by Mia Ford
He glanced up, but when our eyes met he quickly looked away. I felt a chill creep up my spine. I said, “When you say our savings are gone… What does that mean?”
The answer came when he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He stared down into the coffee cup, which had grown too cold to drink. I asked again, “Dad, what does that mean?”
“It means I already lost our savings,” he said, almost too quiet for me to hear. “It’s gone. Every last cent.”
“When you say our savings, you don’t mean my savings? My college money?” He didn’t have to answer. I knew the truth by the look of guilt that was washing over his face like a fine sweat. My fingernails cut into my palms as I tightened my fists on the table. My breathing grew heavy until it felt like my lungs were going to burst. I gritted my teeth and willed the tears back from my eyes.
“Dad, my college money…”
“It’s gone, Katrina,” he said, whispering. He started to cry again. “Every cent. It’s all gone.”
CHAPTER TWO: Nicky D’Angelo
“I fucking hate Sundays, man,” my cousin Tony said as he pounded back the tequila shot the waitress had just set it front of him. He immediately ordered another round, though the three shots in front of me were so far untouched. He picked up the bottle of beer he was using to chase the tequila, drained it dry, and slammed the bottle on the table.
“Why do you hate Sundays so much?” I asked, sliding one of my tequila shots across the table to him. We’d only been there for half an hour and I could already tell that it was going to be a long afternoon, probably followed by a long night if Tony didn’t find a girl (or girls) to occupy his time. Tony didn’t skip a beat. He picked up the shot and splashed it down his throat.
He sighed and smacked his lips. “Because the only bitches here on Sunday are all fucking second string pussy,” he growled, swishing his hand through the air at the assortment of nude dancers and topless waitresses who were milling around the club, doing their best to suck every last dollar out of the patrons like vampires suck blood from their victims. The girls glanced our way every now and then, but they knew better than to approach the VIP area uninvited. Tony could be a real prick when he was in one of his moods, so like good dogs lying in the yard, they knew to only come onto the porch when their master called. And Tony considered himself to be their master, without a doubt.
He picked up another of my shots and grumbled into the glass. “I don’t know why all the best girls have to get off work on Sunday. Surely to shit they’re not all in fucking church. I’m gonna complain to management.”
“Aren’t you management?” I asked.
He grinned. “Whatever.”
I smiled and sipped my beer. I smiled a lot when I was around Tony, depending on his mood. He was a lot of fun to be around, at least until he got shitfaced and wanted to fight some poor schmuck who had looked at him wrong or was taking away the attention of some girl he’d had his eyes on. Of course, Tony never did the fighting himself. He never had, not even when we were kids. That’s what Jimmy Fist was for. Jimmy sat next to Tony scanning the room with his beady eyes as if Tony was the president and he was a Secret Service Agent on steroids. Jimmy was three hundred pounds of hard muscle toting half a pound of brain. He was a humorless pit bull of a man who wore tight Armani suits and black t-shirts with a large gold cross dangling from a thick gold chain around his neck. Most people thought the cross meant that he was religious. They were wrong. The cross was hollow and the top screwed off. It was where Jimmy kept Tony’s stash of blow when they were out on the town. The only time Jimmy Fist went into a church was to steal the collection plate when we were kids or to beat up a priest when we were teenagers because Tony said the guy looked like a pedophile. He probably wasn’t, but that didn’t matter to Jimmy. He just did what Tony commanded him to do.
“That girl is a five out of motherfucking ten,” Tony said, rolling his eyes at one of the nude dancers who was leading a drunk guy in a suit toward a private room for a lap dance and whatever favors he could afford to buy. He tapped the air with his finger like he was pecking on a typewriter. “That one’s a seven, that one’s a six, that one’s not even on the fucking scale. Christ, Nicky, I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick.”
“That’s good because my dick is not available for you to use,” I said.
“Your dick’s too small for me to use,” Tony said with a laugh, bumping Jimmy with his elbow. Jimmy grunted without smiling and cut me a sideways look. Jimmy and I were not friends. Never had been, never would be. I thought he was a fucking thug and he thought I was a condescending asshole. We were probably both correct to a large degree.
Tony was still grumbling about the lack of what he called “Grade-A pussy” working the club that afternoon. He considered himself to be quite the expert on gentleman’s club pussy and pussy in general. Lord knows he’d had more than his share of it, paid and free. Tony was a good-looking guy, not too tall, not too thin, with the dark Italian looks of the D’Angelo family, with coal black hair and olive skin and deep-set brown eyes that could cut through you like a laser. A lot of people mistook us for brothers rather than cousins, though I was a year older, a couple of inches taller, and had about twenty pounds of muscle on him thanks to my rugby playing days at school and the daily workouts I did with the personal trainer who came to my office every afternoon. The only heavy lifting Tony did was dragging his ass out of bed every morning. And sometimes he had to call Jimmy to help him with that.
I listened to Tony rate more girls as I sipped my beer and watched the naked girl who was dancing on the main stage at the center of the room. She was rubbing herself against the silver stripper pole to some George Michael song like she was getting fucked by the invisible man. She was a redhead with big hair and big tits and an ass you could set a drink on. Her pubes were waxed clean, so I had no idea if the carpeting matched the drapes. Her clit had a silver ring pierced into it. Ouch… I was wondering how it felt to have a metal rod pushed through the hood of one’s clit when she caught me looking at it. She used her fingers to pull back her mound to give me a better look at her cunt. She gave me a dreamy look and grinned. There was a large gap between her front teeth. She stuck her tongue through it. I quickly looked away. Tony was right. Sunday was for the second string at best.
“Maybe all the best girls rest on Sunday because they work so late on Saturday night lap dancing for pricks like you,” I said thoughtfully, as if I was hypothesizing one of the great mysteries of life. “On Sunday, you get the leftovers. Although, some of them are still pretty hot.”
“Yeah, if you like a gap between their front teeth that you can shove your dick through,” he said, nodding at the dancer who was still looking my way. He sat back and shook his head. “I’m gonna have a little talk with Mavis,” he said, referring to the former stripper-cum-manager who managed the dancer’s schedules. “If she’s gonna bring out the second-string pussy on Sunday afternoon she ought’a at least discount the motherfucking lap dances. Or put them on a sliding the scale. The hotter the bitch, the more it costs.”
I snorted a laugh and rolled my eyes at him. “When’s the last time you paid for a lap dance, motherfucker? Or for a drink, for that matter?” I oversaw the accounting for the club and handled the public set of books (someone else handled the private ones), so I knew who paid and who didn’t. Granted, the club was owned by Tony’s dad, my uncle Gino D’Angelo. Neither Tony or I had ever paid for anything in all the years we’d been coming here; drinks, pussy or otherwise. I reminded him of that fact and added, “You can’t complain when the shit is free.”
“Of course, I can,” he said with a smirk, reaching for my last shot. “Just because it’s free doesn’t mean it has to be low quality. If I think it’s shitty, the customers will think it’s shitty. And shitty pussy is bad for business. You graduated from a big fancy school. You know what I’m talking about. It’s simple economics.”
“I must have been out the day they covered shitty pussy and its ef
fect on the economy.”
“Fucking college boy,” he snorted, shaking his head. “I never even drove past a college and I’m smarter than you.” He bumped Jimmy with his elbow. “Ain’t that right, Jimmy boy?”
“That’s right,” Jimmy grunted. He looked at me and wrinkled his nose like I was a bad smell. “Fucking college boy.”
I almost told him to go fuck himself but decided to let it go. I wasn’t afraid of Jimmy, to the contrary, I kicked his ass when we were in high school and I could do it again today. He was all muscle and strong as a fucking ox, but in a fair fight he moved with the speed and grace of a sloth. One good punch to the nose or jaw and his knees would buckle like toothpicks. I just didn’t want to spend my Sunday afternoon picking his teeth out of my knuckles.
Tony grinned at me, waiting for my reply. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to get into it with Jimmy, he downed the shot and wiped his lips on the back of his hand just as the waitress arrived with a full tray of shots and beers.
Tony started talking smack to the waitress, who, unlike the dancers, was topless, but wearing a see-through thong that did very little to hide the outline of her neatly-trimmed dark pubes. The health department demanded the waitresses (all servers of beverages and food) cover their vaginas (for the purposes of sanitation), so Tony had found the see-through thongs online and bought them by the gross. He said it was his way of telling the health inspector to go suck a dick. Tony loved coming out on top.
The waitress was a pretty brunette with small tits and a big smile named Bethany something or other. She had worked at Gino’s Gentleman’s Club for a few months and had spent a considerable amount of her off time in Tony’s bed or in the back seat of his car. He said she wasn’t bad for backup pussy and could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, which seemed to be all that Tony was thinking about at that moment.
I picked up my beer and sat back in the plush booth to let my eyes go around the large room. I heard myself sigh, but I wasn’t sure if it was from boredom or disgust. It was barely two in the afternoon on a freakin’ Sunday and the place was already filling up with men ready to spend their whole paycheck or max out their credit cards on the two things that made the world go around: booze and pussy.
I looked away when Tony pulled the waitress onto his lap and started fondling her tits while she stuck her tongue down his throat.
One thought kept running through my mind.
I was Nicky D’Angelo, the proverbial tall, dark and handsome Italian man, with a business mind second to none and a cock that would make most men envious and most women salivate. I had a Master’s Degree in Finance from Wharton. I lived in a luxury penthouse downtown and had my own limo and driver. I was the founder and CEO of a successful financial services company that had made me a multimillionaire before I was thirty years old. I was twice voted one of the city’s most eligible bachelors and had dated more beautiful women than I could even remember.
I was young, rich, and had the world by the tail.
So what the fuck was I doing here?
One word: family.
My full name is Nicholas Ramone D’Angelo. I had been called Nicky since the day I was born. In a big Italian family like mine, everybody has a nickname. You only hear your full Christian name when your mother is pissed off and screaming at you.
Tony’s full name was Anthony Luigi D’Angelo; Tony for short. Jimmy Fist’s real name was James Orson White. He wasn’t Italian, but he got a nickname anyway, like naming the family pet. Jimmy was an Irish mick whose father worked for our grandfather as a bodyguard and enforcer. Jimmy grew up with us and Tony gave him the nickname Jimmy Fist because he used his fists more than he used his brain. It fits him still today.
I’m the only son of Ricardo and Marina D’Angelo. Grandson of Luigi D’Angelo, and one of the heirs to the D’Angelo family fortune. The thing is, I don’t want anything to do with the family business or the family fortune. Unlike Tony and the rest of my shithead cousins, I prefer to make my own way in the world, not because I don’t want the money, but because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail.
The D’Angelo family is involved in lots of businesses, some legit, most not. I knew all along growing up what my family did for money and while I didn’t involve myself in any of it, I certainly enjoyed the spoils.
Family money put me through Yale, then through Wharton Business School, where I earned my Master’s in finance and graduated with honors. I started my company, Phoenix Capital, on family money and my first clients were my mother and father, then my uncles, and cousins. I manage their investment portfolios and retirement accounts. I make my money off their money.
I know. I’m a fucking hypocrite, but I keep telling myself that once my company is firmly established with non-family clients, I’ll turn over the management of my family’s money to someone else. Until then, I’ll do the best fucking job for them that I can and pretend that I don’t know where the money comes from. And therein lies the issue because I can’t ignore the fact that much of my family’s wealth has come from the pain and suffering of others.
The D’Angelo fortune was built on drugs, prostitution, loan sharking, gambling, racketeering, money laundering, extortion, and other more violent acts that I try not to think about. Like most criminal empires, it’s one that’s built on a house of cards that could come tumbling down at any time. One good jailhouse snitch or one random conversation picked up on a wiretap could bring the Feds to my grandfather’s door.
I refused to take part in anything criminal. The money I managed for the family was done so legitimately, no money laundering here. I made damn sure every cent was vetted by my in-house counsel before accepting the wire transfer. I felt that I owed the family a debt for getting me here, and nurturing their fortunes, making them grow, was my way of paying them back.
I also told myself that family was the reason that I was sitting in a bar surrounded by drunk, horny men, and naked women at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. Tony was my cousin, my best friend, and I loved him like a brother. He had asked me to come out for brunch and we ended up here, as we did most Sundays. And like most rationalizations I come to about my family, this one was bullshit, too. I enjoyed Tony’s company, but I also enjoyed the attention of the girls, even if I didn’t partake as much as he did.
I’m a red-blooded American male with raging testosterone and a fondness for blondes with big tits and blue eyes; especially if those eyes are looking up at me while she has my cock in her mouth.
I’d had my share of lap dances and I’d even fucked a few of the girls in the backroom, but I always went home alone, unlike Tony, who liked to caravan all the girls back to his place so he could have as many girls at a time as he wanted. And like a good cousin, he always invited me to come along.
We’d done a lot of gangbanging in our younger days. Tony was like a carnival ride in bed. He liked to have a girl riding on his cock, a girl riding on his face, and a girl riding on each hand. I had to admit, it was pretty impressive to watch.
The truth is, playing the field is getting a little old for me. I’d love to meet a nice girl and settle down, but it’s been my experience that women are more interested in what you can do for them than having a serious relationship. I’m surrounded by strippers and hookers and gold diggers who will do whatever I tell them to in the bedroom but expect a gratuity in exchange for spreading their legs to me.
I’d love that ring, Nicky.
Oh, look at that convertible.
Wow, Nicky, wouldn’t I look great in that mink coat?
I’d tried dating models, actresses, socialites and spoiled rich chicks, but they’re even worse because they don’t need your money. They act like you should be honored just to be fucking them. I swear, I fucked this chick you would recognize from TV and she just laid there while I fucked her. It was like shoving my cock into a corpse. It literally gave me the creeps.
I was ready for something different.
I needed a real woman,
one with a brain as well as a body.
One with ambitions and passions that rivaled my own.
It wouldn’t hurt for her to have big tits and like it up the ass once in a while.
Like I said, I am a red-blooded American male.
CHAPTER THREE: Katrina
I left my father sitting alone at the table feeling sorry for himself and went downstairs to open the bar for the Sunday night crowd. Maybe I should have gotten up and given him a big hug and told him I loved him. Or reassured him that somehow, some way, we’d figure it out together and it would all be okay because that’s what families did, they put their heads together and came up with a solution when one of them had done something so incredibly stupid that it might get them all killed. Or at the very least I could have told him that I’d miss him when he was gone. Maybe I should have done all that, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. At least not yet. So it was tough luck, pops, but you’re getting what you deserve. Thanks for stealing my savings and ruining my life. You’re just the worst dad ever… you selfish prick.
We opened at four on Sunday to give the churchgoers time to do their morning penance with God and have lunch with their families before coming in to drink with their pals and blow their grocery money on beer and wings.
I hated the bar. I always had and always would so long as my life was tied to it. I hated that it was a haven for men like my father, who preferred the company of their drinking and poker buddies over their wives and kids; men who would steal money from their kid’s piggy bank to gamble it away without a moment’s regret. I hated the bar, but it was all we had and the only way my father could make a living. He had worked at the bar since he was a kid for my grandfather. He barely graduated high school and had never worked anywhere else. Then, as now, he was devoid of ambition and talent. Working the bar was all he knew. It was who he was. If my grandfather hadn’t died and passed on the deed and debts to him, he’d probably be selling shitty used cars in Jersey or pushing buggies at people out front of Wal-Mart. Granted, he drank up much of the inventory himself and always had his hand in the till, but without it, we probably would have been homeless long ago.
