“In front of the deli on Fourth.” Which was right next to Hunter’s apartment building. “Why? Do you know the guy it belongs to?”

“How did you know it was a guy?” Payne demanded, and Liv rolled her eyes over the obvious suspicion in his voice, still in character.

“It’s in a gunmetal-gray case and the wallpaper is a picture of muddy girls in bikinis playing soccer. Let’s just call it a good guess.” She waited, but Payne made no reply. “So, do you know the guy or not?”

“Did you call any of the other numbers?” he demanded, and I lifted one brow in interest. Payne obviously knew something, and he obviously wasn’t going to give details to some random chick from the block.

Liv seemed to debate her answer for a second, then she shrugged, though only I could see her. “No, yours was the first one listed.” She huffed in feigned frustration, then let a little impatience leak into her voice. “Look, I lost my cell last month and this guy down the street returned it instead of running up my bill, so I was just tryin’ to pay it forward, you know? But if it’s gonna be some big hassle, I’m just gonna—”

“Now hold on!” Payne snapped, and Liv grinned at me. Now we were getting somewhere. “If you bring the phone to the deli, I can get it back to its owner.” Someone knocked on a door in the background—three short, sharp taps—and the ambient noise changed as Payne crossed the room, presumably to answer the door. “Just a minute.”

Hinges creaked over the line and unease flared in my chest like heartburn. Those knocks meant business. Something was wrong.

“No, wait!” Payne cried, and Liv obviously thought he was talking to her until her eyes went wide at the familiar thwup of a silencer over the line—the term is a bit of a misnomer; it still makes noise. Then there was a loud crash and a thud that could only be a body hitting the floor. Payne’s body, almost certainly.

I stretched for the phone, but Liv pulled it out of reach. She looked shocked by the lethal development, but determined to hear it out. Something scraped against the phone softly, then we heard nothing but the deep, steady breathing of whoever had picked up Payne’s phone.

Liv opened her mouth, probably to ask Payne if he was okay—the reaction you’d expect from a clueless Good Samaritan—but I shook my head. I didn’t want whoever’d killed Payne to hear her speak.

“Who is this?” a new voice demanded, and I closed my eyes. Shit. I knew that voice.

That time when I reached for the phone, Liv let me have it. I flipped it closed and dropped it on the counter, and Liv stared at it as if it might bite her fingers off if she got too close.

“You recognized that voice, didn’t you?” she asked, watching me closely. “Who was it?”

“Adler.” I ran one hand over my face, then through my hair. “My direct superior.”

“So what does this mean?”

“It means they’re cleaning up. Clipping all the loose threads. Payne obviously knew something, and whatever he knew just died with him. But now they know someone has Hunter’s phone, and they’ll trace it.”

“They can do that?”

“You can do anything with enough money and the right connections. It’ll probably take a couple of hours, but as long as Hunter’s phone is transmitting a signal, they can trace it.”

Liv sank onto a bar stool and leaned with her good arm on the counter. “Okay, but does that really matter? They already knew we killed him. And by now, they probably know Anne hired us.”

“Yes, but when they trace the phone back to us, they’ll know our involvement didn’t end with Hunter’s death, and they’ll know we’re looking into the syndicate’s involvement.”

Liv shrugged. “So we destroy the phone. We already have everything we can get out of it anyway. Got a hammer?”

“Even better.” I opened the drawer to my left and took out a two-pound stainless-steel meat mallet, hefting it to get a feel for the weight. Then I wrapped Hunter’s phone in a hand towel and set the bundle on the counter. I could have just snapped the SIM card, but swinging the meat mallet felt great—a cathartic release of primal rage at Tower, for targeting a child. At myself for signing with him in the first place. At Olivia, for running off to the city for no reason I could fathom, leaving bloody bits of my own heart like a bread-crumb trail for me to follow.

The crunch of plastic was muted by the towel, which kept electronic shards from raining down on our dinner, but the destruction was obvious, and so satisfying that I did it again. And again, grunting with each release of pent-up fury.

After several swings, I couldn’t even see lumps beneath the top layer of towel. I unfolded it and searched through the debris for remnants of the SIM card—it was in several pieces—then shook the towel over the trash can. The pieces that tumbled out were too small to even identify, much less trace.

“Wow,” Liv said, when I dropped the mallet back into the drawer. “That looked like fun. I call dibs on the next over-the-top destruction of evidence.” She tried on a smile, but couldn’t quite pull it off.

I didn’t even try. “Obviously that won’t keep them from suspecting we took the phone, but at least now they can’t confirm that with a trace.”

Liv stared into the bowl of salsa, slowly stirring it with a corn chip. “How much trouble are you going to be in?” Because it wasn’t a question of whether or not Tower would find out what we were doing, but a question of when he’d find out.