’t get another chance,” I tell him. “Now, I’m going to give you a name. And you’re going to tell me everything you know
about
that name. I’m sure you’ll know him. He should be one of
your
little pals.”

I lower my voice menacingly.

“Tell me what you know about…”

But I don’t finish.

A voice, loud and articulate, cuts into my train of thought, stealing all of my attention. I stop, looking upwards at the still blaring TV, and a news reporter with a blonde bob mentions the Annecy police department.

Her face is severe. Her story is grim.

And I listen
very
closely to every word she says next.

The volume of her voice feels disturbingly deafening.

“
Federal investigators and local police refuse to give further comment, but initial reports indicate that the cause of death of decorated FBI agent Calvin Carlson may have been a suicide
.”

An image flashes on the screen of a man.

“
We expect more details to come as investigators cordon off the area of the Hudson River where Carlson’s remains washed up just yesterday in a gruesome scene
.”

The reporter pauses.

“
Calvin Carlson was only thirty-seven years old
.”

She finishes the story… and all of a sudden, I feel the overwhelming urge to vomit right on the spot.

I let go of the barkeep, and in doing so, nearly fall off my stool.

The near-fall turns into a stumble. The stumble turns into a stagger, and by the time I hit the front door to the bar, my body is shaking, overcome with a sense of shock and simultaneous mania.

Lightheaded from the drinks, blindsided by the news, I push through the double doors, wandering down the streets from the bar like a drunkard.

My vision is blurry. My gunshot wounds throb, and the more panicked I become, the harder I can feel my heart pounding through my chest.

I realize what is happening the second it starts.

The blood is rushing too quickly through my veins. I’m hoping that I won’t pass out before I make it back.

I’m bleeding
. I’m bleeding the fuck out from wounds that never really healed.

And at this point I can’t tell how much damage I’ve suffered, whether it is internal or external. All I know is that I need to see Dani.

I need to
explain
to her…
that this game has just completely changed.

Feeling faint, I reach a hand out for the brick wall beside the bar. My eyes scan the street, searching for help, when I get an unexpected gift from the gods of outdated commodities: a payphone sitting in the center of a well-lit corner.

With wayward steps, I stagger towards it.

I don’t remember grabbing the change out of my pockets. I don’t even remember dialing her number, but when the phone picks up, I remember every single word I say.

“Don’t hang up,” I wheeze. “I know it’s late, but I need your help. You’re the only one who
can
help. Can you get to me?”

The response on the other end is quiet. There’s hesitation in the voice on the other end, but also unyielding determination. I exhale heavily with relief.

And that’s when I begin to hear the sirens…

Less than a block away, a police cruiser begins to coast beside me. A woman cop, sitting deep in her driver’s seat, proceeds to call out to me from the middle of the road.

“Sir!” she yells. “Sir! Are you alright?”

I cough, waving her off. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

“Sir, if you’re not okay, I can help you…”

“Won’t be necessary.”

“I got a report of a publicly intoxicated man on the street,” she finishes.

I ignore her.

“Sir!” She continues to follow in her car.

“Sir, if you don’t let me help, I’ll be forced to put you under arrest for public intoxication.”

Her voice is stern.

“What’s it going to be, sir?”

I can barely see her. I’m on the verge of falling into the street. Desperate, I stumble towards her cruiser.

Leaning against it for the briefest of seconds, I open the back door.

I crawl inside just as she pulls off.

“I need a hospital.
Hospital, please,
” I manage.

“Sure thing.”

The response is not hers, but her passenger’s. A man with cropped hair, nearly crew cut, glances back at me.

I slump towards the edge of the seat… and the passenger, quiet just a few minutes ago, continues to speak.

“We almost thought we’d lost ya…”

I grimace. “Thanks,” I reply dryly. “But I’m still around.”

“Ya know… when you disappeared from our radar in Paris, we thought you were a goner, for sure…”

If I thought my heart was beating quickly before I was wrong.

The stranger’s almost benign statement throws my pulse into fucking overdrive, and I lean forward trying to get a better look at him.

Even in the dark, I can see the spots of gray sprouting through his thick grade of hair.

“Delaney...?” I croak.

He finally turns to me.

“Hello, Bishop. You’re in a bad way, son. You look like shit. I let you slip through my fingers. Won’t happen again.”

He shakes his head seemingly with genuine concern.

“Have you met my new protégé? She’s been helping me keep tabs on you. She’s good… Could be even better than you.”

The driver waves.

I notice that she’s not wearing a uniform as I initially assumed. Just dark clothing. And the police cruiser I thought I’d seen was no more than a Crown Victoria with a roof light.

It was camoflauge.

And when I look again at the driver, I realize that she was nothing but camouflage, too.

I try to open the back door but it is locked.

“Bishop…” Delaney announces. “I want you to meet a very special woman and my newest informant… Audriana Fletcher.”

I have no choice but to stare at the side of her face.

Probably because there’s fucking two of them.

Audriana Fletcher, the senator’s missing daughter.

Amelie
.

The flirtatious, French croissant that waited on us at the café in Annecy barely a week ago…

BISHOP

I wake up in a room with no doors.

Or at least it seems like it.

The bright fluorescent lights above my head are the sort that come standard in any government-sanctioned building.

The minute I open my eyes, there they are, blazing.

They burn the will to wake up right out of my irises, and I squeeze my eyelids shut immediately, wanting to roll over and go back to sleep, needing to feeling the warmth of Dani in my bed.

Except when I try to… there is no Dani.

And I can tell by the silvery railings on either side of my mattress… that this isn’t my bed either.

The realization brings me back to full consciousness, and I bolt upwards, attempting to sit up in bed when I realize that I am lightly strapped in with tan-colored cords crossed over my abdomen and legs.

A hospital gown replaces my usual black boxer briefs I wear to bed, and a blue and white curtain sits in place where a door would normally be.

I pull at my restraints, trying to slide out of them when a voice on the other side of the curtain speaks up.

The voice is soft and accented and strangely familiar…

The ugly curtain opens suddenly.

“Oh, you are awake, Mister Bishop…” the woman practically sings.

She’s got large glasses on her face and hair two shades darker than before. She walks about the room with a straighter gait, and if I weren’t looking so goddamned closely, I wouldn’t recognize the
real
woman hiding beneath the small, imperceptible changes.

Her French accent is gone and replaced by something more Brooklyn-esque.

In
this
space, she is strangely bold, but in Annecy, just a few days ago, she seemed subject to our whim, a source of levity at a time of uncertainty.

And as fortune would have it, she just so happens to be the woman who’s overheard some of my most secret conversations.

Amelie. Audriana Fletcher.

A supposed dead woman… and the last person I expected I’d end up meeting (
again
) tonight.

She comes closer to me… and my fists instinctively flex.

“Bishop, you have no reason to be alarmed,” she says, looking down at my hands. “The restraints are for your
protection
, not your detriment.”

“Coulda fooled me.”

“You’ve been shot
twice
, Mister Bishop,” she emphasizes. “
Very recently
, it seems. And you hadn’t recovered from it. You
still
haven’t… and yet, you were walking around the streets as if you had.”

She sits on a stool in the center of the floor.

“If it makes you feel any better, the bullets weren’t meant for you. There were meant for
Dani
.”

I stop.

“
What?”

I narrow my eyes at the doctor, pushing my chest against the restraints and feeling that now familiar burn.

It’s a like a fire that’s never extinguished, a flame that begins with hot lead and leaves you hollow and full of holes.

I must have passed out.

I passed out in that goddamned car.

“How’d you fucking find me?” I croak.

“You were unconscious, Mister Bishop,” she says, ignoring my question. “You should
still
be unconscious. The medication should have kicked in by now. I can’t imagine how your body is still awake. It needs time to mend.”

“And that’s what you’re doing?” I ask, raising an eyebrow. “
Mending
me?”

Audriana/Amelie/Whoever-the-fuck stands, nodding once. Her brown-eyed stare is severe.

“You lost a lot of blood, Mister Bishop. You should be thankful Delaney is so loyal to his badge.”

She smirks.

“If we hadn’t rescued you, who knows what would have happened?
Somebody called in an armed threat against a local bartender.
We heard it over the police scanners while we were looking for Jackson.”

I blink rapidly, trying to ward off a sudden feeling of falling, and Audriana approaches.

“Jackson‘s inquiries were getting just a little too close for our comfort.
And so were you
. We couldn’t find you… so we tracked the next best thing. And whaddya know?”

She smiles.

“He lead us right… back…
to you
…”

She snorts.

“That damned Jackson. Thinking he was going to fuck up my father’s plans.
Our
plans, Bishop. Remember?”

She touches my face and I jerk away.

“You were once on our side,” she says.

I lift my head. “I’m not on anybody’s fucking side.”

Audriana leans in.

“
Of course you are
. You against the Gafanellis.
Us
against the Gafanellis. They overextended their reach. Got too big for their britches. I mean, yeah… their money and connections helped my father into his senate seat, but then they wanted too fucking much.”

She laughs.

“Everybody
always
wants too much.”

She flips her hair over her shoulder.

“You. Dani. Jackson. If only he’d stopped looking into my father’s affairs…”

“Your father’s affairs?” I try my straps again. “You mean his assassinations?”

She throws me a hard glare.

“You’re one to talk.
It’s your fucking fault
…”

She whispers the words, bending at the waist, and just as she does the curtain opens up again behind her.

She smiles as Delaney walks into the cordoned space.

I try to sit up quickly in bed and almost flip the entire damned thing over. The pain leaves me short of breath, and I look up at Delaney, wanting to reach over and grab his throat.

“If only you’d done your job,” he says, shaking his head. “Put that sonuvabitch, Gafanelli, behind bars, instead of falling all over yourself to climb up the ass of his spoiled ass daughter.”

He rocks back and forth on his shiny agency-bought shoes.

“We had to eliminate that connection, Donovan. Get your distractions out of the way.”

“You should consider getting out of
my
way,” I grit out. “You can’t keep me here.”

Delaney smirks.

“Did you think you were going to get out of this unscathed?” he asks forebodingly. “
You disobeyed direct orders
. You went off the grid. You escaped with a suspect wanted for federal crimes and you purposely avoided detection by the agency. You’re a fucking fugitive, Donovan.”

“
And you tried to kill Dani, Delaney
.”

“Fletcher did. That’s my problem…”

“It should be.”

Delaney eyes me. “It’s not
mine
. It never was… You know that better than most, Donovan.”

I challenge him, holding his stare as I sit in bed, nearly wincing in pain.

“So what are you going to do, Del? You going to arrest me?”

“I looked after you, kid—made sure you didn’t get yourself killed when you were ripping and running the streets since you were
ten
. I won’t arrest you, Donovan…”

He shakes his head.

“Well, I won’t arrest you
yet
.”

He puts his hand in his pocket, and just from the gesture, I can tell that he’s thinking. His hand movements always give him away.

If he were a poker player… he’d be the first man out at the table.

He takes his hand back out.

“But I can’t make any promises about your little girlfriend. And I can’t make any promises about—what did I hear?—your ‘wife’?”

He shakes his head.

“Marrying her was a mistake, Donovan. You let her turn you against us.”

I stop, feeling a stabbing in my gut as well as my arm.

“Against us?” I respond. “You’re the one
holding
the puppet strings. A mindless machine. All this so you could be on Fletcher’s payroll, huh, Del?”

I scoff.

“Did you think I was going to work
for
the Gafanellis,
with
the Gafanellis without establishing any real connections?”

Delaney stares at me blankly.

“
You were a fool not to
,” he growls. “I did my best to make
sure
you didn’t.”

“Yeah, and it fucking worked. Up until the point that I went off the grid, I’d barely said two fucking words to Dani. I’d done my job. I’d watched her family and her father, wordlessly. Keeping myself detached. Keeping myself unhindered. Keeping my mouth shut. And look where it got Dani.
Shot
. On my watch.”

Delaney’s cool reserve explodes. His deep voices rumbles throughout the hospital room and possibly into the hallway.

“Your
job
was to take down the Gafanellis and anybody that works with them! It wasn’t to make friends.”

He leans towards me.

“
I’m
the one with friends, Donovan. Senator Fletcher is going to set me up
reaaaal nice
. And I could have cut you in… if you thought with the head above your goddamned belt and gotten the don out of the senator’s fucking way.”

I look him dead in the eyes, lowering my voice.

“I don’t care what you meant to me once before. That was a
long
time ago, my friend. Back in the Jersey days…”

I grunt, sucking in a painful breath.

“You’ve never been a real agent, have you? You tricked my father into letting you in on inside info of the mob. And he and my mother were
murdered
for it.
Guilt
kept you in my life.
Not loyalty
.”

I challenge him with my eyes.

“
Unless you’ve been playing on Fletcher’s side this entire time, old friend…”

Delaney looks behind us, glancing for witnesses, and then he smiles. He takes another step towards me, bringing us nearly nose-to-nose.

He’s trying to intimidate me. He always
was
damned good at intimidating.

But I’m not his ward… and I’m not his pawn. Haven’t been for a while. Nor will I be any fucking longer. I don’t back down.

“I
am
your old friend. And as an old friend, let me just give you a piece of advice… Do what the hell you’re told, Donovan... or you’ll spend the rest of your life in a room with no windows.”

He places a hand on my bed and tightens the straps at my torso.

“Try not to run, Mister Bishop,” Audriana chimes in. “If you do, you will most assuredly die…”

“And if I stay here?” I snap.

“You could
still
die…” The words taper off. “ But do not worry, Mister Bishop. You have a job to do… and we want to make sure you hold up your end to do it.”

Her smile is strange.

“I will not let you die. Oh, no. Not today.

Not just yet…”

***

DANI

That night, Bishop never makes it home.

He doesn’t show up the next morning either, so that when I stretch my fingers over to the side of the mattress. I grip nothing but air.

Knowing Bishop, understanding his habit of disappearing, I try not to let it worry me.

But I can’t remember a time where he’s been gone
this
long, and panic puts a new pep in my pulse, making it beat with a rhythm that practically thunders by the time I step into La Roma, looking for him.

Three hours pass, and still Bishop is a no-show.

By the time 1PM rolls around, I’ve nearly walked a hole in the bar and I’ve definitely drunk more than most of the customers.

The argument with Bishop the night before had pushed my blood past its normal boiling point… and I had been simmering in a particularly saucy cup of “Fuck Bishop” stew.

I was so fucking mad at him.

Why wouldn’t he listen to me?

Trying to get my mind off of it, I down another shot of tequila, ignoring my low tolerance… and I regret it the instant it hits my throat.

But a man, one whom decides to sit oddly close to me at the bar, distracts me.

I try to gather the many abandoned beer bottles I’ve had from earlier and hurry them out of his way, but there are too many.