He’s lying. I know by the way he smiles. “Noble cause, Uncle Tony.” I lean back against the shelves in his office, blocking the pictures of our family and the stupid trinkets he’s collected over the years. One photo is of me, Angelo, and Giana sitting at the restaurant that used to occupy this building, all of us slurping up mouthfuls of spaghetti. Angelo Fretolli was one of the best cooks I ever knew, authentic Italian food like you’d find in Italy. A real stand-up place until Tony turned it into what it is today.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve always been mafia. The Fretolli family was one of the five organized crime families that had control over New York. There were books and television shows about us in the early years. Back then, the family’s chief criminal enterprises included drug trafficking, labor rackets, extortion, loan-sharking, and gun running.
Nothing like what Tony has his hands in today.
Tony opens his mouth to say something and I cut him off, “But that’s not all he said, if you remember correctly.”
Tony holds a blank expression. He’s always been good at that.
“He said the Russians stopped working with you when you bought some kind of—” I chuckle and rub the back of my neck. See, Tony taught me how to lie as well as him. I shake my head, like it’s the most absurd thing that could ever pass through my lips. “What the fuck did he call it?” I snap my fingers. “Oh shit, yeah. He called it a bio-chemical weapon.” I make straight eye contact with him. “Like you bought a jar of fucking Anthrax or something—something so fucking crazy even the Russians didn’t want to deal with it.”
He rubs his hand over his mouth. The other guys in the room are silent and they’re watching this back and forth between us, and we’re talking like there’s nobody here but the two of us. “I got a tip on a new medicine. A new type of chemo. The FDA won’t approve it here.”
Piece of shit liar. “I knew it, I knew it had to be something that would change the world, Uncle Tony. You,” I say smiling so wide at him, it’s just about killing me inside, “You’re like a fucking hero. A real hero.”
“So,” Carlo says, “if this is what it is, why is someone executing all the made men in this family?”
“Is it one of the other territories? Should we go to the Commission with this?”
“The Commission,” Tony laughs. “There hasn’t been anything said between families. Jesus, they don’t even know what’s happening.”
“So who the hell is it?”
Tony shakes his head. “It’s got to be the Russians. They want to take over the club, those fucking assholes come in here every night to watch the girls.” Tony smiles at me again—a real smile. “Especially to watchyourgirl, Corrado.”
* * *
I’m watchingthe club with sixteen rounds of hate just waiting for someone to look at me cross to use it.
But nothing happens. Nobody who looks even remotely Russian walks in.
The club doesn’t get crowded. The only crazy thing that happens is Candy has too much to drink and somehow falls on her ass in front of a group of construction workers still dressed in their bright orange overalls.
I don’t even have to handle it. Felony is by her side immediately, scooping her up off the floor and scolding the men who didn’t help at all. I don’t know what she says to them, but the shame is clear as day on their faces, and when they leave there’s a two-hundred-dollar tip left on the table for each of them.
Two hundred dollars.
My fists clench and rage boils in my blood thinking about every asshole in this place putting a price tag on her. Two hundred is nothing, not when it comes to Felony.
I wish she just took the money I gave her and left. It would do my dick good not to see her dance. It’s not even the dancing, I get rock hard when she walks past in that worn-out, oversized men’s camouflage coat she wears.
Now when her sets come on, I make myself busy in the office. That’s where Tony finds me when he gets back from checking out Junior’s place. I may have been on my tenth game of Solitaire—but I don’t own up to it.
“What did you find?” I ask, sliding my phone back into my pocket.
“What did I find? What did I find,” he says, as he walks in and heads straight for the mini bar. He exhales a loud breath and pours himself a glass of whiskey and pulls up one of the chairs in front of his desk to sit on. “I found out that these people know their way around alarm systems.” He squints his eyes at me. “It looked like magic. There’s footage of Junior’s living room with an empty sofa with a half-eaten box of pepperoni pizza on his coffee table. Then the scene cuts to Junior. Decapitated.”
“What about the outside cameras? The doorbell camera?”
“We found nothing.” He pours more whiskey, swallows it back and repeats. “We did, however, find the rest of Junior’s body.”
“I’m not going to want to hear this, am I?”
Tony shrugs. He looks pale, and for the first time I’ve seen in my life, frightened. “He was propped on his bed, naked under his robe with his hand wrapped around part of his dick.”
“Part of his dick?”
“Yeah, the other part? Well, let’s just what we thought was a cigar in his mouth, wasn’t a cigar at all.”
