Free Espresso Shot by Cleo Coyle

mean, the shooter’s going to stay low for fear of being caught. And the authorities aren’t going to release Hazel Boggs’s name to the press until her family’s been notified. That gives you a few days to work with Soles and Bass. They can pursue leads, see what turns up. And before you know it, your wedding day will be here, and you’ll be getting Bree out of town. You’re flying off to Barcelona for the honeymoon, right?”

    “Yeah, but . . .” Matt sighed, hung his head. “I’m still freaked.”

    I nodded, tried to look supportive. Despite his strong feelings, however, I really doubted he was right. Matt was stressed—and paranoia was never a long trip from that state. After a good night’s sleep, he was bound to see things differently.

    By tomorrow, the detectives from the Sixth would probably have Hazel Boggs’s shooter in custody, a murder weapon impounded, and an assistant district attorney drooling over an open-and-shut felony case. Then maybe Matt could rest easy, realize he was wrong, and finally start enjoying his last few days of bachelorhood.

    In the hearth across the room, the feverish crackling had slowed. The flames that had been burning so strongly when I’d first come upstairs were now slowly dying. Rising, I gently suggested to Matt that we table this discussion and head downstairs. Then he could help Gardner behind the counter, and Dante and I could begin taking free coffees out to the New York police and fire personnel.

    The long night was about to get even longer and—like I’d told my overworked baristas—morning came too early around here.

SEVEN

    NINETY minutes later my body had exhausted every last molecule of caffeine, and I was ready to drop. With the lights finally out downstairs and Matt tucked into his old guest room down the hall, I pulled my chestnut hair free of its barista ponytail and changed into the softest garment I owned—no, not a pashmina nightie—an oversized Steelers football jersey.

    When I was a little girl, growing up in Western Pennsylvania, my father ran an illegal sports book in back of my grandmother’s grocery. Naturally, the Pittsburgh teams were his bread and butter. But that wasn’t the reason I wore the shirt. My grandmother believed in signs, and she’d become convinced that Franco Harris’s Immaculate Reception during the Steelers playoff with the Oakland Raiders was some kind of miracle. So she gave me the football jersey with Harris’s 32 on it and said if I slept in it, I would be protected.

    Yeah, I know. To the typical modern-thinking urbanite, this notion would be waved away as ridiculous, a joke, some kind of psychosis. But Nana grew up in a remote Italian village where curses were more common than slip-and-fall lawyers, and things not seen carried at least as much validity as earth and sky. To her, the malocchio wasn’t some quaint old-world notion. The evil eye was very real, something to be actively warded off.

    Growing up in an American suburb, I didn’t have nearly the same level of imagination as my grandmother, but I wore the jersey to humor her—until I grew out of it. When I was seventeen, preparing for my freshman year of fine arts studies, she bought me a brand-new one. It was the last one she gave me before leaving this life, and it’s the one I still wear. Its edges are frayed now, its logo massively faded, but I wouldn’t trade the threadbare talisman for a truckload of Himalayan cashmere.

    Yawning like a sleepwalker, I swung my legs beneath the covers of the mahogany four-poster, but I didn’t turn off the bedside lamp. Not yet. Despite the fact that my eyes were practically closed, I couldn’t shut them completely until I heard one last voice.

    I grabbed my cell phone off the nightstand and speed-dialed the second number on my list (the first was my daughter’s). Holding my breath, I listened as the electronic pulses made the connection I’d been aching for all evening: one ring, two—

    “Hi,