“Are you infatuated?”
“I barely know her.”
“That wasn’t the question.” Remo turned to me, leaning his weight against the bars of the balcony. “Just wanna know the right head is getting the blood supply on this one.”
“Did I want to take her out when I first saw her? Yeah. Who wouldn’t? But as soon as I saw a way in, I tabled that.”
“Alright. Just checking.”
“How’s Dom doing?”
“Having the time of his life, it seems,” Remo said, smirking. “Though I think the pit boss has her eye on him. So we’ll see how that goes.”
“Anything else you need from me?”
“It’d be good if you could get yourself another invitation to a private game. But if that can’t happen, just keep a close eye on Monroe. I know you don’t know Frank like I do, but if he suspects her, shit gets bad, and it gets bad fast.”
With that, he turned and started to make his way down.
I checked out the view for just a second—since there was no way in hell I’d willingly do the steps again—before I followed.
We were maybe a third of the way down when someone else came into view—panting, red-faced.
“What the fuck?” he exploded as soon as he spotted Remo. “You said eleven.”
“Yeah, I sure said that,” Remo agreed, smile wicked.
“You’re a fucking asshole,” the guy snarled before turning and running back down.
“Let me guess,” I said when Remo glanced at me, “little brother?”
“How’d you know?”
“Because that’s the evil kind of shit my own brothers did to me growing up.”
“Eh, keeps things interesting,” Remo, who must have used the lighthouse for many a meeting because he seemed completely unaffected by the stairs, said as he kept going down.
“How many do you have? Brothers,” I clarified.
“There are five of us. That one was the baby, half-brother, obviously. My old man was never getting out. Ma… she needed some joy in her life. Ended up with a heartbreak and a baby when she was, shit, forty.
“He’s not even of age yet, but I got a call about him being drunk off his ass at a club last night. Naturally, he needed to do some stairs this morning as punishment.”
He didn’t say it, but I got the feeling Remo was a stand-in father figure for his siblings. Especially the younger one, since he probably would have been in his teens when he’d come along.
“I remember my brothers punishing me for the first time I got drunk, and high, so we didn’t have to involve my mom in that shit.”
“Yeah, we try not to involve our ma in any of that stupid shit. She’s got MS. Getting kind of advanced. Stress can make symptoms worse.”
“You don’t think finding out you guys are rebuilding a mob presence in AC is going to stress her out?”
“Nah. Since no one is gonna be telling her that.” At my silence, he glanced back and shrugged. “She’s in a nice little apartment with care. As far as she knows, I’m working on buying a casino. And that’s all she needs to know.”
“Can I ask something?”
“Shoot.”
“Where the hell is the money coming from?”
