Requiem For a Glass Heart Read Free Page A

how knocked out I was when I first saw you. Tavio, he didn’t tell me anything, the sly bastard. He knew what I was thinking when he told me he had this girl he wanted me to meet. He knew I was thinking—which I was—that she was a Mexican. He loved messing with what he called ‘white-guy assumptions.’ He said we were prejudiced, every last one of us, and we didn’t even know it. Never let up on that. Just kind of slipped it in there. And he was right—I mean, about what I was thinking. You walked into that club … Remember that place? What was it?”
    “Carioca.”
    “That’s right!” He gestured quickly with the glass again, sloshing the gin. “Carioca! What a place … Anyway, you walked in, all pink and Scottish-looking, all that reddish hair, for Christ’s sake.” His grin was reminiscent and stupid.
    Griffin was pure small-town Texas, and despite his degrees and his’ experience and his years of global traveling, he always would be small-town Texas deep down in the well that was his real nature. Tall and lean and nearly as dark as Tavio had been, he was almost at the end of his undercover career, at least in the front line of the DEA’s foreign operations. He had strung himself out to the breaking point, playing roles inside his head for so long that the distinctions between who he was and who he pretended to be were bleeding together. It was taking him longer and longer to crawl out of the skins he crawled into in Palermo or Naples or Trieste or Salonika, and the rumor was that he was beginning to make mistakes and that he had been sent to Houston until they could decide what to do with him. He was looking more and more like damaged goods, and one of the black marks on this business was that nobody really knew how to handle damaged goods. Often the men in the offices, the men who maintained distance on everything, didn’t handle this part of the business very well. In fact, it could be argued that more often than not, damaged goods were simply thrown away.
    Cate looked at him and wondered how close Tavio himself had been to this. Who knew what these men really thought? She had been married to Octavio Cuevas for fiveyears, and though she had loved him—still loved him—and believed she knew him well, she also knew that when she married him she got only part of him. He kept a percentage— a small percentage, she hoped—to himself. But she had known that going in, and she had accepted it, though she had to admit that toward the end it had begun to have an effect on the marriage. It was nothing insurmountable. It was just that the small part he kept to himself sometimes defined more of what happened between them than she would have liked.
    Griffin’s smile faded, and he stared into space with an unsteady tilt of his head.
    “Working together … so long …” He cut his eyes at her, almost glared at her, and then looked away again, his eyes returning to the space where nothing was. The sweat from the ice was puddling around his glass. She didn’t say anything, but she wondered what it was about men that made them so damned romantic about their relationships with each other while at the same time they bravely proclaimed their independence from such dreamy attachments.
    “I could
trust
him!” he snapped.
    Cate frowned at the unexpected note of anger.
    “That whole Naples thing was squirrelly,” he said. “And I knew that—but I trusted him on it. When you start doubting your own people … Well, shit, you just can’t do that.” He shook his head slowly.
“Cannot
… do that.”
    Cate looked at him. “Salerno.”
    “What?”
    “You mean Salerno. You said Naples.”
    He hesitated a second too long.
    “Salerno, Naples—whatever.”
    Now he had her attention. She had never known the details of the events surrounding Tavio’s death, and she had accepted that lack of closure as a grim downside of the business they were in. Because of her own career in the FBI, and because she too had worked