Page 74 of What We Bury

“Did you just tip Frank?” I ask, when the bell stops jingling.

“Of course.” He sticks his fork in his fifth piece of pie—a feat I truly am amazed to watch. “Frank’s ex-Mob. You gotta pay the price when he’s around.”

My eyebrows go up. “He’swhat?”

“He hasn’t told you yet?” He shakes his head. “You mustn’t be in the inner circle. Shame. His stories are cray-cray.”

I chuckle. “Frank isnotex-Mob. I don’t think he’s Italian.”

Milo waggles a finger in my face. “But I didn’t say which Mob.”

“There’s more than one?”

“There are several, Sage.” He throws up his arms in exasperation. “There are mobs we don’t even know about. The Latvian fish mob. The Belgian chocolate mob. The retired-postmen mob. Frank could be any of them.”

I’m giggling once again. “Milo.”

“I’m just saying. The man has had a life. You don’t get a face like that eating cornflakes.”

I chuckle and slide his next plate in front of him—cherry pie this time. “You are full of shit.”

The kitchen door swings open and Danny emerges with his apron untied and his keys in his hand. He’s been in there for forty minutes yelling on the phone to someone about a botched delivery.

“Need a smoke.” He looks at Rosa who’s been cleaning tables. “Wanna join?”

“Sure do.” She tosses the rag into the bus bin and glances my way. “You good for fifteen?”

“Diner’s empty. I’m fine.”

She heads toward the alley without a backward glance, but Danny’s eyes track to Milo, take him in, take in the pie plates at his elbow, and seem to decide that this is none of his problem.

He lets go of the door and follows Rosa out back, the door swooshing back and forth on its hinge behind him.

Then it’s just me and Milo and an empty diner. I glance around, noting the late hour and marveling at how fast the last of my shift flew by with this pie-eating gremlin sitting at my counter talking incessantly. The streetlights have even turned on, bleeding orange through the front windows.

“Alone at last,” he says, wagging his eyebrows. “We have maybe fifteen minutes. Ask me anything. What do you want to know?”

I open my mouth. Close it. There are a thousand questions I have been building up, all of them stacked behind a closed door in my head, and Milo has just kicked the door open.

“Anything?”

“Within reason. If you ask me where the bodies are buried, I’ll lie to you, but it’s for your own protection.”

I nod slowly. “I’m not sure where to start.”

“Start anywhere. I’m sure the others are being vague as fuck with you. So consider me your orientation video.”

I pick up a tray of silverware and begin to polish it, needing something to do with my hands. “Eli told me about his sister and about Knox showing up and then Holden helping cover it all up.”

“Good. That’s the origin story. So you got the big one out of the way.”

“And Micah told me some guy called Odin is your boss.”

He nods, as if expecting that. “The Norse Gods. They’re the bosses.”

“There’s more than one?”

He picks up his tea. “Four men. Odin, Loki, Thor, Fenrir. Not their real names, obviously, but that’s what we get to call them. They’ve known each other since they were boys. They’re ex-special forces who built one of the world’s best private security corporations—cyber, physical, operational, whatever a rich prick will pay for.” He takes a sip of his tea, makes a face, and begins to dump another six sugars and two creamers into the mug.