orgasm in front of a client. Talk about a black mark on her permanent record.
“I don’t?” she asked, in a voice normally used only when having an impromptu orgasm. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.
Judging by the way his pupils dilated, though, she was pretty sure he did. Even so, his own voice was level—if a tad warm—when he said, “No. You seem like a Renata to me.”
Well, this was news to Renny. No one thought she was a Renata. Even her own parents had given up calling her that the day she stripped off her pink tutu in ballet class and decreed she would instead play football, like her brothers. Ultimately, she and her parents had compromised on archery, but still. Renata had gone the way of the pink tutu decades ago.
“Uh...” she said eloquently. Damn. What had they been talking about?
“Bulletproof Bacco,” he repeated.
Right. Joey the Knife. Nothing like references to ammunition and cutlery to put a damper on thoughts of... Um, never mind.
“That doesn’t sound like the name of someone I’d run into at the Chicago Merc,” he continued.
She tried one last time. “How about the ‘Iron Don’?” she asked. “Does that name ring a bell?”
The light came back into his eyes, and this time it stayed lit. “Right,” he said. “The mobster.”
“Alleged mobster,” Renny corrected him. Since no one had ever been able to pin any charges on Joey the Knife that hadn’t slid right off him like butter from a hot, well, knife. Though she was reasonably sure that wasn’t why he’d earned that particular nickname.
“From New York, I think,” Tate said. “His death was in the news a couple of months ago. Everyone kept commenting that he’d lived to be the oldest organized-crime figure ever and died of old age instead of...something else.”
“Alleged organized-crime figure,” Renny corrected him again. “And, yes, he’s the man I’m talking about.”
Tate glanced at his watch, then back at Renny. All heated glances and flirtation aside, the man was obviously on a schedule he intended to keep. “And he has bearing on this meeting...how?”
Renny handed him the first of the records she’d brought with her—a copy of his original birth certificate from New Jersey, much different from the one he had now from Indiana, which he’d been using since the fifth grade. The name printed on it, however, wasn’t Tate Hawthorne, as he had come to be known after his stepfather adopted him. Nor was it Tate Carson, as he had been known before that. The name on this record was—
“Joseph Anthony Bacco the Third?” he asked.
“Grandson of Joseph Anthony Bacco Senior,” Renny said. “Aka Joey the Knife. Aka Bulletproof Bacco. Aka the Iron Don.”
“And why are you showing me a birth certificate that belongs to a mobster’s grandson?”
Renny started to correct him, but he hastily amended, “Alleged mobster’s grandson. What does Joseph the Third, or Joseph Senior, for that matter, have to do with me?”
She withdrew from her portfolio a photograph, one of several she had from the 1980s. In it, a man in his sixties was seated on a sofa beside a man in his twenties who was holding a toddler in his lap. She handed it to Tate, who accepted it warily. For a moment, he gazed at her through narrowed eyes, and somehow she sensed there was a part of him that knew what was coming. But he only dropped his gaze to the photo.
“The picture is from Joseph Bacco’s estate,” Renny said. “The older man is Joseph Anthony Bacco Senior, and the younger man beside him is—”
“My father,” Tate finished for her. “I don’t remember him very well. He died when I was four. But I have some photographs of him and recognize him from those. I assume the little boy he’s holding is me.”
“Yes.”
“Meaning my father was an acquaintance of the Iron Don,” he gathered, still looking at the photograph.
“He was more than an acquaintance,” she told him. “Your father was Joseph Anthony Bacco Junior.”
At this, Tate snapped his head back up to look at her. “That’s impossible. My father’s name was James Carson. He worked in a hardware store in Terre Haute, Indiana. It burned down when I was four. He was killed in the fire.”
Renny sifted through her documents until she located two more she was looking for. “James Carson was the name your father was given by the federal marshals before they placed him and your mother and you in the Witness Protection Program when you were two years old. Your family entered WITSEC after your father was the star witness at a murder trial against one of Joseph Bacco’s capos, Carmine Tomasi. Your father also gave testimony against a half-dozen others in the organization that led to a host of arrests and convictions for racketeering crimes.”
She glanced down at the record on top. “Your mother became Natalie Carson, and you became Tate Carson. You all received new Social Security numbers and birth dates. The feds moved the three of you from Passaic, New Jersey, to Terre Haute, and both your parents were given new jobs. Your father at the hardware store and your mother at a local insurance company.”
Renny handed him copies of documents to support those assertions, too. She’d received everything she had to support her story via snail mail at her condo a few days ago, from her high school friend with the mad hacking skills. They were records she was reasonably certain she wasn’t supposed to have—she’d known better than to ask where they came from. The only reason Phoebe had helped her out in the first place was because Renny (A) promised to never divulge her source and (B) pulled in a favor she’d been owed by Phoebe since a sleepover thirteen years ago, a favor that might or might not have something to do with a certain boy in homeroom named Kyle.
These records, too, Tate accepted from her, but this time, his gaze fell to them immediately, and he voraciously read every word. When he looked up again, his pale gray eyes were stormy. “Are you trying to tell me...?”
She decided it would probably be best to just spill the news as cleanly and quickly as possible and follow up with details in the inevitable Q&A.
“You’re Joey the Knife’s grandson and legal heir. In spite of your father’s having ratted out some of his associates, your grandfather left his entire estate to you, as you’re the oldest son of his oldest son, and that’s what hundreds of years of Bacco tradition dictates. What’s more, it was Joey’s dying wish that you assume his position as head of the family and take over all of his businesses after his death.
“In short, Mr. Hawthorne,” Renny concluded, “Joseph Anthony Bacco Senior has crowned you the new Iron Don.”
It took a minute for Tate to process everything Renata Twigg had dropped into his lap. And even then, he wasn’t sure he was processing it correctly. It was just too far outside his scope of experience. Too hard to believe. Too weird.
Renata seemed to sense his state of confusion, because she said, “Mr. Hawthorne? Do you have any questions?”
Oh, sure. He had questions.
