Simple Faith

by Susan Fanetti

  Instead, they’d acted on their own and risked igniting a war before Nick wanted to strike the match. He’d already made a strong move at the Bondaruks and won; pissing on their feet now would do nothing but ruffle what he’d made smooth.

  After he’d sent Trey and Lara to West Virginia and secured Lara’s father, Nick had gone for the Bondaruks straight on, right at their head, for Oleksander Bondaruk, and he’d pulled all the Council together behind him. It was a calculated strike to demonstrate decisively how outmatched the Ukrainians were against Nick Pagano and all the New England Families. He’d kinked their pipeline with a phone call and then stormed personally into Bondaruk headquarters, a tea room in northern New Jersey. Dropping Oleksander’s younger brother, Bohdan, bound and gagged, at his feet, and with soldiers from all the Council at his back, Nick had forced Bondaruk to hand over the men who’d taken Lara and pay a fifteen percent tax on their New England cocaine profits for three years. That was how he’d ‘forced a truce’—with one flex of his arm.

  One of the men who’d hurt Lara had been the Bondaruks’ nephew. But Oleksander had still given him up.

  Nick Pagano got what he wanted.

  But now, there was a Bondark bagman in Rhode Island who had to be dealt with, so that Berto and Sandy’s stupid display of hubris didn’t make a hash of Nick’s power play.

  His French cuffs neatly folded, Donnie opened a chipped metal cabinet and began to pull implements from it, arranging them across a well-used worktable: Blowtorch. Pliers. Needle-nose. Rasp. Chisel. Box cutter. Rubber tubing. And on.

  When Donnie had picked him up, Trey had known what would transpire in this warehouse tonight. But seeing the tools of it laid out so tidily, so calmly, he swallowed hard. Then Donnie, half of whose face had been melted into something like a Halloween mask, picked up the blowtorch.

  “He’ll talk.” Donnie set the torch alight. Trey noticed a slight flinch when the flame caught, but otherwise, the boss was steely cool.

  Trey swallowed hard and reminded himself that he was more than simply Trey Pagano. He was a Pagano man. This was what he wanted. He wanted to be at Nick’s side, and that meant he lived this life. Every part of it.

  Even this.

  ~oOo~

  The Bondaruk didn’t talk. He died in mid-scream, fifteen minutes after Donnie started in on him. A heart attack, most likely. Not that there would be an autopsy or a death certificate.

  They had his book, but, like all such books, it was written in code. Unlike most such books, this code looked like alien text, something out of science fiction. The corpse hanging from the shipping hook would be no help in deciphering that mess.

  It made Trey think of Lara, something he generally tried very hard not to do. But he had no doubt that Nick would bring this book to her and ask her to decode it, and he had no doubt she’d succeed. She was brilliant, and a search for patterns was more than simply her life’s work. It was her life.

  Brilliant, beautiful, and broken.

  He gave his head a hard shake and looked around. This night, this space, this deed was high among the reasons he needed to stop thinking about her and stay far away. She was too good for all this, too fragile for it.

  And yet, this deed had to do with her, in part. The Bondaruk attack on her had precipitated all of this, had put a mid-level Ukrainian bratva on Nick’s radar.

  The man who’d died here tonight hadn’t hurt her. But he was a Bondaruk man, so Trey had taken satisfaction in his pain. Donnie had inflicted all of it; Trey and the others had only watched. Nonetheless, Trey had felt a party to it.

  In his time with Nick, Trey had seen and done dark things. He’d seen men beaten and killed. He’d seen interrogations. He’d used his fists himself. He’d sailed out with Nick on his boat and helped dump canvas-wrapped bodies over the side. But he’d never seen a systematic torture before. He was sickened by it, but underneath that disgust was something else. The man hanging from that hook was a Bondaruk. He hadn’t been one who’d hurt Lara, but watching him suffer had given Trey a powerful sense of payback nonetheless.

  Under his disgust was satisfaction.

  “Trey.” Donnie called, and Trey closed the cabinet and went to him. Bobbo had taken the body off the hook, and Donnie stood over it.

  “Yeah, boss?”

  “What did you learn tonight?”

  He considered what the right answer should be. What had he learned? How skin bubbled before it blackened, how the layers curled as they broke apart, before they burned away. The way fat spilled out like yellowish curds from a slash through a belly. The way fear and pain turned the bowels to water, and the overpowering stench when they went loose.

  He gave the answer that was right because it was true: “This is messy work.”

  Donnie’s grin worked only on one side of his face. “Yes. It’s mess, and it’s work. Both things make it dangerous and easy to fuck up. Act calmly, do only what you must, and choose a scene you can control completely. Even there, leave no trace. Did you learn anything else?”

  “Sometimes it doesn’t work.” They’d gotten nothing from the Bondaruk.

  “Good. Sometimes they don’t talk because they’re tough bastards, or like tonight, because they’re weak. So we do this only when there is no better choice and when we’re prepared for it to end in a kill. Never torture anyone you don’t plan to kill. Let them think there’s hope, but know that the most likely end is a kill. A tortured man gone free is a dangerous loose end. Nick is the only one who ever makes that call. When he sends anyone else to do this work without him, he means it to be a kill.”

  Trey nodded; he understood.

  Donnie went to the sink and washed his hands—carefully, scrubbing each finger, all each beds, each cuticle, into the creases of his knuckles. When he was satisfied, he dried them on paper towels and folded down the cuffs of his shirt.

  “What else did you learn? About yourself?”

  That answer, he knew straight off. “I can do this.”

  “Good. Because next time, Trey, you don’t watch.”

  ~oOo~

  Less than twenty-four hours later, still feeling the humid stick of the warehouse and smelling the corporeal reek of the Bondaruk’s body like ghosts on his skin and in his head, Trey sat in a limousine with Nick, Donnie, Bev, and two other pretty women— Gina, Donnie’s comare, and Ashley, a girl Trey had been seeing casually for a couple of years. The men wore tuxedos; the women all wore elegant gowns.

  It was nights like this that really chafed the guys at the bottom of the chart, where Trey belonged as well. By any measure but his last name, Trey had no business in this limo, being treated to an elegant night out with the don, his wife, and his closest confidant. But it wasn’t the first time he’d been commanded to come along and to bring a date. It happened several times a year, and Trey had a few women he could call for a night out like this.

  But this night had particularly caught him by surprise, since it was Donnie’s night.

  For Donnie’s forty-fifth birthday, Nick and Bev had taken them all to dinner at Dominic’s, the best restaurant in the Cove, and then to Providence to see a touring performance of Giselle, a ballet, from the best box in the house. Donnie was deeply into classical music and ballet. Trey was not, but you didn’t turn down an invitation from Nick.

  He didn’t think Nick was into ballet, either, but the don liked to be seen doing normal things and enjoying himself with friends and family. A good portion of his business was legitimate, and he was influential in Rhode Island business and politics. He wanted to keep his good face in people’s minds.

  Trey liked Donnie a lot, and he admired him more. Not just for the ruthless, resolute ice he’d shown the night before, but that was part of it. Because Donnie wasn’t cold or ruthless. He was smart and a careful thinker but not afraid to act. And he was unfailingly loyal. Last night, he’d been who he’d needed to be to do what Nick needed him to do.

  Above all that, he was brave as hell. Since he’d been brutally tort
ured himself, he’d had a hard burden to carry through every day of his life, but he carried it without turning into either a hateful prick or a sad lump.

  When Trey was just a little kid, Donnie had had his face pressed to a commercial grill until the skin had burned almost clean off. The whole right side of his face, from his nose to his ear, and his hairline to his jaw, was a shiny-smooth quilt of skin grafts. His right eye only opened about halfway, and the right side of his mouth barely moved. He had only one nostril, because the right side of his nose had melted away, and surgical attempts to rebuild it had failed. His hairline on that side was compromised, too; no hair would grow from his ear forward. He hadn’t shaved his head entirely, though, and kept a tight buzz of greying hair wherever it would grow—on the left, top, and around the back. He even wore a beard on the side of his face that would grow one.

  The left side was unscarred, though the years since his injury had carved somber lines. Come upon him in profile, on the left, and you’d see that he’d had, before his injury, a wide-eyed kind of good looks that women often called ‘beautiful.’ Now, he was known, among most of the organization and throughout the underworld, as The Face.

  But not to Nick, or Bev, and never in their hearing.

  He always had a comare, always a young, pretty woman, because he was the underboss of the Pagano Brothers and a wealthy and powerful man, and wealthy and powerful men attracted young, pretty women, regardless of their own looks. But as long as Trey had known him, he’d never had the same woman for more than a year, at the outside.

  He’d been hurt while on duty protecting Bev—not a torture for information or even retaliation, only for pain, for a message to Nick. Bev had been badly hurt, too, in that attack, after her guards had been neutralized. Trey didn’t know all the details, it was long before his time, but he was sure Nick’s lingering guilt for what had happened to his wife all those years ago had shaped his relationship with Lara Dumas and the way he’d responded to the attack on her.

  Denys Tataryn, the Bondaruks’ nephew, and two other men had taken Lara and held her for six hours. That was all Trey knew about that, and it was all he wanted to know. He could fill in the rest. Nick had made them pay and dropped what was left of them into the ocean. A strong reaction to avenge a wrong done to one of his contractors, but that contractor was a woman, a fragile woman, and more than Nick’s sense of justice had been in play.

  Sitting beside Trey, Ashley ran her hand up his thigh. “Hey, you. Did you go anywhere interesting?”

  He blinked and focused on her. She was hot as hell—long brown hair, big brown eyes, a body for days, and she knew how to dress to show it off. He’d met her running on the beach the summer before last, and he’d taught her to surf.

  “Please?”

  She smiled. “You were far away. Was it somewhere nice?”

  His brain had locked onto Lara Dumas and was having trouble shifting gears to Ashley Clemmons. He didn’t understand what she was asking. “I’m sorry, what?”

  Nick chuckled. “I think Ashley is gently telling you that you’ve been a neglectful companion tonight.”

  Ashley dipped her head; Nick still made her nervous.

  He lifted his arm and tucked her inside it. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”

  Donnie laughed in his quiet way. “We’re working him too hard, Nick. Maybe he needs some easier jobs.”

  Nick gave him an amused but probing look. “You’ve been distracted lately, it’s true. Are we expecting too much for you?”

  Trey knew they were joking, but he defended himself anyway. “No, I’m good, I’m all set.” He turned to Ashley. “Have I been neglecting you all night?”

  She smiled prettily. “No. But you have been a little distracted. It’s okay.”

  He leaned close and kissed her. “I’m sorry.”

  “You can make it up to me soon,” she purred.

  ~oOo~

  As usual on nights like this, the limo dropped them off at Pagano Brothers Shipping, and Donnie and Gina, and Trey and Ashley, went their separate ways. Trey drove Ashley to her Narragansett apartment and parked his Audi in the lot. He’d been raised by a whole herd of traditional Italian men to treat women a certain way, and while he wouldn’t have called himself a traditionalist, some training was hard to break. Besides, women seemed to dig it. So he opened the passenger door for Ashley, helped her out, and walked her to her door.

  He knew she expected him to come in. There was no reason he shouldn’t; he always had before. But he knew, as he set his hand on the small of her back and led her up the little walk, that he was leaving her here at her door.

  She turned before she unlocked it and leaned against the frame, hooking her fingers into the waistband of his trousers. He didn’t wear a cummerbund with his tux because he wasn’t a Mariachi singer or a waiter for a catering service, but he did wear suspenders instead of a belt with it, because he liked that look. Suspenders were slick with a tux.

  Why wasn’t he going in with Ashley? They’d been fucking on and off for two years. She was hot, and she wanted him, and she was leaning back in that slinky gold dress, her full breasts swelling up from the neckline. He hadn’t had a woman in more than two months. With her fingers in his waistband, she pulled him close, and he went, trying to get into it, setting his hand on the door and leaning down to capture her lips. Red lipstick. He set his free hand on her hip and leaned closer, deepening his exploration of her mouth. She arched against him, and her hands slid up his chest, over his shoulders, into his hair. Her polished nails—matching red—scratched over his scalp. The strong, spicy scent of her cologne enveloped him, made him lightheaded.

  But he wasn’t hard. At all. He did not want to take this woman—who was a very good lay, with a firm, athletic, flexible body—to bed.

  He ended the kiss and leaned back to give them both some breathing room. “I’m gonna say good night here, Ash.”

  “I can tell.” Under the bright beam of her door light, her eyes sharpened and examined him. “I know I’m not your only. I’ve always known. You’re not mine, either.”

  “I know. It’s fine.”

  “There was a time, not that long ago, that I thought I wanted to be your only. Around Christmas, when we were seeing each other almost every week. But this is the first time you’ve taken me out in weeks, and you’ve been thinking about something else all night. Or someone else. Is that it?”

  Lara’s name and face immediately leapt to the fore of his mind, but he shook his head. “Please? No. It’s not that.”

  “Because that’s not cool. Sharing you, that’s the deal, that’s what we’ve had going, so okay. But not while you’re with me, Trey. That’s just … rude.”

  “I’m not thinking about anybody else. I’m just tired.”

  “Tonight, maybe. But where have you been since, like, March? Somebody else obviously has your full attention.” She cleared her throat, and looked away, and Trey understood that her feelings were hurt. She was trying to be cool about it, but he was hurting her.

  Surprised, he couldn’t work out what to say. He played back what she’d said a moment earlier. There was a time I wanted to be your only. Shit. That had never been on his mind.

  She pushed him back and stood straight up. “You’re a good guy, Trey. But lately, you make me feel like shit. Let’s just … stop this. Whatever we’ve been doing. Or not doing.”

  “I’m sorry, Ash. I really am.”

  “I know. It’d be easier if you weren’t so great. I don’t know who it is that has your whole interest, but she’s lucky. I’m not mad. I just need to close this book, okay?” Her smile was sad, and he felt like an asshole. Again.

  “Okay.” He’d already apologized, so he didn’t know what more to say.

  She let him kiss her cheek, and he stepped back and waited until she was in her apartment with the door locked.

  Then he walked alone back to his car and drove home. Alone.

  ~ 12 ~

  Lara had bought her apa
rtment when she was twenty-six years old. Two years after she’d begun working for Nick Pagano, one year after that occasional work became a retainer. He paid her very well to be available to him when he needed it. The work he gave her was often banal, sometimes interesting, and occasionally truly fascinating.

  She’d devised a system of shifting codes for his own information, and devised new ones occasionally to keep the encryption fresh. Using those codes to encrypt his data was her most common, and banal, assignment. Devising new codes and decrypting data he’d acquired was interesting work. The fascinating work came when she decrypted dangerous data. She felt like a spy in a novel. That didn’t happen often, however. Mostly, she protected his data.

  And he had very sensitive data to protect, from people with cryptologists almost as skilled as she. Even her banal work was critically important to Nick and his business. And his life.

  Her father had worked for Nick as long as he’d been don, and he’d worked for Nick’s uncle, Ben Pagano, the first don, before that. His work was to invest and obscure Pagano Brothers resources, to legitimize Nick’s fortune, which went far deeper than simply laundering his illicit profits—and, since she’d been brought on, to be the face of Lara’s work. He used the codes and software she devised. But he knew only about half of the information his keystrokes concealed. He, too, was very well paid.

  Over the course of the eight years Lara had been on retainer with Pagano Brothers Shipping, she averaged an aggregate of about three full-time months of work each year. The rest of her time was her own. He paid her well not only for her skill, but for her silence.

  Her loyalty, she gave him for free.

  At this point in her life, after what had happened outside The Ground Floor—after she had been raped and beaten and burned and thrown away, it was important to acknowledge it fully and not hide behind vague notions—only one man in the world knew everything about her. Only Nick Pagano.