“Just the importance of it,” I assured him. “And I know it’s part of the…overall power play.”
Dear Old Dad was in the middle of the biggest power struggle of his lengthy, legendary career. As the don of our territory, Anthony Butera was always dealing with interlopers. “That’s the thing about power, Jonny,” he’d always say to me, a pricey smuggled cigar perched between his lips under a salt-and-pepper mustache, “every jamoke with a taste for it thinks he’s got the stones to handle it. Very, very few of them truly can.”
But if anyone besides my father was equipped to run the well-oiled machine of the underground, Robert Ferrara would be the one.
The ruthless bastard had been making grabs at Butera territory and clients for ages.
Though he still wasn’t as lauded as my dad, he had his own well-established circle of thugs and plenty of money to show for all of his efforts.
Things were heating up with every passing second.
It was a matter of time before it all boiled over.
“Must be something pretty valuable. Boss doesn’t usually meddle with something so…ostentatious.” Devin’s street smarts were legendary, which was what got him mixed up with the family in the first place. This assessment was appropriately astute.
A lanky older man started to ease past our table, and I recognized his receding hairline and greasy aura right away.
Yusef Black, a notorious weasel who always slipped away when the Buteras wanted to pin him to the wall.
He’d last been on the line for endangering one of the girls who worked the street nearest to one of the main Butera headquarters.
Uma made a lot of money on her back, but she helped us out with the occasional bit of information, too.
Yusef, after soliciting her services, had left poor Uma stranded two hours out of town, her phone dead, at a rest stop where other working girls had been assaulted one too many times.
She was damn resourceful in finding her way back, and her experience that particular evening told us all we needed to know about Yusef.
Principles mattered, even to those of us the rest of the world would consider unprincipled, and one of our rules: we didn’t fuck with women.
“Worth showing up if just for the PR of it,” I grumbled to Devin, clenching my jaw as I lifted my glass again. Just as my disdainfor Yusef was drifting away on another swig of barrel-aged fire, the most despicable motherfucker in this city rolled his way up to Alex’s side.
“Ernie,” I greeted, though I could only really see the top of his liverspotted bald head from my side of the table, since he was in a wheelchair.
Ernesto Simmons was an even lower piece of scum on the pile than Yusef Black as far as I was concerned.
One of the richest men in the country, with far more financial resources than moral ones, his near-sociopathic treatment of his three ex-wives was infamous.
The last two had died under mysterious circumstances.
Just his presence made me feel like I needed a long, hot shower.
“Hello, fellas,” Ernie said, his gravelly voice sending a shiver of disgust through me. “Jonathan. I’m surprised to see you here.”
“I’m not shocked to see you,” I shot back. “Seems like exactly the kind of flashy show you enjoy. When you’re not trying to hide things we all already know about, anyway.”
His wrinkled face went stony. “I’ll have you know I’m here on an invitation. A request from a very important man. Your father knows him. Fears him, I think.”
“You’re welcome to think that,” came Alex’s icy voice. “We all know who’s really running scared.”
There was no doubt in my mind the man he was talking about was Ferrara, which only added an additional wrinkle to this interaction. If Ernie was aligned with Ferrara now, the beast had just grown an extra head. And what did my father’s nemesiswant with this stupid auction, anyway? What reason did he have to be invested in Ernie’s presence here?
“Good luck in the bidding, gentlemen. You’ll need it.”
“Good luck surviving until the end of the night,” Devin grumbled quietly, and Alex gave a sardonic snort.
We didn’t have long to wait before the auction got started. Stolen goods, flashy acquisitions were up for grabs, and huge stacks of cash were earmarked for them with the flick of a wrist and the smack of the auctioneer’s gavel.
I dropped a pretty penny on an original sketch by an Italian master just to keep up the pretense that we were here for fun and not on any specific mission, and things were going smoothly despite the rising anticipation for our specific lot number to come on the docket.
