Kim Burgess had been to Adam Ruzek's house before. Once, maybe twice, she recalled. Only for short visits to see the boss, though. The drive through the gateway, usually protected by big metal gates, was familiar. The entrance hallway in the house was, too. And she knew that off the right side of the hallway one of the rooms had a long board room-style table for meetings. And that was the extent of her knowledge of what for the time being was apparently going to be her home.
"Do you need to shower or change? If so I'm sure Erin could lend you some clothes for the time being," Ruzek said.
"No, thank you, Mr Ruzek. I'll be fine until we pick some of my things," Burgess said. It was true, but she would have given that answer either way since she could see how unenthusiastic Erin Lindsay looked about sharing her clothes. Getting on that woman's bad side was not on her things to do list.
Ruzek was about to say something else, but he changed his mind because a Hispanic-looking woman wearing a housekeeping outfit started coming down the grand staircase towards where they were standing in the hallway.
"Ah, Vanessa, perfect timing," Ruzek said. "This is Ms Burgess. Show her to one of the guest bedrooms, then give her a tour of the rest of the house when she's ready. And get her anything she needs."
"Of course," Vanessa said respectfully.
Burgess didn't get the impression that Vanessa was treated badly in any way, which pleased her. She too had never had any complaints about her treatment by Ruzek. Word had it that he could be hot headed at times, but he seemed to look after his people well. For Burgess, that told her something about him. You could tell a lot by how a person behaved towards people underneath them. In any event, for now she just had to be glad of somewhere safe to live.
"I've got work to do, Kim. I'll leave you with Vanessa," Ruzek said.
"Thank you, Mr Ruzek."
"Please, call me Adam," he said. It was worded politely, but it sounded pretty much like an order, so Burgess decided to make sure she did so in future.
Ruzek's phone gave a message tone. He took it out of his pocket and set off towards one of the rooms off the left side of the hallway while reading from the screen. Lindsay followed him without needing to be told, leaving Burgess with Vanessa.
"Please follow me," the housekeeper said, heading up the stairs.
Adam Ruzek wanted a strong drink, and a moment to get his head in the right place. Today was not in any way a day for distractions, but he was distracted. He was distracted by Kim Burgess. Her vulnerability back at the lab had only added to her considerable beauty, as he saw it, and they had ended up sharing quite a striking moment on the way out of the lab. He had never felt something like that before. He'd had sex with a lot of sexy ladies, but hadn't felt whatever the hell he had felt towards Burgess. It needed thinking about, and he needed to arrive at an explanation for it. But not now. There was serious business to be dealt with.
"Any news?" Lindsay asked after closing the living room door behind her. She was clearly referring to the message he had just received.
"Kevin says he's found out Antonio was frequenting underground poker games that were being run by The 51."
"The 51? Wallace Boden's crew?"
"Yes," Ruzek said, his face tight with anger. "If I'd have known he was out there doing something that dumb, I'd have killed him myself." He didn't mean it of course. The comment was born of his frustration at Antonio being so stupid.
"Shooting someone in the back of the head isn't how I'd go about debt recovery," Lindsay pointed out.
"No, but it might be how you'd deal with someone who couldn't, or wouldn't, pay you." He took a moment to think. "I'm going to call Kevin and find out where he is. You're going to take me there and drop me off, then you're going to come back here and take Kim home to get some of her things."
Lindsay wore a sour expression. Clearly the assignment was not what she wanted, to say the least.
"Not today, Erin. Not today," Ruzek said before she could protest.
"Okay, boss. Whatever you need," she said.
Telling the boss what they knew so far wasn't something that Jay Halstead was particularly looking forward to, mostly since they didn't know a lot. But then they hadn't even had two hours to work on it yet, and already Ruzek wanted to meet up to get answers.
"Spoke to a guy I know called Marlon," Kevin Atwater said. He, Halstead and Voight were starting near their vehicles in a parking lot where they had arranged to meet Ruzek. "All he could tell me was he knows Antonio has been playing cards with Boden's crew."
"Well that's more than we've got," Voight said. "Sounds like it's possible he owed them money, or got on the wrong side of someone there in some other way."
"We're probably going to have to go speak to Boden and find out what he knows. Or, I should say, Ruzek is." That kind of conversation had to happen between two people of equal status. Not that either of them would necessarily think of the other that way, but it was a lot more acceptable than sending someone lower down the pecking order to ask questions. They would probably only have been laughed at anyway.
"Here they are now," Halstead said, seeing Lindsay drive her SUV into the lot, with Ruzek in the passenger seat. She stopped nearby, and the boss got out.
"Now, Erin, make sure no one gets to Kim without going through you."
"Got it," Halstead heard his girlfriend reply. She sounded about as thrilled with protection duty as he might have expected her to be. There would be a complaining session to come over dinner, he thought with some amusement as Erin spun her vehicle around and drove off in the direction she had arrived from.
"Everything was okay at the lab?" Voight asked the boss.
"Yes. I closed the lab down, and I've moved Kim Burgess a room at the house until whatever this is gets taken care of. Like I said earlier, being down one meth cook is bad enough, I'm not losing both. Erin's going with her to get some of her things. Now, what have you learned?"
"Pretty much what I said in the text, boss," Atwater said. "Antonio was playing cards at one of The 51's places across town. Quite regularly, apparently. It's possible he owed them money. It's the only possible motive we've got for his murder so far."
"Then I'll have to sit down with Wallace Boden. If he's had one of my men killed, he can answer to me face to face."
"It's worth keeping in mind that we don't know that whoever killed Antonio knew he worked for us," Voight said. "It might not have anything to do with us, or the meth lab."
Ruzek looked at him quizzically. "You don't believe that, do you?"
"No, I don't. But what we believe and what we know are not the same thing."
"This is true," Ruzek conceded. Moments like that showed why it was so important to have someone with Voight's kind of experience high up in the organisation. "I'll keep that in mind, but I am going to demand a meeting with Boden. We'll head over to that auto repair place of theirs."
"If this is some kind of play Boden's making on us, is it really wise to go over there and walk into what could be a very bad situation?" Halstead thought aloud.
"That's not how things are done, Jay. You don't shit in your own back yard," Ruzek said. "The one place something isn't going to happen is there, especially when four of us show up."
The boss had made a decision, so the others went with it without further discussion.
"Ready to move when you are," Atwater said.
"Then let's go," Ruzek replied.
Kim Burgess felt nervous, as had been the case pretty much all day. The current reason was more immediate than the fact that someone had shot her supervisor, and possibly might be out to get her too. The current reason was the fact that she was on the way to her house, being driven by Erin Lindsay.
There were many reasons that Burgess was nervous of Lindsay. For a start, she knew that there was almost no one above Lindsay in the organisation's hierarchy. Only Mr Ruzek and Mr Voight, in fact. In mafia terms, Lindsay was a made woman. By comparison, Burgess was a nobody. Secondly, she happened to have heard through Antonio that Lindsay was the one who did a lot of the dirty work for Mr Ruzek. If someone needed 'dealing with', as Antonio had put it, Lindsay often did the dealing. It seemed obvious that dealing with people sometimes meant killing them. And thirdly, Burgess knew that being assigned to protect her had Lindsay in a bad mood. No secret had been made of that.
"I'm sorry you're having to spend your day with me," Burgess ventured.
"It is what it is," Lindsay replied, somehow managing to combine disinterest and annoyance in her tone.
"I won't take long at the house. I'll just grab some things quickly and we can head back."
"I know. I already told you that before we left," Lindsay said, even more annoyed. Her eyes never left the road ahead.
Okay, I'll shut my mouth, Burgess thought. And she did. Not another word was said until the SUV pulled up out front of her house.
"We haven't been followed, and I don't see anything suspicious," Lindsay said. "Give me your keys. I'll go inside first and clear the place. You'll wait inside the front door, and you won't move until I tell you to. Got it?"
"Yes, ma'am," Burgess said humbly. She took out her keys and handed them over.
Lindsay got out of the vehicle and approached the house, with Burgess hurrying to catch up to her.
On full alert, Lindsay unlocked and slowly opened the front door, pulling out a silenced pistol as she did so. Burgess didn't want to see any killing, but she was glad to find herself confident that if there was any, it would be her bodyguard doing it, not an intruder.
Lindsay touched a gloved finger to her lips to remind Burgess to stay silent, and fixed her with a glare to remind her not to move until the house had been cleared.
Nodding her understanding, Burgess gently closed the door without a sound. Lindsay then disappeared into the living room, gun raised, ready to drop anyone she might encounter.
For the next few minutes, Burgess stood there trembling while Lindsay methodically walked around the house, moving quietly from room to room, first downstairs, then up. Hating every second of it, Burgess just wanted to be back in the lab, doing her job. Confrontation and violence were not for her. She had a knowledge of chemistry, and put it to use in a way that made her a lot of money. That was all she had ever wanted to get involved with. Certainly people being shot was way more than she could cope with.
Lindsay came down the stairs, her gun now lowered and made safe. "Come on then, let's go. Get some things packed into a case or two and we'll get back to the house."
"I hate this. This whole situation is awful."
Lindsay looked at her absolutely no sympathy, only impatience. "Yeah, well, for the time being you're going to have to get used to it. Now move. We haven't got all day to stand here."
Burgess hurried up the stairs to do as she had been told. All things considered, living at Mr Ruzek's house was not something she was looking forward to. Not one bit.
A/N: Do you think Ruzek will get his meeting with Boden?
How will Burgess settle in at the Ruzek house?