Invasion of Privacy

pause, and I pictured Loiselle sitting up in bed, trying to cope. “Look, I appreciate your letting me know, I really do. If you’re stuck with anything down there, have the cops contact me, and I’ll... I’ll...”
    When I hung up, Loiselle was still crying.
    Tángela Robinette took a swig of coffee from a mug, then pointed with it to a pot brewing on the stove. “Some of this might help.”
    “No, thanks.”
    She set her mug down on the counter. “I appreciate your keeping a lid on the situation here, far as the locals are concerned.”
    “Too many cooks.”
    “That is exactly right. We just cannot be cutting the town departments in on these group situations. First thing you know, somebody talks in their sleep or lets it slip in a bar. Then Geraldo and Oprah will be here next, elbowing each other out of the way to film a show on location.”
    “ ‘Anonymous turncoat felons and the women who love them.’ ”
    “Your client.” Robinette closed her eyes. “Sorry.”
    “I’m the one brought it up.” I started to leave. “Thanks for the use of your phone.”
    “Cuddy?”
    “Yes?”
    “I truly believed that Andrew Dees had just flown the coop. If I had thought—”
    “Ms. Robinette, who are we trying to convince here?” When she didn’t answer, I walked through her living room and out into the night.

    “Hey-ey-ey, Cuddy, how you doing?”
    Zuppone’s words were right, but the tone and facial expressions belonged to a man hanging on by his fingernails. He stood at the curb outside my condo building, behind the open door of his own Lincoln . In the faint lamplight, my watch read 2:00 a.m .
    I went over to the car. “Primo, I figured you’d be in bed by now.”
    “No way. You got a couple minutes?”
    “Sure.” I moved around to the passenger side, glancing into the backseat as I did. Empty.
    We both entered the Lincoln at the same time. Instead of starting the engine, Zuppone hunched over the wheel, like a driver having trouble seeing out the windshield. Then he started thumping his thumb on the top of the dashboard.
    I said, “Okay, where do we stand?”
    “With the two organizations—mine and Milwaukee ?— pretty good, considering. The funeral home here’s gonna embalm Rick and Coco . Better than trying to semi-thaw the bastards so their people won’t know they bought it three days ago. The way our coordinator put it over the phone tonight, Milwaukee thinks their guys were fucking heroes, done in by the Judas and his girlfriend before you and me got them.”
    “You and me.”
    “It was the only way made sense, Cuddy. We avenged Rick and Coco by putting DiRienzi and your client in his car and pushing it into the swamp there. Then we used the couple next door as the cover for it. The Milwaukee people weren’t happy, but they ate up the shit about Ozzie and Harriet being brother and sister. Incest, they don’t like that very much, so it appealed to their sense of morality, us icing ‘the sinners’ to fool the cops. Speaking of which, everything go okay on your end?”
    “It didn’t, I probably wouldn’t be here.”
    “Right, right.” But distant. Then, “Cuddy, you ever shoot a cop?”
    “No.”
    “How about another soldier, then, like when you were in the Army?”
    “Came close a few times overseas.”
    I waited for him to get to it.
    Zuppone cleared his throat. “This thing . . He cleared it again. “This fucking thing is tearing me up.”
    “Shooting Ianella and Cocozzo.”
    Primo spoke to the windshield. “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. Shit, I had to take some pills for tonight, for what we pulled off down there. Me, a fucking druggie now. It’s like I told you before, I swore this oath, a blood oath to the only fucking people that ever did for me in my whole life, ever made me feel I belonged to something. And now I betrayed them.”
    “By killing members of another organization without orders to do it?”
    “Right, right. Before, it was always…“ Primo turned to me. “ ‘Sanctioned.’ I looked that up, because I knew there was a word for what I was thinking, only I couldn’t remember what it was. Every other time I killed a guy, it was ‘sanctioned’ by the people above me, thought through and decided after everybody weighed the risks and the bennies, you know, of whacking the party involved. Only this time...” Primo faced front again, his voice lugging like my Prelude trying to climb a hill in the wrong gear. “This time, back in that fucking