“She got a badge?”
“I’m not a cop.” Why wasn’t he browbeating Cam? And how did Cam happen to know one of Tower’s grunts?
“Then I gotta check her for marks.”
I drew my gun and flicked the safety off with my thumb. “You’re welcome to try.”
“No, he isn’t.” Cam met my gaze with a heavy one of his own. “You’re going to put the gun away.” Then he turned back to Nick. “And you’re going to back the hell off. I already told you she’s an independent.”
Independents were a dying breed in the city, even before I’d defected from their ranks.
“She broke into an apartment, she’s armed and I have it on good authority that she’s bound to Ruben Cavazos. I gotta check her for marks, Caballero. You don’t like it, you take that up with Adler. It’s over my head.”
Cam’s jaw clenched. “My word’s not good enough?”
Nick shook his head. “Not this time.” He turned to me. “Take off your jacket.”
My temper flared. “Go to hell.”
“Liv, just show him your arm,” Cam said. “You’re not marked. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is that I don’t owe him anything.” And I was tired of being forced to strip.
“Fine. Then do it for me.” Cam frowned, but the lines around his mouth were fear for me, not anger. Something was wrong—beyond the obvious. “You owe me, Liv.”
He was wrong about that. I’d already made up for what I’d done to him, several times over, but I couldn’t tell him that.
The real question was why he wanted me to cooperate with this arrogant little grunt in the first place.
And that’s when I finally understood. “Push your sleeve up.”
Cam exhaled slowly, but didn’t even try to deny what I’d just figured out. He uncrossed his arms and pushed his left sleeve up with his right hand. And there it was. Not one, but three thick, iron-colored links of chain circling a quarter of his upper arm.
“You son of a bitch….” I whispered through clenched teeth. Cam was well entrenched in Jake Tower’s infrastructure. Halfway up the ranks. No wonder he’d been worried about my rumored affiliation with Cavazos. We couldn’t work together. We couldn’t even safely be seen together by anyone who knew about our respective bindings.
And that little bit of understanding brought Cam’s current predicament into clear focus. He’d brought me—a potential enemy—into his neighborhood and if I refused to prove I had no opposing affiliation, he would be held responsible.
My heart pounding, I holstered my gun and slid my jacket off my shoulders, then let Cam pull my shirt sleeve up to show off the unmarked flesh of my upper left arm.
“See?” he said, as I shrugged the jacket back into place. “No binding.”
“That’s not the only place she could be marked.” Nick’s gaze wandered down from my arm before finding my eyes again, his own gleaming in anticipation. “Where does Cavazos mark his whores?”
I stiffened, but Cam didn’t hesitate. His fist flew, and a second later, Nick was on the floor, bleeding from either his nose or his mouth—I couldn’t tell which, with all the blood.
Out of habit, I pulled the bottle of ammonia from my pocket, but Cam shook his head. “Save it.” He plucked a tissue from a box on the coffee table, then knelt next to Nick and wiped the blood from his fist while the grunt pinched his nose, trying to staunch the flow. “You checked. She’s unmarked. Your job here is done.” He folded the tissue into quarters and held it up for Nick to see. “You ever disrespect her again, and I’ll consider it a personal insult.” Cam tucked the tissue into his front pocket. “And I’ll send this to Ruben Cavazos myself, along with your name and a suggestion of how best to use them both to make your life a living hell. Got it?”
Nick swiped blood from his face with the tail of his shirt—an idiotic move, unless he was planning to burn it later. “Sorry, Cam. I just … That’s what I heard….”
“What did you hear?” I demanded, snapping the cap back onto my spray bottle.
Nick hesitated, glancing at me for a second before refocusing on Cam. “I’m not saying it’s true, but word on the street is that she’s doing Cavazos. And reporting to him. Tower put her on the watch list.”
“Based on a stupid rumor?” Cam demanded.
The grunt shrugged. “He don’t answer to me. All I know is we got orders to check for a mark if she comes west of the river.”
“Since when?”
Another shrug. “Couple hours ago? Maybe less. You didn’t get the message?”
Son of a bitch. I’d left Cavazos a couple of hours ago. It had to be one of his men.
Cam’s frown deepened. “I haven’t checked my phone.” He stood and shrugged to me. “Doesn’t matter, though. You’re not marked.”
But it wasn’t that simple. Eventually someone who outranked Cam would demand a more thorough search, and then I’d be screwed. We both would.
“We’re done here, right?” I asked, already headed back to the bathroom.
“Yeah.” Cam pulled the grunt to his feet while I squatted in front of the bathroom sink to check for cleaning supplies. Nothing but an extra roll of toilet paper and a half-empty quart of bleach. But that was good enough.
“What should I report?” Nick asked, still sniffling blood while I stuffed one of Hunter’s soiled rags into an extra quart bag from my pocket, then dropped the rest of them in the wastebasket.
“The truth,” Cam said. “She’s here on a freelance job, for a private party, and I’m assisting. You checked her, she’s unmarked, and I’m personally vouching for her. If they want to know any more than that, they’ve got my number.”
He was vouching for me. Shit. I couldn’t let him do that—it could get him killed, if something went wrong—but I couldn’t make him take the words back without telling him I was bound to Cavazos. And if I admitted that now, Nick would try to haul me in front of Tower, and Cam would try to stop him, and that would lead to more violence and spilled blood, and then we’d both be on the run from the entire Tower syndicate. Which would make it really hard to search for a murderer who lived west of the river.
That slope was slippery, but unavoidable.
Trying to swallow the bitter lump in my throat, I opened the bottle of bleach and poured it into the trash can at arm’s length, to keep from splashing my clothes. Then I used the bottle itself to press the whole bloody mess down into the liquid that had pooled at the bottom.
Bleach doesn’t erase all evidence of blood, as any crime-scene technician will tell you. But it does destroy the energy signature that pulls a Tracker to
