“Aye, aye, Boss.”
“If and when you find him, you call me immediately. If he’s alive, don’t let him escape, but be very careful about trying to restrain him. That boy is precious to me. The most important thing. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, Boss. Loud and clear.”
I collapse back against the worn leather and hold the phone close to my chest. I am not a man who asks for favors from the man upstairs, but that night I get down on my fucking knees and beg.
Morning.Black coffee, greasy eggs, and bacon at a nearby diner because I’m fucking worried and I’m fucking pissed and fuck my heart-healthy diet. I smoke a cigarette too and then another. We hear nothing all day. Not a goddamned peep.
“The kid’s a ghost,” Joseph says. He looks like shit. All my men do, as do I. Our suits are rumpled, our hair a greasy mess. Nobody’s done more than take a power nap since yesterday morning.
I scroll through the pictures they sent me on my phone—buildings, street corners, bums, and hookers, just in case I might spot something that could be a clue. The battery on his phone won’t last for more than two days, and he didn’t take his charger. The first thing I’m going to do when I find him, is buy him a smart phone. Fuck that, I’m getting a goddamned microchip implanted into his skull.
I rub my temple because my head feels like it’s splitting in two. Stress and all the nitrates in the shit food I ate for breakfast will give me a migraine if I’m not careful. Giovanni’s always warning me about that, every time I come home looking haggard or whenever I’m tempted to order a cheeseburger instead of a salad. Christ, that kid cares about me. Why would he do this to me?
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I tell them. “You’re going to sleep in shifts. I want one of you on every street corner. I want enforcement brought in to interrogate the drug dealers. Promise them cash for information. Make it seem like Giovanni is someone we want to find because he stole something from me, and if that doesn’t work, I want you to rough up every goddamned hooligan and thug you come across until someone starts talking.”
Around noontime we get a lead. A two-bit hustler who made the mistake of admitting he sold Giovanni the drugs. My men bring him to a garage in Queens where we’ve temporarily set up shop.
“What’d he look like?” I ask the dealer who’s sitting in the chair we provided while I pace the cement floor in front of him. I’ll be nice until I can’t anymore.
“Dark hair, hoodie, young,” the man says, twitchy, like he’s on meth or coming off it. “Classy-like. Spoke real good.”
I glance down at the picture they circulated. You can’t tell the color of his eyes in it.
“What color were his eyes?” I ask. They’re his most striking feature, even in the dark.
“Green.”
“What kind of green?”
“Pretty… like the sea.”
I swallow and glare at the man, wanting very badly to put a bullet in his head.
“The big guy said there was a reward for giving you information,” he says.
“What’d you sell him?”
“Nothing.”
“Pezzo di merda.” I lunge at the man and grab him by his throat, tilting the chair so that it’s balanced on only two legs. “What’d you fucking sell him?”
“Heroin,” he chokes out. I release him and he rubs at his neck. “Fuck, man. They told me he stole from you.”
“How much heroin?” He looks at the ground. “Do you know who I am?” He nods, eyes arrowing up to meet mine. He fears me. He fucking should. “Then you know I’m not in the habit of repeating myself.”
“A lot.”
“What’d it cost him?”
“He offered.” The man tries to scoot his chair back, but Carmine stands behind him with two meaty hands planted firmly on his shoulders.
I lean into the man’s face, getting real personal, close enough to smell the sour rot on his breath. “What did you charge him for the heroin? And don’t you fucking lie to me because I know he didn’t have any money.”
“Sex.”
“What kind of sex? A blowjob?”
