“Yep. I’m okay, though. This time, I did the dumping.” She went to the sink and washed a colander of fresh spinach.
“Yeah? I thought you liked this guy.”
“I did. I do. But he started the ‘let’s join a gym’ thing. When I said I was happy the way I was, and that I didn’t want to spend the time and expense on a gym when I spent my whole day playing tag with the world’s busiest preschooler, I got the ‘yeah buts.’ I’ve been around this track plenty of times, so I dumped him. I don’t want to be with somebody who thinks I can be improved.” She gave him a wry grin tinged with sadness. “I’m perfect, dammit.”
“You absolutely are.” His kissed her temple. As he moved behind her to get himself a beer out of the fridge, and as Trey came out of the bathroom, shaking his still-wet hands as he always did, there was a heavy, insistent pounding on the door.
The door opened onto a sidewalk that led to the parking lot. Something about the sound of that knock seemed less than friendly, and Carlo’s veins flooded with adrenaline.
“Take Trey to the bedroom.” Natalie nodded and headed to Trey. “Elsa, come.”
Again the heavy pounding. Then: “Carlo! Carlo! Let me in!”
Joey? Carlo looked at Natalie and waved her on back to the bedroom. Something was up. He didn’t know what, but he wanted them away from it. The dog, all hundred and fifty pounds of her, was at his hip. As gentle as she was, if she thought her family was in danger, she’d stop at nothing to protect them. Carlo could relate. He peered through the peephole and saw his youngest brother’s face, warped by the fisheye lens. It had to have been the lens that had made his face look so bizarre. He opened the door, leaving the security slider engaged. Elsa’s tail started to wag, and that settled Carlo’s mind a little. But then he took a good look at his brother.
“Joey? What’s up?” Jesus. Joey’s face was hamburger. His right eye was swollen completely shut and an alarming shade of, well, black, his cheek was running blood, and his mouth was every possible shade of purple and about four sizes too big. An odd lump and mottling on the left side of his face told Carlo that Joey’s jaw was broken. He’d seen a similar look once when Luca had badly lost a match. Luca hadn’t lost often, but when he had, he’d made the other guy beat the ever-lovin’ shit out of him to keep him down.
“Let me in, brother. I need help.”
Carlo closed the door, disengaged the sliding bolt. and let his brother in. “Fuck, Joe. What happened to you?”
“I need help. I’m so fucked, Carlo. God, I’m so fucked.” The words seemed to be mired in mud.
“Okay, okay. Sit.” He led him to a chair at the little table that served as dining area and desk. “I’ll get you something for your face.” He went into the kitchen and grabbed a dish towel. He wet it and brought it over with the roll of paper towels. “Here. Clean up. I think there’s some fruit or something in the freezer.” As he went back into the kitchen and dug a bag of frozen blueberries out of the little freezer, he said, “Tell me what happened.”
Just then, Natalie came out. Elsa took the opportunity of the open bedroom door to slip in to be with Trey. “Is everything okay? Oh!” She saw Joey’s face. “Oh, Joey! What happened, honey?”
“Hey, Nat. I’m okay. I need to talk to Carlo, though.”
“Um, okay. I could…” She looked at Carlo. “I could take him to get a hamburger or something?”
Carlo nodded. “Yeah. Thank you. Not sure how to get him past this mess, though.” He gave his brother an appraising look. There was nowhere to hide him, and Trey would be excited to see his Uncle Joey. “There’s an ice room down at the end of this building. Are you in so much trouble that you can’t walk down there safely and wait until Trey is out of here?”
“No. I can do that.”
“Good.” He threw the blueberries at Joey. “Go now, and I’ll text you when he’s gone.”
Joey nodded and, bag of frozen blueberries held to his face, left the suite. Carlo watched until he turned the corner.
When he closed the door, Natalie was turning off the oven. “Just leave this in there. I’ll deal with it when I get back. I might be able to salvage it.”
“Thanks, Nat.”
She nodded and went to collect Trey, who was audibly enthusiastic about the idea of hamburgers for dinner. As they left the suite, Nat looked over her shoulder. “Just text me when we can come back.”
He nodded and waved to his son. When they were safely away, Carlo texted Joey.
Once his baby brother was seated again at the table, his face freshly washed and looking barely any better, Carlo said. “Now. Tell me what the fuck happened.”
“I got rolled. I was on a job, just supposed to be an easy collection. Went smooth. But before I could get to my truck, I got rolled. Three guys. Did this”—he waved at his face—“and this”—he lifted his shirt to show deep, red bruising over his ribs and stomach—“got my piece, and got the cash. Carlo, it was $40,000. I’m so fucked. If I don’t have that money in the morning, the Uncles are going to turn me into chum.”
“Who’d you ride with?” The Uncles’ men worked in pairs.
“Donnie’s kid is sick.”
“You went alone?”
Even behind the bruising and swelling, Joey managed a miserable expression. “It was supposed to be cake. We do this run once a week. It’s always cake.”
Carlo loved his brother, loved him fiercely. But God, the kid could be such a moron. Whether it was chicks or work or whatever, Joey Pagano thought with his littlest head. He couldn’t believe the Uncles even wanted him on their payroll. “Shit, Joey. What do you think I can do? You think I have $40,000 stashed in a coffee can or something? I’m bleeding red here, kid. If you’re here for help with the money, I just don’t fucking have it.”
But Joey shook his head. “No—no. I thought…I thought maybe you’d talk to Uncle Ben for me? Since you’re, like, most-favored nephew or whatever, with the thing with Sabina and Auberon? Maybe you could get him to ease up, give me time?”
Joey was asking him to ask for another favor, and with that, Carlo’s sympathy for his careless, reckless baby brother shrank to a fraction. He stood up. “You want me to make a deal with Uncle Ben. To save your ass from your own screw-up.”
“You did it for a chick you hardly knew. I’m your brother.”
Carlo barely caught back the impulse to punch Joey right in his broken face. Instead, he stood and walked away, counting to ten, then again to another ten, before he turned back. “You signed on for this gig, Joe. After everything Pop said, all the years we were growing up, knowing exactly what business the Uncles were in, knowing what you’d have to do, knowing how much it would hurt Pop, you signed on, because you wanted to play cumpà. Well, now you are. No, I’m not asking Uncle Ben for a favor.”
“Carlo, they’ll kill me.”
“Maybe.” Carlo doubted it. If he were anyone other than blood family, then yes. But regardless of family ties, Joey wasn’t half as broken as he would be once Uncle Ben knew about this, of that Carlo was sure.
“Please, big brother. Please.”
With a sigh, Carlo sat back down. He’d helped raise this kid. In the first years after their mother died, when their father had been an empty husk who’d been able to work but nothing more, Carlo and Carmen had taken on the daily care and feeding of Joey and Rosa, the only kids still school-age. Joey had been fourteen then. Just on the cusp of figuring out how to be a man. Hell, maybe Carlo hadn’t taught him well enough. Their father had been lost, and John and Luca had been off doing their things, coping with their grief in their ways. It had been up to Carlo. Maybe he was to blame for the way he’d come up.
“Did you get a look at any of the guys who jumped you?”
“Yeah. Yeah. I know who they are. They hang around at the Port—they use a storage unit down there. They’re not organized. Just some shithead tweakers who caught me with my pants down.”
“You got rolled by a couple of skinny-ass tweakers?”
“Three. Not a couple. And those fucks are crazy strong when they’re fried.”
“You know ‘em, you know where they are, why don’t you take Donnie or somebody and get your cash back before it all goes in their heads?”
“Nobody in the company can know about this. Carlo, please. Help me.”
Sighing again, Carlo leaned back in the chair and wiped his hands over his face. “Okay. I’ll call Luca. Jesus, Joe.”
Tears leaked out of Joey’s swollen eyes. “Thank you, Carlo. I’ll make it up to you, I will.”
~oOo~
“It’s that one—E15.” Joey’s mouth was getting progressively mushier. Their next stop after this would have to be the ER, or at least a twenty-four-hour urgent care center.
Luca drove past the unit and parked his H3 in a dim corner, though the precaution, Carlo thought, was likely unnecessary. At an unattended storage facility with the broken gate left wide open, the security cameras were probably just for show. Still, better to be cautious. To that end, Luca tossed him a dark knit cap. “It’s the kind with a face mask. Cover our beards.”
He nodded and pulled the cap over his head and face. Luca and Hugh Quinn, their friend who owned the bar, with whom Luca shared a fighting history, did the same. Luca had called Hugh when they hadn’t been able to reach John. He was always ready for a fight. Clean-shaven Joey pulled his hoodie over his head, yanking it as far forward as it would go.
Luca turned and glared at their little brother. “Here.” He pulled a 9mm handgun from a holster under his seat and handed it to Joey. “Do. Not. Shoot. Unless you have no fucking choice. Use your brain, JoJo. Your brain. You can’t fight, so your job is to have our backs. But Jesus fuck, asshole, keep your head straight. Not only do we not want to kill anybody, but we’ll be in a room with cement walls. Don’t fire unless there’s no other choice. You got it?”
Joey looked pale beneath his bruises, and miserable with pain and shame. He nodded. “Yeah, Luc. I got it. I’m good.”
Just like old times. Well, except for the cut-rate ninja getup.
Carlo was a fucking architect, but here he was, preparing to skulk around through a shitty self-storage place, an aluminum baseball bat in his hands. His life had taken a bizarre series of turns in the past several weeks. He was losing his sense of direction. But at least this night had a weird sense of nostalgic familiarity.
Though he was the responsible, rational, levelheaded brother, he was also the oldest. Protection and defense of his siblings had been his responsibility since a little brat had pushed Carmen into the water when she was three and Carlo was five. When Luca came up, by nature physical and confrontational, Carlo had spent a few years getting his little brother out of scrapes. And then Luca had gotten bull-strong, and the two of them helped everybody else out of scrapes. John, though the quietest and gentlest of all the siblings, found a kind of manic fury when his family was hurt, and he joined in, too. By the time Joey and Rosa were in school, the substantially older Pagano boys had a fearsome reputation among the young people of the Cove, a reputation enhanced by, though not built on, the reputation of the Uncles.
It had driven Carmen utterly apeshit that nobody feared her the way they’d feared her brothers—especially when she was a teenager and even her younger brothers had gotten more respect than she had. She’d hated that because she was a girl, nobody thought to be afraid of her. But Carlo had eventually made her see that for the advantage it was. Nobody saw her coming. Carmen on the warpath was extra scary. Not because she was all that strong, but because she was wily. She didn’t need to throw punches or swing bats. She found other ways to make somebody pay. Nobody ever underestimated her twice.
It had been a long time since the Pagano boys had gathered together in premeditation to right a wrong. Now three of them, and Hugh, walked through the dark alleys between the storage buildings, returning on foot to E15. The roll-down overhead door was pulled to about six inches from the ground, and an a weakly golden light oozed under it. Luca went forward, turned back to check on the others, and then yanked the door up with both massive arms. It flew to the ceiling with an ear-crunching rattle and crash, and the tweakers—there were five of them, three men and two women—screamed and jumped.
They’d been having themselves one hell of a party, and Carlo knew that they wouldn’t be coming out of this with the full forty grand. But he didn’t have time to wonder if that meant this exercise was futile, because one of the tweakers, an emaciated, toothless guy with oozing sores over his face and arms, was facing Luca and reaching behind his back in a gesture that could only mean one thing, and Carlo charged, swinging the bat. Right behind him, Luca and Hugh let out war whoops in a wild harmony and flew into the fray.
~ 14 ~
“Hi, honey! You here for lunch or just a jolt?” Edith leaned an elbow on the pastry case and smiled warmly at Sabina as she crossed from the front door.
“Lunch today, thank you. I’m meeting Carmen, though. So I’ll sit, please, until she comes.”
Edith laughed. “Always so polite. Sure thing, honey. You don’t want a cup while you wait?”
Sabina shook her head. “No, thank you.”
The Cove Café was becoming one of Sabina’s favorite spots in Quiet Cove. Edith, the owner and one of only two workers Sabina had ever seen, was a plump older woman with tightly permed, light grey hair and always-rosy cheeks. She wore elastic-waist jeans and one of apparently dozens of Quiet Cove souvenir t-shirts she owned. She had a smile and a kind word for everyone who came in, whether she knew them or not, but Sabina felt a little proud that she had been in here enough to warrant a few extra lines of conversation from the happily busy woman.
The café was the kind of place to get a good cup of coffee—not too many frills, but for this heavily Italian town there was a busy espresso machine—and a small assortment of baked goods. They also had a limited menu, hung over the counter and spelled out in little black plastic letters, of sandwiches, salads, and a soup of the day. The décor was simple—white linoleum floor, white walls, white Formica tables. The chairs were a mixed bunch of old-fashioned vinyl sets, some in red, some green, some blue and white, one set of three with an image of a rooster on the chair backs and also on the seats. The café curtains in the window were white eyelet. And then, covering a majority of the wall surfaces, were photos of Quiet Cove—events in the town and on the beach, the sand, the water, the people, surfers, boats, sunbathers, shorebirds, sea animals, parades, picnics, parties. Some of the photos were obviously recent; others were faded by age and sun and showed beachgoers in swimwear fashions from days gone by.
Sabina didn’t mind waiting for Carmen; she enjoyed her little museum tour of Quiet Cove. She still hadn’t had a chance to look closely at all the hundreds of pictures on these walls. She thought maybe when she had, she’d really be home in this wonderful little town.
The day Carlo had gone back to Providence with Trey and Elsa, Sabina had gone into town to sell the ring Auberon had bound her with. Joey had told her there was a little pawnshop not far off the town square. Most of its stock was surfboards and elaborate fishing rods and other kinds of beach and ocean gear, but there was a case of jewelry, too, and Sabina had handed the canary diamond in its platinum setting to the small, thin man behind it. His eyes had gone wide before he’d masked his surprise with an affect of disdain. Then he’d taken out a jeweler’s loupe and studied the ring, and the surprise was back on his face. And then recognition; he’d known her from the media attention surrounding the disappearance and death. His eyes had gone avid, then.
He’d offered her $45,000 for the ring, and she’d taken it, even knowing that it was worth many times that amount. She didn’t know how to haggle, and she hadn’t wanted to. She’d just wanted the ring to be gone. He’d gone into a back room and brought out a few stacks of bound bills. $45,000 in cash.
Apparently it had been unusual, and dangerous, to receive so much in cash, and apparently she had been disrespected by not getti
ng more. When she’d shown Joey later, he’d been angry, with her and with the pawn man, and he’d wanted to ‘handle it,’ but she’d said no. The ring was gone, and she had some money, and all she wanted to do was to put it in the bank and start her life.
Footsteps Page 19
