Page 10 of Taking Savannah
"Same thing around here."
At Leone’s office door, she stops. Her hand goes to her pocket. The cap. She doesn't take it out, just presses her fingers against it through the fabric, the way I touch the grip of my gun before I walk into a room I'm not sure about. The grounding point. The thing you reach for when you need to remind yourself what you're carrying and why you're carrying it.
"Ready?" I ask.
She takes her hand out of her pocket and opens the door herself.
"I've been ready for two fucking weeks," she says, and walks in ahead of me.
Leone looks up, then Alexandra, then Claudio who is in the middle of a call. Three of the most dangerous people in the city, all armed, all uncovering a conspiracy that has been engineering a war for years, and Savannah Cole walks into the middle of them and sits in the empty chair across from Leone and folds her hands on the desk.
"My name is Savannah. I'm the bartender from your waterfront club, and I know things that are going to change how you fight this war."
Leone blinks once before looking at me with a glare. I shrug, because what the fuck else am I going to do? Savannah doesn’t seem the type to listen to anyone, much less respect the word no.
Alexandra's fingers hover above her laptop. Claudio hangs up and Leone’s gaze shifts to her.
Leone leans forward. "Tell me."
She does.
Chapter Four: Savannah
ItoldLeoneeverything.
Not because I trust him. Not because Emilio asked nicely. Because I sat across from the man running this operation and watched his face while I talked, and the face didn't lie. Leone Costa is a lot of things, most of them terrifying from what I’ve heard, but he's not a performer. When I said the name Kreiss, his jaw moved once and then locked.
So I gave him the pieces I could.
The marina south of the waterfront. The Meridian Star, a forty-foot cabin cruise I could describe because I'd seen the paperwork once when the club manager left it on the bar and I have a photographic memory. Tuesday and Thursday handoffs, always after ten p.m., always two men arriving in separate vehicles, always one briefcase exchanged. Physical intelligence,not digital. Paper. The kind of information you don't trust to a server because servers get hacked and paper burns.
I gave him the physical descriptions. The tall one in the gray suit with the expensive watch, mid-fifties, silver at the temples. The shorter one, heavier, younger, bad jacket, gun under his left arm, nervous hands that kept going to his drink. I told Leone that the tall one did most of the talking and the short one mostly listened and took notes on his phone.
I gave him the names I caught. Vidal came up twice. A reference to someone called "the Custodian" that I didn't understand. The word "Foundry" used once. And Kreiss, obviously.
And I gave him the line that changed the air in the room.
"Both families. Bonaccorso and Castillo. They still think they're fighting each other."
“Like that exactly?” Claudio frowned.
“Yep, word for word.”
Leone sat with that for a long time. Alexandra typed so fast I thought her keyboard might catch fire. Emilio stood behind me, and I could feel him there without looking and it pissed me off, how hyper aware of him I am already.
When I finished, Leone said, "Thank you, Savannah. This changes things."
"I know it does. That's why I'm telling you."
"Is there anything else?"
"Probably. I heard like, eleven minutes of conversation two weeks ago and I've been replaying it in my head ever since. There might be details I haven't pulled out yet. Things that didn't seem important at the time but connect to whatever you already know."
Leone nodded. "Emilio will work with you on that. Take your time. Let it surface."
"I don't do let it surface. I do give me something to do and my brain works better."
Leone looked at Emilio. Emilio shrugged. Leone looked back at me with an expression that said he wasn't used to being told how to run his mafia by a bartender, but he was too tired and too smart to argue with a method that worked.
