3
Paolo led Luis to the loaded trolley he’d wheeled out of the cash-and-carry. “Delivery didn’t come in, so I’ve got to hoof all this back to the cafe.”
“Where’s your car?”
“Don’t have one.”
Luis nodded as if a trolley stacked high with eggs, bacon, and sausages and no way of taking it anywhere made perfect sense. “It’s a long walk.”
“It is. I’m waiting for an Uber.”
“Oh.”
Paolo laughed. “Did you think we were gonna pack up like donkeys and walk?”
“You said hoof it. I took you literally.”
In another world, Luis Pope could’ve taken Paolo any way he wanted, but they weren’t in another world. They were in this one. The one where Paolo had just idiotically hired a gang banger to bus his tables and had been so eager to do so, he’d left the cash-and-carry store without packing his goods into bags.
Luis noticed his mistake first. He gestured to the bags hanging unused on the handle bars. “Want me to put this stuff in those?”
“If you want.”
Luis unhooked the bags and began loading them with packets of bacon and sausages. Paolo should’ve helped but stood back and watched instead, letting his gaze, and thoughts, run riot as Luis worked.
He looked exactly the same as he had yesterday, and yet Paolo could tell he was a different man. His first night of freedom had changed him, and Paolo wondered why. Luis hadn’t divulged what he was doing out and about at the crack of dawn, but the bedsit he’d revealed yesterday wasn’t far away. Perhaps he really had been out for a morning stroll.
Yeah, right. Suspicion warred with Toni’s wise words. Paolo joined Luis at the trolley and reached for the eggs. “Aren’t you going to ask me how much I’m going to pay you?”
Luis glanced up. He frowned, and confusion flashed in his eyes so briefly Paolo thought he’d imagined it. “Is it more than the dole?”
“I think it’s called universal credit these days, but yeah, it’ll be more than that.”
“Then I don’t care how much it is as long as I can pay my rent.”
“How much is your rent?”
“Six hundred quid.”
Paolo raised an eyebrow. That was cheap for the city.
“It’s subsidised,” Luis elaborated, clearly reading his mind. “Through the charity that works with the prison. I can only stay twelve months, though. Then I have to find somewhere else.”
Even in this shitty neighbourhood, he was going to struggle to find anywhere close to six hundred quid on the wage Paolo could afford to pay him, but Paolo figured he already knew that. Sky-high housing costs weren’t a new thing, though it likely wasn’t something Luis Pope had worried about when he was slinging drugs out of the Moss Farm tower blocks all those years ago.Ifthat was what he’d been doing. Back then, the Pope brothers had been feared for all kinds of things—drugs, knives, guns. Paolo had never been interested enough to care what was true.And I don’t care now.
They packed up the produce and the Uber car appeared to carry them the ten-minute drive back to the cafe. Time was getting on. Paolo had a lot to do before he opened the doors at six.
Inside, he directed Luis to the fridges to pack the meat products away. “Eggs go on the shelves in the back room. Don’t drop them. I haven’t got time to fetch any more.”
Luis didn’t answer, but Paolo was fast growing used to that. It was as if he only heard the things he wanted to and completely blocked out what he didn’t.All right for some.
Paolo flew around the cafe, thankful his grandparents had instilled in him the habit of closing down properly every night. Everything was where it should’ve been. Even the sauce bottles were full and ready.
He lit the grill and fired up the tea urn. Loaded the bread baskets and counted the float in the till. There wasn’t much there, fifty quid, maybe more. Pennies to most people, but with nursing home fees to pay, it meant the world to Paolo. What would he tell Toni if Luis turned out to be casing the place for his crew? If he came back tomorrow morning to find it all gone?
The ridiculousness of it left Paolo shaking his head. Of all the businesses the Moss Farm gang could turn over, Toni’s Cafe was hardly prize pickings. What were they going to do? Flog Formica tables from the back of their mopeds?
Not that any gang member with Luis’s standing rode a moped. Nah. The top boys cruised the streets in blacked-out Audis, there for all the world to see, and yet invisible at the same time. Sometimes they drove up and down the high street, slow and steady, music rumbling so deep it made the cafe windows shake. Paolo had never paid them much attention, but he couldn’t help wondering if they’d come looking for Luis one day.They’re not coming in my place. But the truth was, there was little Paolo could do to stop them, and more doubts swept over him, settling with the conflict already raging in his gut. Toni had counselled to give Luis a chance, and fate had crossed their paths twice since then. But what about common sense? What about the logic screaming that Luis Pope was nothing but trouble?
