The Blood of Saints (Tom Connelly Book 2)

by Nick Dorsey

  “Shit. Is it ten already?”

  “Not for a few hours.”

  “Then what the hell are you doing here?” Ray swung his feet off the stretcher and cleared his throat. “Shouldn’t you be somewhere kicking out some underage kids?” Ray covered his eyes. “Damn, dude. Your jacket is like a tiny sun.”

  Tom looked down at his gold sport coat. “Too bright?”

  “Reflects everything. You’re blinding me.”

  Tom crossed his arms. “I’m not staying. I’m not feeling well. I need a doctor’s note.”

  Ray blew a dismissive raspberry. “You know, Tom, it doesn’t work like that. I’m here for serious shit.”

  “I’m sick. Really. And management will take your word for it.”

  “You been sick the past few weeks.”

  “I guess it’s been going around.”

  “Usually a cold only hits a person once, then moves on.”

  “I guess I got one of those vindictive colds.”

  The medic held his hands up and moved to a counter. “Okay, okay. You want to play hooky, that’s fine by me.”

  “I’m just going to go home and crash.”

  “Shit. Alright, man. I’ma do you a solid right now, because your chess game is weak and I feel sorry for you.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “But you know you only get better when you play.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay. Next shift, we play.”

  “Yeah.”

  Ray scribbled something on a notepad. “How’s the game with your kid? He still kicking your ass?”

  Tom leaned against the wall of the office and cursed to himself. He hadn’t checked the game in a while. “It’s been a day or so. But yeah.”

  Ray handed over the slip of paper. “I guess if you give them this, the teacher sends you home?”

  “I’m hoping.”

  Ray gave him a mock salute. As Tom left, he decided to check his phone and see what moves Dennis had made in their game. His phone’s battery was dead.

  Tom forgot to go home. In fact, once he left the casino he forgot all about being sick.

  He was still thinking about what Jean told him over yaka mein. How she believed him but had to move on.

  She had to move on. But Tom didn’t.

  He thought about going to a meeting on Jeff Davis. But that wouldn’t quite do. Not right then. Instead, he drove down Metairie Road to the Pan Dell’Orso. He didn’t go to the meeting because this wasn’t like drinking. Not exactly. Before, at the pre-dawn meeting, he told them all about the booze and the rift it had torn between him and his family. He hadn’t talked about his other addiction. The one that the booze helped to dull, but never fully replaced. The need to know a thing that wasn’t known, the need to uncover something others wanted to keep hidden. It wasn’t something the smokehounds would understand in any real way. It was too specific, too limited to those in his peculiar line of work. It wasn’t something he could easily put into words. And it wasn’t something he could quit cold-turkey.

  The parking lot for the Pan was nearly empty, so Tom drove past it and pulled into the mechanic’s lot where he had waited with Patton. He killed his lights and watched the building. He left the radio on and leaned back. He hoped he was right, and that Dominic or Nino was in there. Sal might have been the boss, but if something needed to be done, one of those guys would be involved directly. Everything about what he had seen over the past few days told him that.

  Did one of them kill Ernesto Adelfi? He wasn’t willing to go out on that limb. But he bet one of them knew who did. Tom felt good. On a job, even if it wasn’t a job anymore.

  He felt good.

  He woke up without realizing he had been asleep. A car rumbling down the street must have woken him up. Tom peered out of the window. He hoped he hadn’t missed one of his guys. No, there was Dominic in his tux leaving by the front door and checking his watch. Tom glanced at his clock. Nearly midnight. Not sleeping was catching up with him.

  Dominic got into a dark sedan and started driving toward the city. After a beat, Tom cranked his Taurus to life and followed.

  Cool air rushed into the car from Tom’s open window. The air smelled damp but it wasn’t raining yet. He followed Dominic Uptown, down the expanse of Napoleon Avenue and past the oaks spreading over Saint Charles.

  The apartment building looked out of place, a stone cube surrounded by old New Orleans homes with wide front porches held up by wooden columns. Quick cash stuck in the middle of all that old money. Tom parked on the street and watched Dominic go inside. He wrote down the address and sat there in his idling car. He could go inside and talk to the guy. That was the most straightforward approach. Hi Dom, I’ve seen you a couple times now and I think you know something about the dead Adelfi guy. Want to talk?

  And how would Dominic react to that conversation? Odds were he wouldn’t be happy to see him. Tom hadn’t told anyone where he would be, and now his phone was dead. So he was on his own. And he didn’t carry a weapon anymore.

  What were his other options? He couldn’t just follow the guy around all day and all night.

  Dominic solved the problem for Tom ten minutes later. He walked out of the apartment ready for a night on the town. His hair was slicked back and he was wearing a leather jacket. Not only that, but he had a new accessory: a tall blonde woman on his arm.

  Tom sat up and cursed. For a moment, his whole world shifted. Reality became an uncertain thing, reminiscent of his worst drinking bouts. How could he have been so wrong? Because either he was wrong or Jean was. Or something monumental had happened with the case over the last few hours.

  Tom rolled his window down to get a clearer look at the couple. Dominic walked her to a light-colored SUV and opened the door for her, and then she was gone.

  But there was no doubt in Tom’s mind.

  The woman on his arm had been Sofia Adelfi.

  C HAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Dominic Barese woke up Friday morning with not too bad a hangover, which was surprising. He was taking shots at the end of the previous night with some friends and Erika had to drive his drunk ass home from Balcony Bar. He didn’t think he did anything embarrassing. More importantly, he didn’t think he had talked out of school.

  His knees popped when he stretched them out over the side of the bed. He got up and used the bathroom. The room tilted with him as he stood over the toilet, signaling that maybe the worst of the hangover was yet to come. He took a handful of aspirin and a tall glass of water and hoped for the best.

  It was still early but he decided not to go back to sleep. He kept the lights off as he got dressed. He didn’t need the light burning a hole in his brain this early and besides, he didn’t want to wake Erika. She looked good like this, quiet and calm, the length of her stretched across the bed with her hair spread out all over the pillow.

  Not for the first time, he thought about how much she looked like Sofia Adelfi. She had a different nose, of course. Erika’s was a little bigger. Her lips were a little fuller, too. But still, anybody could see the similarities. If he was being honest, Dominic would say the likeness was what attracted him to Erika in the first place.

  He sat on the edge of the bed to put his shoes on, the new Magnanni loafers that Sal wouldn’t like but forget it. They looked good with his brown coat.

  The bed squeaked as he put his foot down to slip his heel into the shoe, and Erika turned over. “You should come back to bed.”

  “I got to make the rounds.”

  “Already?”

  “Yeah”. Dominic kissed her and she took hold of his shoulders.

  “You feel okay?” She said. He could smell the stale beer on her breath. He kissed her again anyway.

  “Shouldn’t have had the last shot of Fernet, but yeah I’m okay.”

  She gave him a little wave and collapsed back into the pillow. “Have a good day at work, baby.”

  He put on his Boss coat and left her in the dark.

  Do
minic had never been into the Boulangerie but he had heard good things about it. Only from Nino, that prick, but it was early and he was hungover. Coffee sounded okay. Once inside he cut his eyes against the light. It was wider than he thought, not the little neighborhood place he had expected, and the place was packed. The menu had names for types of coffee he had never heard of before. A cortado. What was a cortado? Fuck it. He ordered one of those and a blueberry muffin from a guy with an undercut and a bar through his nose.

  “And let me get the almond milk.”

  “Okay, it’s a dollar extra.”

  Dominic sneered at the guy. “What, so? Just give me the almond milk.” What was a dollar? Could the guy not see Dominic’s coat? His shoes? He could afford it.

  He got the muffin in a paper bag and his cortado in what looked like half a dixie cup. He waved the cup at the barista. “That’s it?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s a cortado.” The guy barely looked up, he was behind the espresso machine pulling shots or steaming milk or something. Dominic thought the guy should have said something, like a cortado meant half a cup of coffee, but he let it slide. He pushed open the door right as somebody was pulling it open.

  Shit.

  Nino grinned at him, standing there in his JCPenney suit with his hair parted down the middle. He had probably been doing that for ten years. Nino extended a hand and Dominic shook it.

  “You okay? You like this place?” Nino waved to the pastry case. “A girl I was seeing liked those croissants.”

  “I don’t know yet. Not really.” Dominic held up his cortado, showing Nino how stingy they were with the coffee.

  Nino didn’t get it. “We’re gonna be early. You want to sit for a minute?”

  Dominic wondered what that meant. He always had to look for little hidden motives when he spoke to Nino. Nino was a guy on the rise, anybody could see that. He was pretty smart, Dominic thought, but he was always scheming. He always had a plan for something. The light in the place was getting to Dominic all of a sudden. He didn’t think he could listen to Nino talk all morning. “I gotta go.”

  “Alright, see you at the Pan, okay?”

  As he left, Dominic heard the guy behind the counter, the one with the bar through his nose, say, “Nino, I got your mocha coming up. Let me warm up a scone for you. How’s your morning?”

  “Thanks, Jerry. I’m okay, how are you?”

  Dominic shook his head and let the door shut behind him. Christ. Nino even knew the coffee people. What an asshole.

  Traffic was already getting bad so Dominic tried a scenic route, taking his Lexus past all those fancy shops on Magazine Street and onto River Road, with the levee looming up on his left.

  He sipped his cortado and grimaced. The cup was empty. Nino would like a place that serves you half a cup of coffee. He was always strange like that. Didn’t dress worth shit, but he wanted to know the new places to go eat or see a show. He wouldn’t pay for Armani but he would eat at places that only gave you three bites of steak for fifty dollars or charged you an extra dollar for almond milk.

  Dominic would never tell Nino, but yeah, he liked his cortado. He could take Erika there. Tell her that he had discovered it.

  He took the back way to the Pan Dell’Orso, flying over the Causeway to Airline. No morning traffic in this direction, everybody was trying to get to the city. Dominic was going against the grain.

  Nino. He was on the same level as Dominic, but somehow people-like Sal-saw him as up and coming. A mover. Maybe it was because he was from Palermo originally, which the older guys liked. He moved to Louisiana when he was a kid. In everything else, he was just like Dominic. He had a straight check coming from the docks like Dominic used to. They both did that thing with the Afghans after the storm and started bringing in hash and opium and all sorts of weird shit. They had never been friends but they had been down there together. Only after that went bad and the Afghans tried to squeeze them out, it was Nino who muscled up and took care of the whole business. That was when he got a leg up, Dominic thought. So he got brought in closer while Dominic was still making sure those shipping containers didn’t have anything interesting in them, making sure nobody but them touched the dope. Now Nino was running the game room. Dominic wasn’t at the dock, at least. But being an errand boy at the restaurant hadn’t been great.

  Now Ernesto Adelfi was dead, and Sal needed somebody to step up. Of course, Nino probably saw the play.

  He just didn’t know Dominic was already making moves.

  Which was why he was up early. Maybe he could convince Sal that he should drive him today, bend his ear. Dominic had business ideas, too. With all the movie people in New Orleans for the last couple of years, since before the storm, really, his little coke side-business had started churning. They could expand that into other markets. He could also be forward-thinking. Take a crate of spice, the synthetic weed, and he could move it through the club with Erika. He had been doing research and learned all about the fake pot. It was something like a molecule off, slightly different from the real thing and it didn’t quite have the same effects as marijuana, but people didn’t care. It was new, it fucked you up, and the government didn’t want you to do it. Which meant it must be good. It was still legal but Dominic didn’t see how that could last. He could make a bundle hoarding the shit and selling it off down the line when the state started regulating it. Dominic was full of good ideas like that, and that was just the side hustle aspect. He had ideas for the restaurant, too. Like get one of those new chefs in there, or even a guy off the TV, and have him redo the menu. Goddamn eggplant parmesan was a million years old. The Pan didn’t serve anything new or interesting. That’s why every customer in the place got a senior discount. That was one thing Dominic knew that Nino didn’t know. One thing he learned in the past year. The restaurant job was the one you wanted. Not as flashy, maybe not as down and dirty as the game room, but the Pan was where decisions were made. That’s why Ernesto ran it. Did he ever go collect? No. He would drop in, oversee some things now and then. But most of the time he was sitting at the Pan with Sal, drinking espresso and making deals.

  That was one good thing with making the rounds with Sal. Sometimes you felt like a chauffeur, but other times he would ask questions. Ask your opinions. Maybe throw you something interesting. That’s how you moved up in the world. You see an opportunity, you exploit it. If an opportunity doesn’t exist, then you make one. That’s the way things worked. Even if making the opportunity happen means you have to do a few things you would rather not do. Take things a bit more seriously. Make some hard decisions.

  Dominic had to make them, though. If he ever wanted to be more than a glorified waiter, he had to make the hard choices.

  Erika had actually told him that, but he guessed he knew it all along. This was a few months ago, right before Christmas. They were at his apartment getting ready to go out with her friends from the club. She was a dancer, not a stripper but burlesque. It was a lot like stripping, only there were more acrobatics and less shaking her ass in somebody’s face. The club where she worked was having some sort of Christmas party. She was wearing a green leather thing which didn’t amount to a whole lot, but Dominic was done telling her how to dress. It was her club, anyway. Everybody there had seen all they were going to see.

  They were about to leave when she looked him over and started to take off his tie. “That’s too much.”

  “I might need to go to work later.”

  “The restaurant?”

  “The game room. Holidays are busy. Fuckin’ Ernie said I’m on call.”

  “Oh, you’re on call now. Like a doctor?”

  “Yeah. Like a doctor.”

  She tossed the tie on the bed. “There you go. Now you don’t look like you’re going to church. Wait.” She unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. “Okay. Better.”

  “I’m bringing it, in case.” He grabbed the tie and folded it into a pocket.

  “Alright. Dom? There’s a guy that’s gonna be t
here that I should talk to. He’s a drummer in Emily’s band.”

  “The lesbian?”

  “Yeah. But he’s moved into that Musicians Village with all the cute pink houses. He says he can get us on a list.”

  “For a house?”

  She moved close to him and smiled. She was a little taller than Dominic, and he liked that about her. He liked that she was tall and blonde, just like Ernie’s wife, only Erika was younger. Smarter, too. And she didn’t have that dumb accent that Sofia Adelfi had.

  Dominic said, “You want to live over there in the Ninth Ward? Really?”

  “I want to live in a Brad Pitt house.”

  Holy shit, not this again. “I thought that was another thing. His thing is the Make It Right homes for people who lost their houses. The Musician’s Village is another thing.” The actor came to the city after the storm and started some sort of charity setting up homes for the poor, but Dominic didn’t think they’d last. They’d probably blow right over next hurricane season.

  “Whatever. We could get a nice new little house.”

  “And I thought they were for musicians?”

  “And artists. And I’m acting now along with the dancing, that’s a type of art. I almost got to play Ophelia in Shakespeare in the Park.”

  “Right.” Dominic balled up his tie and stuffed it in his pocket. “I can’t go in on a house right now.”

  “But you’ve been at the restaurant for so long. Isn’t it time for a promotion?”

  “It doesn’t work like that.” Dominic sat on the bed and grabbed Erika by her leather hips. She pouted but walked into him. He looked up at her and said, “It’s gonna take some time.”

  She pulled away from him. “Alright. That’s fine.”

  “Come on, don’t be like that.”

  “I’m not being like anything.”

  “We’re together, right? Together forever?”

  She pursed her lips, obviously not okay with the way the evening was going, but she nodded. “It’s getting late. We should go.”