Chapter 4: One Kitchen

I ran.

I ran in wedge sandals the whole length of the quay with my bag slapping my hip.

A black car pulled up beside me at the top of the hill.

The back window slid down.

"The train takes forty minutes with the stops," Ciro said. "I take twenty."

"How do you know where I'm going?"

"Whalen's plane landed in Nice at noon. And you look like a woman whose friend just called."

I got in.

He held up a receipt as I buckled my seatbelt.

"Nine hundred euros," he said. "For two men who don't drink on the job."

"Then they can drink it off the job."

His driver took the coast road.

Ciro sat with his hands on his knees and kept looking at my bag.

"Search it," I said.

"I'm not going to search your bag."

"Then stop looking at it like you want to."

He looked out the window instead.

The bakery was dark. The light upstairs was on.

I took the stairs two at a time, and Ciro took them right behind me.

Cillian Whalen was standing in our kitchen.

Six and a half feet of red-brown beard and gray sweater, holding Lexie's strawberry yogurt and a tiny spoon.

Lexie sat on the counter in her lavender linen with her arms crossed.

"He asked first," she said. "I said no. He ate it anyway."

"I was hungry," Cillian said.

From what Lexie had told me about that night, three words was a speech.

Then he saw Ciro in the doorway.

The spoon went down. A gun came up.

Ciro's gun was out at the same moment. I never even saw him reach.

Two guns. One kitchen. My best friend sitting on the counter between them.

"No," I said.

Neither of them moved.

"Not in my kitchen."

"Your kitchen?" Ciro said.

"I paid cash for a month. Guns in the bread box. Both of you."

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