“What in the hell did you do?” she asked.
Everything wrong, but he wasn’t about to admit it. “What were you thinking by bringing that asshole here?”
Kyle let out an offended squawk. “I’m not an asshole.”
Ford and Fallon turned on him as a unit. “Yes, you are.”
Kyle’s gaze went from Ford to Fallon and back again before he grumbled something that sounded a lot like crazy fucking Hartigans and stormed out of the house. The only thing better than watching Kyle walk out would have been seeing Gina stroll back in—a fact that landed like a punch to the kidneys.
“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” Fallon hollered after him, turning with a smile toward Ford. That moment of agreement at taking out the trash, though, disappeared faster than donuts in the break room.
“What did you do?” she asked.
He looked from his sister’s pissed-off expression to his mom’s concerned one and told them what he could. “My job.”
“How’s that?” Finian asked.
They weren’t this dense. He was a cop, for the love of Mike. They had to understand the conflict here. “You know who her brothers are.”
“So?” Faith asked, putting so much annoyance in that one word that it was like she’d just watched the best person in her life walk out the door. “That doesn’t explain what you did.”
What did he do? He tapped his thumb and finger together in a fast beat, not wanting to fess up because what he’d done was shitty—totally justified, yes—but totally shitty. Letting out a deep breath, he let the truth of just what he’d done into the light so they could all see the ugly of it all.
“I was assigned to watch her and find out if we could learn anything from the family angle.”
His mom gasped and made the sign of the cross. “You mean this whole time you’ve been pretending to date her for a case?”
“No.” He shook his head. “It was never like that—not once we started dating.”
“Then spit it out before the girls throat-punch you,” Finian said, looking like he just might deliver a blow himself.
Their mom cut a death glare at his brother and sisters. “There will be no punching in this house, thank you very much.”
“Thanks, Mom,” he said.
She turned her angry stare to him. “Save your thanks for God, who is obviously looking out for you, since I haven’t boxed your ears yet. Now spit out the whole story.”
So he did—well, as much of it as he could, from the Kiss Cam to the cover story to get into Gina’s house to the suspension to the ice-pick-to-the-balls moment when Gina had walked into the kitchen and overheard Kyle the moron.
“You let that sweet girl believe her grandfather might have been murdered to get into her house?” his mom asked, shaking her head in disbelief.
His frustration at himself spilled out and his voice rose. “He was Big Nose Tommy, there was a high probability of it.”
“But you highly doubted from the beginning that that was the case,” Finian said.
“Yeah.” In the beginning, it hadn’t seemed like that big of a deal, but after getting to know Gina, having to admit it was like being hit with a haymaker of his own stupidity right in the nose.
Fallon shook her head. “And then after all of that was put to bed and you two got serious, you never told her?”
And there it was, the knockout punch. “No.”
Everyone gathered in the entryway wore identical expressions that roughly translated to there never was a dumber man than Ford Hartigan. He couldn’t argue the point.
The whole time, he’d figured it would be something Gina’s rule-breaking family would do that would mess everything up. Instead, he’d done it all by himself.
“Well, what are you going to do now?” Faith asked.
Ford wished like hell there was a procedure manual for this. “I have no clue.”
Chapter Eighteen
Ford had barely sat his ass in his chair Friday morning before his name rang out over the squad room.
“Hartigan,” the captain yelled. “My office.”
When he walked into the office and saw that the new task force lead, Rodriguez, was already there, he knew this wasn’t just another meeting. The captain got introductions out of the way with his usual pondering efficiency, and then he and Rodriguez sat down.
Since there wasn’t another chair, Ford remained standing. Judging by the look on their faces, having enough chairs hadn’t been simply an overlooked detail.
“I understand you have a special in with the Luca family,” Rodriguez said, her tone neutral, but there was no missing the calculating look in her eye.
“I did.” Until he’d fucked it up like an asshole.
Not a muscle moved in Rodriguez’s face, but she tightened her grip on the pen in her hand. “Love has turned to dust already,” she said with a sarcastic sigh. “What a shock.”
“As I’d suspected it would,” the captain said as he clicked open a digital report. “Even if her last name wasn’t Luca, she just didn’t look like your kind of woman, Hartigan.”
The death glare Rodriguez shot the captain could have been used in place of the electric chair. The captain, distracted by the report on his computer screen, missed it. Ford did not. It was so unexpected and vicious that a surprised snicker escaped before he could stop it and he had to cover the noise with a fake coughing fit.
The captain looked up, confusion making a V in his otherwise unlined forehead. “Do you need to recuse yourself to go get some water?”
Ford coughed once more for good measure and pounded on his chest. “No, sir. I’m fine.”
He turned his attention back to Rodriguez, whose expression had warmed by half a degree. Considering that none of the women in his life were currently talking to him—and neither were his brothers—after what happened at family lunch, that minuscule amount of warmth felt like the first day of summer.
“We have information that the Luca brothers have been busy lately,” Rodriguez said. “They’ve been boxing up a lot of stuff and taking it to a storage building on Elmherst. We can’t confirm that it has to do with the shipment tonight, but we need to find out either way.”
The Luca brothers and mystery cardboard boxes. That sounded a little too familiar. “Any idea what’s inside the boxes?”
“Nope, but we think there was at least one delivered to the sister’s house.” She paused as if to gauge his reaction. When he didn’t have one, she went on: “You don’t happen to know anything about that, do you?”
“No.” One word. One bald-faced lie to the woman who held his spot on the organized crime task force in her hand and the captain who held the rest of Ford’s career in his.
It wasn’t a great plan. It wasn’t a plan at all. It was pure gut reaction. Implicating Gina in anything that had to do with her brothers was not something he was going to do when he knew she wasn’t guilty of a thing. Damn the regulations and proper protocol.
Rodriguez continued, “Our informant has not been inside the Luca brothers’ apartment, and we can’t risk his position on the inside for answers about a couple of low-level loan sharks in case it doesn’t pan out. Still, we don’t want to miss anything, so we need to know what’s in the boxes at the storage facility or the ones possibly at Gina Luca’s residence.”
“And you want me to find out?” Well, that wasn’t going to happen because if he showed up on her door, she’d probably let him fall through the porch again and leave him there.
“That was the idea, but if you’ve lost access then we can send in someone else to poke around.” Rodriguez looked down at her notes. “She’s renovating her house, right? So maybe an inspector for a spot check, see if there’s anything suspicious. If there is, we can get a warrant for the storage unit.”
All he could picture was the box on Gina’s kitchen counter, the one her brothers had left and made her promise not to look in. This was the point in the conversation where it was standard operating procedure to offer up that pertinent information.