I smiled at him and I smiled big. “You’re on.”
“Right. Great.” He reached into me, grabbed a bag of pork rinds and held them up. “Lunch.” And then with no further ado, bid his farewell. “Later.”
And with that, as I was finding was Tony’s way, he turned to walk away.
“Tony Wilson, you better get something more substantial for lunch!” I admonished to his back.
“Do it at dinner, Cady,” he told the cash register, where he was heading.
“You better!”
He looked over his shoulder at me and it was then I nearly melted into a puddle of goo.
Tony bought his pork rinds.
I restocked the one he’d taken and then some.
He left.
I was dog tired.
But I walked on air the rest of the day.
Tony/Coert
“Use the girl.”
“What? Cap, are you serious?” Malcolm asked in disgust.
Coert sat back in his chair in Cap’s office, ankle on his opposite knee, not breaking the stare he had aimed at his captain and trying real hard not to let it show as he swallowed back the bile that had filled his throat when his cap gave him that order.
“Nightingale, this Lonnie moron is into her, she’s into Coert, Coert gets close to her, he’s deeper in Lars’s crew. A part of it. Hooked to one of their women,” Cap told Malcolm.
“She wants out,” Coert put in, having swallowed back the bile, now a pit was settling in his gut in a way it felt like it might stay there forever.
Cap looked at him. “She can get out after you use her to solidify your place in.”
“If she wants out, Cap,” Tom butted in, “this crew, we shouldn’t do shit to keep her in.”
“Savage, if she’s stupid enough to even get her big toe in with that mess, not bein’ a dick, but she gets what’s comin’ to her, and some undercover cop usin’ her to solidify his cover is the least she’d have to worry about,” Cap said to Tom and looked to Coert, who had straightened in his chair and put both feet to the floor when Cap had called Cady “stupid enough.” “She’s into you, use her.”
“She’s not feelin’ the love for Lonnie anymore and she’s breakin’ away from his woman,” Coert reported.
“So reel her back in,” Cap returned.
“Cap—” Coert started.
“Coert,” Cap bit off, “you got three months in with this shit and we got nothin’. You need to get cozy with Lars, which means you need to get cozy with his crew. Assholes like that consider themselves a family, until one acts out of line and gets a bullet in his brain. Best way to find your way into a family is to use one of their women. Not tellin’ you to fuck her, that’s your call. Shit happens when you’re undercover. You want that, whatever. Not my business and don’t wanna know how that goes either way. You just wanna playact with her, get creative about keepin’ her hooked. But this girl is into you, so use her.”
“And what about after it’s done?” Malcolm asked.
Cap looked to him. “She’s not indicted with the rest, she goes her own way and whatever.”
“This is a twenty-three-year-old girl you’re messing with, Cap,” Tom reminded him.
“She’s not a minor. She’s an adult who needs to make adult decisions and face the consequences for those decisions. And all the intel we got is that Lars is flooding our streets with product, so we not only need to shut his crew down, we need to shut him down, but before we do that we need to understand who he’s gettin’ that shit from so we can shut them down. Lars hasn’t bought into Coert, Lonnie has. But we need Lars’s buy in. We need Coert deeper so we can nail the suppliers.” Cap looked back to Coert. “So fuckin’ use the girl.”
Coert obviously couldn’t let Cady be raped at Wild Bill’s Rally.
He didn’t have to call his bud Casey and see if Cady could crash at his place while she was figuring shit out, but he also did have to, because she was in a situation and it didn’t seem she had anyone to help her out.
He also didn’t have to tell Cap, Malcolm and Tom—his handlers on this assignment—about her.
And apparently that last, sharing about Cady, was his biggest screwup.
Fuck.
“We on the same page here, detective?” Cap asked, but it was an order.
Coert pushed out of his chair, replying, “We’re on the same page, Cap.”
“Good,” Cap muttered dismissively.
In other words, they were all dismissed so they all filed out.
The door to Cap’s office was closed behind them when Malcolm Nightingale, a man who had a bit over a decade longer on the force than Coert, a good guy, family guy, great wife, three kids—two of them hell-raisers but Malc would sort that out—and a brother’s brother when it came to cops, asked, “Question now is, you into her?”
Coert stopped and looked to his colleague. “She’s a short redhead with a great ass and rack.”
She was more than that.
Too much more.
But he’d said enough. He wasn’t going to dig that hole deeper. Not even with Malc and Tom.
Tom Savage, Malc’s partner, a good guy, single dad since his wife passed years ago, his daughter was the definition of a hell-raiser, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t a great kid who loved her dad beyond reason, grinned big.
They both knew his type.
And Cady Webster was maybe a hint too young, just a handful of years older than Tom’s daughter, and for that matter, Malc’s (their two girls being best friends).
But she was absolutely his type.
And a whole lot more.
Malc looked worried.
“Wrangle that,” Malc advised.
“Come again?” Coert asked.
“She part of this crew, I mean really?” Malc asked.
“Seen her three times. She tries to act tough and not sure she makes the right decisions but she seems like an outsider.”
She was definitely an outsider. She had no business with that crew.
And she knew it.
So did Coert.
“Cap wants you to use her, use her, keep her removed and do it so when it’s over she doesn’t totally hate your guts,” Malc replied.
The way she looked at him, Coert figured he could take her to the bank for a deposit and hold the place up after she did it and she’d not hate his guts.
And he loved that.
He loved the way Cady Webster looked at him.
And he’d loved it from the first moment she turned her head from the beer tap and met his eyes.
Shit.
Fuck.
“It’s part of that life, Coert,” Tom said quietly. “You leave here, put Tony’s skin back on, your whole life is a lie and it isn’t just the bad guys who get it.”
This was his first undercover job, though he’d been laying the groundwork before he slid into that world so he’d had his taste of it. Now he’d been living it for three months.
He knew that.
But he’d never been ordered to make a twenty-three-year-old girl with the greenest eyes Coert had ever seen have feelings for him so he could use her to take down her friends.
“Lonnie’s digging in deeper but Lars isn’t stupid, and he knows Lonnie has a big mouth and is essentially a total fuckup. It’s Maria who does the runs for them. She’s pretty. Fast talker. Sly as hell. Lars is grooming her for bigger things, including warming his bed. Maria is Cady’s girl. None of this is gonna end well,” Coert told them something he’d already reported.
“Their decisions, their consequences. Cady’s being loyal but staying removed, so you keep her in while keeping her out and use that to get in deeper,” Malc advised.
“And you wanna share how to pull off that miracle?” Coert asked.
“Give her Coert but do it being Tony,” Tom answered.
He’d already done that. Three times.
And she’d liked it, three times.
And Coert had liked doing it, three times (though he wasn’t a big fan of watching her the five seconds it took him to get to her as she fought off two would-be rapists, he still liked that it was him who saved her).