Page 70 of Taking Care of the Target

He considered sayingGood, then I win, and we both stay put. But she was right about his wound needing cleaning, and he’d made sure they weren’t followed. “Your purse is in my duffel bag. I hope you don’t mind I took your stash of cash from your drawers and shoved it all in there, but I knew you’d need it. We can’t use credit cards from here on out, okay? Nothing they can use to trace us.”

“Okay.” She opened the duffel bag, dug around, and came up with her purse and the framed picture from her night table. Hugging it to her chest she spun to him. “You…” Her voice cracked, and tears bordered her eyes.

“I would’ve brought the quilt and your hot pink couch if I could, but that was the only thing I could fit in with our clothes and other supplies I thought we’d need.”

She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”

***

Tony “the Trigger” Castellano wasn’t talking. The local boys in blue caught him running out of the building across the street from Cassandra Dalton’s place. Jim and Mancini had burst into Cassandra’s complex and rushed to her floor, planning on taking her into protective custody.

Only when they arrived, the door had a hole instead of a doorknob, there were bullet holes in the fridge as well as the counter and wall, and blood was on the floor of the kitchen. Cassandra’s car sat in the parking lot, but she was nowhere to be found. They put in calls to the local hospitals and talked to her neighbors, who hadn’t heard anything. Not all that surprising, considering the blaring TV and the fact that sniper rifles were quiet, unless the thing they shot was right next to you. None of her neighbors seemed to know much about Miss Dalton in general.

He and Mancini also questioned the people at her work to see if she was with any of them or had contacted them, but no dice. One of her co-workers told him about Vince DaMarco and how he and Cassie had been seeing each other.

There was no sign of Vince DaMarco, either.

Trigger Castellano’s lawyer showed up, and big surprise, he had the same lawyer as the rest of Rossi’s boys. They couldn’t charge him for murder without a body, but until they found out if there was one, they could hold him on smaller charges. They should probably apply for a judge’s approval to hold him for longer so they’d have more time to investigate Cassandra’s disappearance.

Mancini slammed down the phone with enough force for Jim to know whatever lead he’d been pursuing hadn’t worked out. He sat back in his chair and scrubbed a hand over his face. “If Vince killed her,” he said, “why’d Tony shoot?”

“I don’t know,” Jim said, shaking his head. The connection between Cassandra and Vince had never made much sense to him. “But I do know I want to get my hands on him and ask him.”

“I just hope…I hope he’s not on his way to dispose of the body. The more time he has…” Mancini didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.

Cassandra Dalton was either dead or injured, and they needed to find her soon, for her sake and for their case’s sake.Please let her just be injured.

He wanted her to be okay, he did, because he didn’t want innocent people to die. Did it make him a bad person to also want her alive because she could be the key to their entire case against Carlo Rossi? They’d be able to make a decent case against conspiracy to murder. Of course, the slippery bastard had Sal give the order to keep himself clear.

Jim turned and punched the wall until his knuckles throbbed and stung.

Mancini simply watched, not attempting to stop him or tell him to calm down. He liked that about the kid, even though his knuckles could’ve used an intervention. “Feel better?”

“No.” Right now the case felt so damned impossible.

Mancini leaned back in his chair, crossing one ankle over the other. He gave off a good fake everything’s-gonna-be-okay-vibe, but tension tightened his jaw, and his fists were clenched. “Once forensics is done with what they found at the scene, they promised to send us the information ASAP. And we sent out an APB on Cassandra and Vince.”

“We got double the manpower for surveillance now, too, so we’ll push hard while they’re trying to cover their tracks.”

Mancini nodded and sighed. “So, now we just gotta wait and see.”

Jim studied his red, scraped knuckles. “Problem is, I’ve never been much for ‘wait and see.’”

***

Cassie frowned at the many types of bandages, not sure what she needed. They always seemed to magically know in the movies. That or they had the luck to have a doctor stashed somewhere. Hospitals, cancer treatments, waking up from massive head injuries… she could tell you loads about that. But flesh wounds confounded her, and she certainly didn’t have a doctor stashed somewhere.

She tossed supplies into her basket at random. Gauze, tape, butterfly bandages, hydrogen peroxide, and Neosporin. That should cover most of the bases, just short of actually going to the hospital to get Vince stitched up like she’d prefer. He kept insisting he was fine, but she saw the way he winced whenever he moved. Not to mention the amount of blood staining his T-shirt.

Trying to focus on happier thoughts, despite the fact that they were in short supply at the moment, she moved to the next aisle. The sleeves of Vince’s green jacket fell over her hands as she grabbed Ibuprofen. She opened her purse, pushed aside the wads of cash she’d need to organize when she got a chance, and saw she still had a few pain pills left over from her accident.That should get us by. And food. We never got to eat dinner, and I’m starving.

After loading up with snack-type foods and tucking a case of water bottles under her arm, she took her items to the check stand. The older woman in front of her glanced back, her eyebrows arching slightly, and Cassie prepared herself for being silently accused of being a hooker for the second time today. Vince’s jacket at least covered her skimpy, torn dress, but it also kind of made her look like she was wearingonlythe jacket, with a mere few inches of hot pink showing at the bottom. Then there were the heels she couldn’t wait to abandon.

The woman gave her a compassionate smile. “Are you okay, honey?”

Cassie blinked back unexpected tears at the concern from a stranger and assured the woman she was, in spite of doubting she’d ever be totally okay again.

Balancing everything was a bit tricky, and as she exited the store, she suddenly remembered every movie she’d watched where the bad guy was outside waiting for the unsuspecting girl who’d been dumb enough to go somewhere alone.

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