Buda gave his men their marching orders. He would drive back to the Bronx with Prek and Genti, while Neri would remain at the house and clean it and the van thoroughly to erase all traces of Pia’s stay. Buda was quite specific about what products Neri would use and how long he should spend on each part of the task. Buda emphasized what a good job he wanted Neri to do and that it would take him the entire weekend to complete. That would give Buda time to figure out what to do with Neri. Before he left the house, he put the van’s keys in his pocket. Fatos had to drive Drilon back to the parking lot at the restaurant to pick up his car because Pia flatly refused to get into a car with Drilon. She wasn’t about to explain why.

Pia sat in the front seat of Burim’s vehicle and stared straight ahead as the men said their goodbyes in the driveway. Burim and Pia set off, heading for Weehawken. Burim turned up the heat for Pia’s benefit.

“What’s your problem with Drilon?”

“I’m not going to talk about it,” Pia said.

“I hope you will later. So, tonight we’ll go to my house.”

Is he kidding? thought Pia. She was desperate to get away from this man.

“No, I want to go back to the hospital.”

“I can’t let you do that,” Burim said.

“Sure you can,” Pia said. “I promised not to meddle any more and I’m not going to. You’ll have to trust me. It’s the same tonight as it will be in a week, in a month. I have to check on something.”

“The place will be swarming with cops.”

“I’ll have to talk to them eventually. Or do you think I’ll move in with you and live in New Jersey and play happy family? Because that’s not happening. You can’t just walk back into my life, don’t you understand that? We have an arrangement, that’s all. You have to trust me, I have to trust you. We shook hands, remember?”

“You can’t tell the cops anything, obviously, you know that. Anything about Buda or his men or about seeing me and Drilon.”

“Don’t worry, it won’t be difficult to forget you.”

Burim ignored the barb.

“So we have to come up with a story for what happened to you,” he said.

“The police will know as much as I do, about the polonium. But I don’t know who did the killing, I just know the why.”

“The less I know the better too.”

“They’ll find my system was full of drugs, I imagine,” Pia said. “So I’ll say I was drugged, then I was held in a house outside the city, but I escaped.”

“So how did you get back to New York?”