“I was sixteen,” I said. “Got picked up boosting cars off a lot in Newark. Stupid shit. Small-time. Judge decided I needed ‘structure.’ Dumped me into this teenage cage with a bunch of other idiots who thought they were invincible.”
“Miami was one of them?” she guessed.
“Yeah,” I said, smiling despite myself. “Except back then he wasn’t Miami. He was just this loud-mouthed kid from Florida who’d moved north with his mom. Wrong place, wrong friends, wrong everything. He’d gotten into it with some local crew. Cut one of them in a fight. Nothing fatal, but enough to make a statement.”
“Sounds about right,” she said.
“He was scrawny,” I said. “Big mouth. Bad haircut. First week he was there, he picked a fight with a kid twice his size over a deck of cards.”
“And lost?” she asked.
“Got his ass handed to him,” I said. “But he never shut up. Bled all over the floor, split lip, still talking shit. Nobody knew why. Nobody wanted to stand near him because trouble clung to him like smell.”
“But you did,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I did.”
I breathed out slow.
“He stole a pack of cigarettes off me,” I went on. “Didn’t even do it well. I caught him, put him up against a wall. He grinned at me with two busted teeth and said, ‘Knew you had that Jersey blood in you. You got that look like you think this place is beneath you.’”
“Was he wrong?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “That was the annoying part.”
She chuckled quietly.
“We ended up in the same bullshit anger management group. Same work detail. Same everything. We fought each other more than we fought anyone else. The staff hated us. But, the other kids stayed out of our way. We never made any kind of official pact, but by the time we got out, everyone knew that you didn’t go after one of us without dealing with both.”
“When’d he start calling you Jersey?” she asked.
“First night we talked about getting the hell out,” I said. “Really getting out. Not just going home to the same shit and pretending we’d changed. He said he wanted to go back to Miami someday. Own a bar. Sit on a beach. Be one of those guys who wears linen and pretends he’s classy while he’s drinking rotgut out of crystal.”
“Classy,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I told him he’d just get bored and end up starting fights with tourists. He laughed and said, ‘Fine. You be Jersey, I’ll be Miami. When I get my bar, you come visit. We’ll ruin it together.’”
My chest hurt.
“We never got to the bar part,” I said. “We got as far as Atlantic City. Cheaper lights, same kind of bullshit.”
“How’d you end up with the Aces?” she asked.
“Odd jobs,” I said. “We aged out of juvenile, went back to our respective ‘homes’ for all of fiveminutes before we realized those were just open-air cells, and bounced. Met up again in the city. Started doing security for off-book games. Running small packages. He knew a guy who knew a guy who occasionally needed muscle at a dock. Sometimes that guy was 8-Ball. Sometimes it was Blackjack.”
Her brows lifted. “So, you’d crossed paths with them before?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A few times. Simple shit. No colors. Just cash in hand and rules we were expected to follow.”
“And you did?” she asked.
“Most of them,” I said. “We impressed them enough not to get shot. That counted for something.”
I rubbed a hand over my face.
“One night,” I went on, “we got hired to watch the back room of a bar. High-stakes poker game. A couple of the guys at the table thought they were smarter than they were. Tried to rob the pot instead of playing it out. Pulled guns. Miami moved first. I moved with him. We disarmed two, knocked one out, kept one from shooting his own foot off.”
“And Blackjack saw,” she said.
