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nodded. “I guess.”
    Eddie “The Prince” Pinero had been convicted the week before on criminal usury charges, otherwise known as loansharking at an interest rate that would make even your credit card company blush.
    The case was the first time Vincent Marcozza — a legal heavyweight, in every sense of the word — had failed to spring his biggest client. But hey, even Bruce Cutler didn’t win every time on behalf of John Gotti.
    But Marcozza’s performance in the trial had been heavily criticized by legal pundits. They said he’d been uncharacteristically sloppy and at times seemed ill prepared. As Jeffrey Toobin told Anderson Cooper on CNN, “Marcozza really took his eyes off the ball this time.”
    His eyes, huh?
    Courtney raised her champagne glass. Then she gave me that big blue-eyed wink of hers. “So here’s to you, Nick.”
    “Me? For what?” I asked.
    “For starters, being alive,” she said. “I had no idea you were such a magnet for danger these days. A girl could really get in trouble hanging around you.”
    We clinked glasses, but what followed could only be described as an awkward silence between us. It was all due to the subtext of what she’d just said.
    Which brings me back to the second thing you need to know about Courtney Sheppard.
    I owe you that one, remember?

Chapter 13
    THE PROBLEM BETWEEN us was as clear as the ten-carat diamond on her finger.
    Courtney was engaged.
    And not just to anybody, but to Thomas Ferramore, one of the wealthiest guys in New York. We’re talking loaded here. Super megabucks. A one-man stimulus package, if you will.
    Ferramore owned commercial real estate, lots of it. He owned an airline. He owned over a dozen radio stations. Two soccer teams.
    Oh yeah, and he owned Citizen magazine.
    After their yearlong “whirlwind courtship” that rivaled the likes of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Brangelina for boldfaced mentions in the gossip pages, the two of them were scheduled to be married this fall at the ultraposh San Sebastian Hotel here in the city. You guessed it. Ferramore owned that, too.
    The whole thing promised to be the don’t-miss social event of the season. A real storybook wedding. Problem was, there’d been an unexpected chapter written. Only two people knew about it, and Thomas Ferramore wasn’t one of them.
    The night before I left for Darfur, Courtney and I had slept together.
    We immediately agreed that it was a one-time thing, a complete lapse in judgment due to our close working relationship over the years. And our friendship, platonic up until then. Sometimes histrionic, often hilarious.
    “We can’t pretend it didn’t happen, nor do I want to,” she said the morning after. “But we have to act like it didn’t happen, Nick, okay? And that’s that.”
    Compartmentalizing again.
    But I suspected it wouldn’t be as easy as “that’s that.”
    Sure enough, after her little toast to me, “it” was suddenly the big white elephant in the big white marble room of Astor Hall. We couldn’t ignore it, not until we at least had discussed it some more. As much as we might have tried, there was no way to stuff that elephant into a box.
    More important, I didn’t want to. For better or worse, Courtney needed to know how I felt about her, and maybe it had taken getting shot at in Africa for me to fully understand that.
    So I took a swig of my Laphroaig 15 Year Old Scotch, followed by a deep breath. Here goes, well, everything , I was thinking.
    I turned to her. She was wearing a long black dress with a jewel neckline, her auburn hair elegantly pulled back behind her ears. Beautiful — and so, so sweet.
    “Courtney, there’s something I need to —” “Uh-oh,” she interrupted.
    Uh-oh?
    But she wasn’t reading tea leaves. This had nothing to do with what I was about to say to her. Instead, Courtney was peering over my right shoulder. She’d seen someone, hadn’t she?
    “We’ve got big trouble at twelve o’clock,” she