Witness Protection

Chapter 1: Dead Until Seven

"You're doing that thing again, Olivia," Marco said. The floor manager leaned against the bar with a rag slung over his shoulder, gray-haired, sixty-something, with a belly built on thirty years of tasting his own sauces. "Looking like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop."

"Relax." He wiped down a highball glass, the squeak of cloth on glass loud in the empty room. "It's Tuesday. Tuesdays are dead until seven."

Dead until seven. She'd turn that word over for weeks afterward.

The front door opened.

A gust of October air swept through the dining room, wet leaves and diesel, rain-soaked asphalt and the faraway rumble of the Kennedy. Two men came in. Not the after-work crowd, not the university couples who came for the seven-dollar house wine. These men wore suits that cost more than Olivia's semester of textbooks, and their shoes had a fresh shine that had somehow survived the wet sidewalk.

She knew who they were before Marco straightened up and sucked in his gut.

Romano men.

Not Don Tomasso. She'd seen his photograph in the Tribune enough times to recognize the silver-haired patriarch with the cold smile. These were soldiers, lieutenants, whatever the proper word was for men who did business in the back booth while everyone else pretended not to notice.

Olivia tucked a stray strand of platinum blonde hair behind her ear, the motion automatic after three months working the dinner shift at Giuseppe's. It was half past five and the sun was already sinking toward the Taylor Street rooftops, turning every rain puddle copper. Her section was six tables, all empty, and she had been using the pre-dinner lull to restock her apron: forks, knives wrapped in burgundy napkins, the little electronic ordering tablet that still felt foreign in her hand after two years of paper tickets at her last job in Springfield.

She averted her eyes, a habit she'd picked up fast at Giuseppe's.

The restaurant was a front. Everyone knew it. The Health Department knew it, the neighborhood knew it, probably even the alderman who ate linguine in the corner booth every other Thursday. But knowing and acknowledging were two different things in Little Italy, and Olivia had bills to pay and a neuropsychology textbook waiting at home that cost two hundred and forty dollars used.

She busied herself with the napkin dispenser at table six.

The two men settled into the back booth. Marco brought them drinks himself, no order taken, no menu offered. Two glasses of something amber, neat. The older one, a heavyset guy with a scar splitting his left eyebrow, barely glanced around before turning back to his companion.

The door opened again.

This time Olivia felt it before she saw it. Marco's hands stopped on the highball glass. The two men in the booth sat up straight. Even the busboy, a kid named Leo who couldn't have been older than seventeen, quit wiping down the salad bar and stared.

The man who walked in was young. Twenty-something. Black hair slicked back from a face that would have been handsome without the nose, a boxer's break, flattened at the bridge.

His suit was charcoal, cut so close to his shoulders that the fabric didn't ripple when he moved. No tie. Top button undone, and the edge of black ink climbing his throat.

Domenico Romano.

Nico, she'd heard him called. The youngest son. The wild card.

His eyes swept the dining room like he owned it and had for years. They passed over Olivia without stopping, as if she were part of the décor, and landed on the heavyset man in the back booth.

"Nico." Marco's voice had gone tight. "Your usual table?"

"Later." Nico didn't slow down. "Business first."

He walked past her section.

Close enough that she caught the smell of him, expensive cologne over something sharper, like ozone after a storm. Tendons stood out along his jaw. Not angry, she thought. Focused.

She should have looked away. Should have finished the napkin dispenser and pretended nothing unusual was happening on a Tuesday in October.

Instead, she watched.

Nico stopped at the back booth. The two men rose, but only halfway, an awkward crouch that gave him respect without giving up anything else. The heavyset one, Scar Eyebrow, gestured at the seat across from him.

"Tommy sends his regrets," Nico said, not sitting. "He won't be able to make your sister's wedding."

Scar Eyebrow's face drained. "What?"

"Car accident." Nico sounded bored. "Very tragic. Black ice on the Kennedy."

"There wasn't any ice last night—"

"Sure there was." Nico pulled a small envelope from his inside jacket pocket and slid it across the table with two fingers.

"The Don sends his condolences. And a gift. For the wedding."

The other man, younger, thinner, with a tic in his left eye, reached for it. His fingers shook. The paper rustled loud in the silent dining room.

"I didn't—" Scar Eyebrow started.

"Tommy," Nico said, cutting him off, "was skimming from the family for eighteen months. The Don has documentation. Receipts.

"Wire transfers. Photographs of Tommy shaking hands with Alberto Fiore in a parking garage in Evanston." He let that sit. "You knew about this."

A denial formed on Scar Eyebrow's lips. Olivia watched his mouth open, his shoulders square up for righteous indignation.

Then his eyes changed. He was doing math. Arguing with Domenico Romano in a restaurant full of witnesses was not the same as arguing with a reasonable man.

"I didn't know," he said finally. "But I suspected."

"Then you understand the position you're in."

"What position is that?"

Nico smiled. It was the first expression Olivia had seen on his face that wasn't flat assessment, and it was worse than the blankness. "The position where you walk out of this restaurant, get in your car, drive to O'Hare, and take the first flight to anywhere that isn't Chicago.

"You don't call your wife. You don't pack a bag. You don't pass Go. You don't collect two hundred dollars."

"And if I don't?"

"Then we revisit this conversation somewhere else." Nico tapped the envelope. "Take the gift. Consider it severance."

The thin man was already standing, already reaching for his coat. But Scar Eyebrow, Tommy's brother, Tommy's ally, was slower. Pride, or stupidity, kept him in the booth.

"I've been with the family thirty years," he said. "My father knew Don Alessandro. My grandfather—"

"Your grandfather is dead." Nico's voice dropped. "Your father is dead. And in about three minutes, you're going to be dead if you're still sitting in that booth."

Nobody in the restaurant moved.

Olivia's hands had stopped somewhere during the exchange. She stood at table six with a napkin clutched in her fingers, watching something she had no business watching.

Scar Eyebrow rose.

For a second it looked like compliance. His knees unlocked. His palms pressed flat on the table. He came up to his full height, six-two, maybe six-three, with the bulk of a man who'd done physical work before he graduated to whatever kept him in three-thousand-dollar suits.

Then he lunged.

Not at Nico. At the door.

He moved fast for a big man. Shouldered past his companion.

Past the salad bar. Past Leo, who dropped a stack of plates with a crash that made Olivia's ears ring. Past table six, where she still stood, still frozen, still holding that stupid napkin like it might shield her—

Nico's hand shot out.

Not to grab. Not to stop. A flick of the fingers, casual as hailing a cab, and from the back booth one of his own men raised a compact dart gun.

Scar Eyebrow's legs buckled. He went down hard, his knee cracking against the tile like a bat on wet concrete. Olivia saw the dart only when he tried to get up and his arms wouldn't work, a small tranquilizer dart buried in the meat of his thigh.

"You should've taken the envelope," Nico said.

He stepped over the fallen man like he was stepping over a puddle. Nodded to the younger companion, who was already backing toward the door with both hands up. Then he turned toward the back booth, where his own men were rising to deal with the body.

And his eyes met Olivia's.

Not a sweep this time. He looked straight at her and didn't blink.

She dropped the napkin.

"Boss." Marco's voice cut through the silence, strained. "She didn't see nothing.

"She's just a kid. College student. Works Tuesday and Thursday nights. Doesn't talk to anyone, doesn't—"

"Shut up, Marco." Nico didn't look away from her. "What's your name?"

Her tongue had glued itself to the roof of her mouth. She pried it loose. "Olivia."

"Olivia what?"

"Lombard."

"You saw something just now, Olivia Lombard?"

The correct answer was no. She knew it the way she knew a hot stove would burn. No, I didn't see anything, I was restocking napkins and thinking about my neuropsych midterm and I absolutely did not watch a man get tranqued in the thigh by the youngest son of Chicago's most powerful crime family.

But she was a terrible liar. Always had been. Her face broadcast every thought like closed-captioning for the socially inept.

"I—" she started.

"Don't lie to me." Nico's voice was soft now, almost conversational. "I hate liars. Lying wastes everyone's time, and I have a busy evening."

The heavyset man lay on the floor between them. Not dead, just out, his chest going up and down. His companion had fled. Marco stood rooted behind the bar, Leo crouched over the broken plates, and the kitchen door had swung shut on the cooks.

Olivia was alone.

"I saw something," she said.

Nico studied her. Then he laughed, one short sound, more surprise than amusement. "Honesty. That's refreshing."

He gestured at one of his men. "Take Tommy's brother out back. Clean up this mess."

The man hauled the unconscious body toward the kitchen without a word. Nico straightened his cuffs. Walked toward Olivia like he had all the time in the world and no one to answer to.

"Marco," he said, not looking away from her. "Call my father. Tell him we have a situation."

"A situation," Marco repeated.

"Nico, she's a good kid. She's not going to say anything. Right, Liv? Tell him you won't say anything."

"I won't say anything," Olivia said. It came out level, which surprised her. Her pulse was banging in her ears.

"I believe you." Nico stopped two feet away, close enough that she had to tilt her head back.

He was taller than she'd realized, five-ten, maybe, but she was five feet even and he towered. "Unfortunately, belief isn't the same as certainty. And my father values certainty above all else."

"What does that mean?"

He didn't answer. He reached out and moved a strand of hair off her face. His fingers never touched her skin, only the platinum hair that had escaped her ponytail during her shift. Her stomach clenched anyway.

"It means," he said, "that I'm going to make a phone call. And you're going to sit right here until I'm finished."