by Roy Glenn
“And we need to start acting like we command this family.” I looked at Bobby. “We are not soldiers anymore. You’re the under-boss of this family. You think Carmine Abandonato would be out in the streets hunting Gun.”
“No.” He laughed. “He’d have a fuckin’ army of shooters in the street twenty-four seven until The Gunner showed his face.”
“Wanda, you are this family’s consigliere. You think The Gooch is out there being the wheel man on a job?”
“No,” Wanda said. “And I can guarantee you that Vinchenso D'Agostino, the boss of the Curcio family hasn’t hit the streets in years.”
“He damn sure hasn’t. They give orders and people follow them.”
“We all do need to step back. Especially me,” Wanda said, and I was glad that she realized it.
“That ain’t always possible,” Bobby said.
“You’re right and I know there are still going to be times when we are going to have to get our hands dirty.”
“We do still work for Andre,” Bobby said.
“But even in that, when Andre calls you to put in work, you send somebody to take care of it.”
“Mike’s right,” Wanda began. “We need to do things a lot smarter. Kirk came to our spot and announced that he planned to put us all in jail. We need to start insulating ourselves.”
“If we gonna call ourselves The Family, we need to start acting like The Family.”
Chapter Eleven
December 23
In spite of the fact that I had just gotten all serious and shit, it was still December and we still had celebrating to do. But instead of hitting the streets and rolling from spot to spot getting fucked up, the three of us did our celebrating that night hanging out at The Late Night. But after a while one by one the three of us drifted back into the office. We were still smoking and drinking, but we did more talking.
“What time are we meeting with Larry?”
“Anytime you say,” Wanda said.
“Let’s say ten o'clock. Get it out of the way.”
“I’ll pick you up then.”
I stood up. “Good.”
“Where you going?” Bobby asked.
“Cynt’s.”
“Tell Lo-Lo and Anya I said hello,” Wanda said, as I put my coat on to leave.
“I will,” I said, instead of warning her that if Lo-Lo had her way, she’d have Wanda stripped down and screaming and Anya would be happy to help. “What you getting ready to do, Bobby?”
“I don’t know. I may see you up there later.”
“I’m only gonna be there long enough to get Lo-Lo and Anya and then I’m out.”
“Wait up.” Wanda stood up and got her coat. “If you’re not staying long, I’ll take you to pick them up and then I’ll take y’all home.”
“Thanks, Wanda.”
“No problem,” she said, and then to make sure that we weren’t staying long, Wanda called Cynt’s and had them tell Lo-Lo and Anya to be ready when we got there.
When we got there and went inside, I went to get my girls while Wanda went to talk to Cynt.
“See how we’re doing tonight,” Wanda said smiling and walked away. When she was done fuckin’ with Cynt, we left, and Wanda drove us home. On the way there, me and Wanda talked about making the deal with Larry in the morning and what else we could buy or open up to launder our money.
When the subject of how we were gonna finance the things we were talking about came up, I said, “we’ll talk about that another time.”
“Right,” Wanda said, and we stopped talking.
And then there was silence in the car. I glanced back at Anya and Lo-Lo. They had been in each other’s ear whispering the entire time me and Wanda were talking. The look on their faces told me that they were up to something and I would find out what that was soon enough. “Thanks for bringing us home, Wanda,” Lo-Lo said when we got there, and Wanda parked.
I was about to say good night and get out of the car when Anya said, “You wanna come in, burn one and have a drink with us, Wanda?”
I laughed because now I knew what they were up to.
“Wanda has business in the morning,” I said and looked at Wanda.
“I don’t appreciate you answering for me. But you’re right, we do have business in the morning.” She looked at Lo-Lo and Anya. “Sorry, ladies. Maybe we can get together and burn another time,” she said and they both smiled.
“That would be nice, Wanda. Let’s make that happen,” Lo-Lo said and got out.
Anya slid out behind her. “Good night, Wanda,” she said and got out.
“See you in a few hours,” I said and got out.
“Night, Mike,” Wanda said as I shut the door and then she drove off. Instead of going inside, Lo-Lo and Anya were standing there trying to look innocent. I shook my head and started for the building.
“What?” Anya said as they followed behind me.
“Nothing,” I said and went inside. “But I didn’t just meet y’all.”
They had no comment.
We went in our apartment; the subject of us getting a bigger nicer place came up while we got undressed. Then we got in bed, did what we do until we couldn’t do it anymore and eventually we fell asleep.
It seemed like I had just closed my eyes when I heard the phone ringing, followed by Anya saying, “Good morning, Wanda.” I sat up in bed and stretched expecting Anya to hand me the phone, but she didn’t. “I’ll let him know.” She hung up. “She’s on her way.”
“Okay,” I said and dragged myself out of bed and into the bathroom. When I came out, Anya and Lo-Lo weren’t in bed. “Anya!” I shouted.
“What?” she shouted back.
“Nothing,” I said as the door opened, and she stuck her head in.
“Wanda’s here,” Anya said and closed the door.
While I got dressed quickly, I could hear the laughter in my living room. When I came out of the room, and from where I was standing, all I could see was tits and thighs.
“Morning, Wanda.”
“Morning, Mike.” She was sitting in my chair.
Lo-Lo and Anya sat on the couch across from her burning one. Lo-Lo was wearing that CCNY sweatshirt and with her legs crossed her thick chocolate thighs were on display. Anya had on the black shirt that I was wearing last night. With the shirt unbuttoned down to her navel, Anya was flashing tittie every time she moved.
“You ready?”
“Yup,” Wanda said and got up. Lo-Lo went to get Wanda’s coat and she handed it to me. I helped Wanda on with her coat.
“Bye, Wanda,” Anya said. “Maybe you can burn with us next time.”
“Call me. You got the number,” Wanda said as I held the door open for her.
“See you later, Black,” Lo-Lo said.
“See y’all later.”
I left my apartment wondering if I should be jealous.
“I think Lo-Lo and Anya like me,” Wanda said when we got in the car.
“They do,” I said as she started the car and drove off.
“I mean they like me, like me.”
“And I’m saying, they do.”
“Uh, uh, Mike. No.” Wanda looked at me as she drove. “Uh, uh. That is not how I roll. You need to say something to them.”
“You’re the one that gave them your number.”
“’Cause I like them, but I don’t like them, like them.” She shook her head and then she glanced at me. “Is that why you didn’t want to leave me alone with Lo-Lo that day?”
“Correct.”
“Uh, uh, Mike. No. You need to say something to them.”
“Don’t worry, Wanda, I’ll keep the predators away from their prey.”
“Uh, uh, Mike, I am not their prey. You need to say something to them,” she said for the third time as we got closer to Morris’s to close the deal.
“What time did you tell Larry we were coming?”
“I didn’t. You picked the time, remember?”
“What else you got
to do today?”
“Nothing really, why?”
Even though I had given this a lot of thought, I still wasn’t sure it was a good idea. I took a deep breath. “I want you to go shopping with me.”
“What did you say?”
“I asked if you wanted to go shopping with me.”
“Why?”
“You said me actually picking out something for you myself made it mean more to you. So I thought that it made sense for you to be there.”
“So we can be all in our heads about Vickie.”
“We don’t have to be in our heads about Vickie. We can talk about it.”
“We do need to talk about it.” Wanda paused. “We never really have, you know. We talk at each other about it, but I know I try not to talk about it.”
“Me too.”
Wanda laughed a little. “I know, you get all quiet and broody any time anybody mentions her name.”
I looked at Wanda as she drove downtown, which meant we were going shopping, and wondered if I would tell her my truth. “That’s why I think this makes sense, for both of us.” I paused. “Truth is, I enjoyed shopping with Vickie.”
“I know … she told me.” Wanda paused. “Truth was, I used to feel some kinda way about you shopping with Vickie.”
“Really? I thought you said it meant more because I bought it?”
“It did. I was the only person that you actually shopped for. But you were having fun with Vickie shopping for me.”
“Right.”
“Never mind.” She shook her head and looked disgusted at me.
I knew that there was some bit of girly logic that I was missing here, because I’m a man and I’m slow. But I knew that either she or some other woman would break it down for me or maybe I would figure it out myself in a couple of years if I was lucky.
“Anyway, I need to shop for you too, so what do you want?”
“Nothing. You already gave me my birthday present.”
“Well what were you thinking about getting me?”
“Diamonds.”
“They are a girl’s best friend.” Wanda laughed. “So, you wanna ride out to Diamond Source?”
“Ballsy, but no,” I said, and we spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon shopping for each other’s presents. And we had fun talking and laughing and sharing our memories of sweet innocent Vickie.
“Sweet innocent Vickie? Be real, Mike, Vickie was never innocent,” Wanda said. “Vickie was great at acting sweet and innocent.”
“Damn sure was; it was her job,” I said and laughed.
“She’d drop that smile—”
“Or she’d get that confused look on her face.”
“And then here come the questions,” Wanda said laughing.
“Best distraction in the world.”
Wanda shook her head and laughed. “I remember one day, Vickie talked me into leaving school, so we could go downtown. I’m thinking we’re going to thirty-fourth street to do our thing.”
Their thing was shop lifting. Once they sized up the cameras, Vickie would distract the sales people and Wanda would load up. They’d keep the best stuff and sell the rest.
“So I knew you were down.”
“That was our hustle, so yeah, I was down. So, we hop the train and we’re on our way downtown when she says, let’s get off at forty-second street and hang out there for a while, and I was like, what? Vickie never wants to hang out at forty-second.”
“She was up to something.” I smiled, because Vickie could be sneaky when she needed to be.
“So we get off the train and we get outside, and I see these guys and one of them starts waving at us. Sweet innocent Vickie says, oh that’s Donavan, he said he might be down here. So we walk a little further and she says, he said that his friend thinks you’re cute and he wants to meet you. And then he turned around and I stop walking and looked at Vickie.”
“What was wrong?”
“He was ugly, Mike,” Wanda said louder than she needed to. “I hate to talk about the boy, but I was like, no, Vickie, look at him. So she looks, and she says, okay, yeah, he is, but—; anyway she talks me into it and we go talk to them. She introduces us, and that was when I see Vickie’s mom coming straight at us.”
“Uh, oh.”
“I say, Vickie, here comes your mom, but she didn’t hear me because she’s running her mouth.”
“What’d you do?”
“I grabbed her arm and just started walking the other way and I tell her that her mother is behind us, but I don’t think she saw us.”
“No problem.”
“No problem, until the boy starts yelling Vickie’s name. I said just keep walking and don’t look back. Then the other boy starts yelling, ‘Wanda, yo Wanda!’”
“So much for sneaking away.”
“Right, because even if she didn’t see us, she heard them yelling our names at the top of their lungs.” She laughed. “Anyway, we get back on the train and go back uptown. Do you know when we got home, her mother and my mother are standing in front of Vickie’s house talking. She sees me and starts walking.”
“You’re in trouble now.” I laughed, cause Wanda’s mother wasn’t nothing to play with. “What Amy do?”
Wanda laughed. “She chased me in the house trying to hit me with the mail in her hand. And I couldn’t go anywhere for a month.”
“I remember that; that’s when you and Vickie weren’t speaking for a couple of weeks.”
“Because it was her fault we were down there in the first place.” Wanda sucked her teeth, like it happened yesterday. “Shoulda just gone to Macy’s,” she said as we parked, and we went shopping for each other’s Christmas present.
Yeah, that’s right, I said it, we went shopping for each other’s Christmas present. I got Wanda an 18k white gold three-stone drop diamond pendant. I chose it because the woman who sold it to me said that the three-stone drop design was inspired by our past, our present, and our future. I thought that it was appropriate for where we were. We were learning from our past mistakes, living in the present but looking toward the future. Wanda got me measured for a tailor made Italian suit, black, of course, and a bottle of Rémy Martin Louis XIII that was originally bottled in 1962 which she planned to help me drink.
On the way to the car, me and Wanda promised that we would try to do this every year. And then we got in the car and headed to Morris’s. There was no more laughter, no more stories of Vickie; when the doors closed it was back to business and we talked about our growing legitimate businesses.
There was Invulnerable, the security company we opened so we’d have a license to carry guns and the funeral home we brought from old man Leibovitz to dispose of bodies, and the rest were cash businesses. A chain of laundromats, a dry cleaner, and a vending machine company that we ran our ATM business through. But I had to admit, buying Morris’s was big for us or at least it felt that way. It made me feel like we owned a real legitimate business and not just a way to launder our money.
In order to make everything look legit, we were able to convince Larry to lower his selling price on paper from the three hundred fifty that he was asking for to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; thirty-five thousand of that he had already received. Since he knew without actually knowing how we made our money, he agreed to take a cashier’s check from Invulnerable for one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars and two hundred thousand dollars in cash. And yeah, we used the two hundred thousand that we got for doing that job for Sherman. After we convinced Bobby to give up his share, that is.
We had just wrapped things up and shook hands, when Wanda’s phone rang. “Excuse me, Larry.” She got up to answer. “Hello,” she said as I passed Larry the case and he assured me that the cash was not going to be a problem for him.
“You’re not the only one who has connections, Mike. I know some people in Tel Aviv,” Larry said. “This will be no problem for them, believe me.”
“It’s Nick,” Wanda said and hande
d me the phone.
“What up, Nick?”
“We’re in Mount Vernon at one of the places Wanda gave us. Simon Parrish is here, but his security saw us when they pulled up and he approached us.”
Before I asked if they killed him, I stood up and walked away from the table. “He’s not asleep, is he?”
“No, but he is tied up and can’t come to the phone,” Nick said. “What you want us to do?”
“Sit on Parrish until we get there.” I hung up, called Bobby and told him to pick me up from Morris’s.
“Where are you?”
“Downtown. Why?”
“Nick and Freeze have Parrish. He’s in Mount Vernon.”
“I’m on my way.”
“I’m closer,” I told Bobby and looked at Wanda. It wasn’t that I thought that Parrish was going to be a problem, but we had just talked about her not being involved in things like this anymore. Despite her wanna be a gangster tendencies, Wanda has to represent the legitimate face of our business. “I’ll get with you later, Bobby.” I handed the phone back to Wanda. “We need to go,” I said to her, we apologized to Larry for our abrupt departure and headed out.
When we got to the house, Nick and Freeze were waiting. While I went to talk to Parrish with Nick, Wanda waited in the car with Freeze.
“You have one job.”
“Protect Wanda with my life.”
“Right,” I said and walked away with Nick. When we got to the door, I put the silencer on my gun before I knocked. Parrish opened the door right away.
“Mr. Black. I’ve been expecting you,” he said and stepped aside to let us in.
“Were you,” I said as Nick checked Parrish for a weapon and went in to check the house.
“Yes. When Günter didn’t come back, and I saw these gentlemen in the car across the street, I thought you’d be along.” Parrish said.
“House is clear, Black.”
“Thank you, Nick,” I said and walked in. Parrish shut the door.
“I have your money, Mr. Black,” he said as he led me to the living room. “Please, have a seat while I get it,” Parrish said, and Nick followed him into another room. When they came back he had a briefcase. “And an apology.” He placed the case on the coffee table in front of me and opened it. “I had to leave the country shortly after I left you. A multi-million dollar deal I had put together was about to fall apart. My partners and I stood to lose a great deal of money, so I had to go right away. I had intended to make arrangements with my assistant to get you your money with instruction for Jürgen to deliver it,” he let out a nervous chuckle. “But I guess I forgot.”
