Which meant this was another dead lead. I hung my head. My sister was out there somewhere, and none of these fucks knew anything.
My phone vibrated. One glance at the caller ID and my mood plummeted further. Giambrone refused to let up—four calls in two days.
I turned away from the scene and walked to the car. The distant city lights lit up the sky over the columns of scrapped vehicles.
“Wrap him up and keep him on ice. Intact,” I told my crew of ten, ignoring the call. “Then clean this up.”
“You want any particular message left behind, boss?” Massimo asked.
“No.” I handed off the murder weapon and then tossed him my soaked black gloves for disposal. “He was never here, and neither were we.”
Vinny and I slid into the back seat of a nondescript sedan without a word spoken, in case of bugs. I scanned through emails with suppliers and investors, rereading the same ones two, even three times, before finally turning the phone off. It was pointless tonight. My eyelids drooped, and a crick developed in my neck. Streetlights zoomed past, a never-ending pattern of light, dark, light, dark—kind of like my search for Persetta. I sighed and closed my eyes for the rest of the drive.
It didn’t take long to drop the car off at the nearest auto detail shop owned by the members of the outfit, where Jac and Tore were waiting to pick us up. Despite the late hour, the shop crew wasted no time taking the sedan in.
The sounds of the city hummed in the background—sirens, dogs barking, tire rubber burning from street races, and gates and fences rattling with the breeze. The city never truly slept. We slipped into Tore’s Cadillac, Vinny taking the front passenger seat next to Jac, while I relaxed in the back seat next to Tore.
“Well, that didn’t go as planned.” Vinny shut his door.
“No shit,” I muttered, staring at the hazy gray-blackness of the sky through the sunroof. “Fucking Stathis Dimakos.”
Jac pulled onto the freeway, headed for my home in Newport Beach for the night. The headlights from our bodyguards’ car trailed close behind.
“First, Elio kills the brother,” Tore said. “Now you kill him. This is going to be a problem.”
I nodded slowly. Considering Stathis was close with his cousin Ilias, it was likely. “Probably.”
Ilias Dimakos controlled a small part of Los Angeles as the head of its Greek mafia, but what made him a contending power was the large telecommunications company his family owned. He wasn’t a large figure in the underworld, but this would make him troublesome nonetheless.
“Fuck.” Vinny slammed his palm against the dashboard. “Fuck.”
I smirked with wry amusement at his rare loss of control.
“Let’s not worry just yet.”
“Dare we ask?” Tore questioned.
My father had been a cruel bastard, but far from dumb. He kept records, some written, most coded, on every transaction made that wasn’t noted in the declared accounting books. I read those journals back to front so many times for clues on what he’d done to my sister that I practically knew them by heart. Every favor transaction my father ever held was detailed in there. They were the kind of records any government agent would salivate to get their hands on.
“Alastor Dimakos’ death was planned by Ilias himself, owing Elio a favor for the execution,” I told them. “Seems the kid was talking to the pigs after Ilias carved Alastor’s girlfriend’s face up for calling his wife a whore.”
“That’ll do it,” Vinny said.
“Elio took the fall, on the condition that Ilias smooth it out internally.”
“Not enough with his cousin,” Tore added.
I nodded. “We might be looking at a war because of thatbuco del culo”—asshole—“if we can’t turn this around.”
“And nothing to show for it.”
I sighed, scratching at my empty palm.
“Any chance Dimakos will be willing to overlook this?” Jac asked.
A dark glance from my consigliere in the rearview mirror matched my exact thoughts.
The likelihood of that happening was practically nil. We Italians were known for our loud voices and expressive gestures, but the Greeks were known for their exceedingly strong family foundations. In the Cosa Nostra, the don made every life-and-death decision, but the Greeks prioritized family on another level. None of their leaders survived long if they were willing to do away with family. It was exactly why Ilias went through my father instead of handling his snitch directly. It also made Ilias manipulable.
