He studied her. That wasn’t a hard conclusion to reach. “I have enemies,” he said as if it went without saying. “If I don’t stop them now, to send a message, I never will stop them.”
That wasn’t Roz’s real question. She knew it was an obvious assumption too. She decided to ask her real question. “You’re going to your office now or what?”
“I’m on a leave of absence at Sinatra Industries. They know not to expect me any time soon.”
“So where are you headed? You’re going to see Cleopatra now?” That was her real question.
Mick knew it too. He knew Roz like he knew the back of his hand. “Yes.”
Roz decided to test hisI’m a new mandeclaration, because she’d heard that declaration before. “Can I go with you?” she asked him.
Mick didn’t expect her to ask him that. And normally his answer would be a hard no. But if he never changed, when was he ever going to change? “Yes,” he answered her.
“But I thought you meant what you said about . . .” Roz looked at him. “You saidyes?”
“I said yes,” Mick responded.
Roz hopped her naked body out of that bed so fast it almost gave Mick whiplash.
“I’ll take a quick shower,” she said as she began hurrying for the bathroom. “Give me twenty minutes. That’s all I need!” She closed the bathroom door behind her.
Mick smiled. It didn’t take much to make Roz happy. “Take your time,” he said to her. But he purposely said it too low for her to hear him. He loved her, but she was notorious for always running late.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“I wanna be just like Daddy when I grow up,” Duke said jokingly as he sat at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal.
His twin sister Jackie, along with Marco, who was actually their nephew although he was older than them, were seated at the table too.
Marco was drinking a cup of coffee, with his legs crossed, and strolling through messages on his phone. Jackie was eating cereal, too, and answering messages on her phone. Neither looked at Duke.
Mick was already downstairs and had just entered the kitchen area as Duke was speaking. He saw the twins and Marco seated at the table. None of them noticed him. He leaned against the arched doorway that led into the kitchen, folded his arms, and watched and listened.
“Y’all heard me?” Duke asked them again. “I said I wanna be just like Daddy when I grow up.”
Mick stood still. Duke thought the gangster life was still the cool life, even after what he endured in Fangen. Roz was once again trying frantically to disabuse him of any such thoughts. She even asked Tony Sinatra, Big Daddy’s second-oldest son and a trained clinical psychologist, to intervene with therapy. Was it working?
Mick saw when Jackie finally looked up from her phone and gave her brother the attention he apparently craved. “Why do you wanna be just like Daddy? I’m sure there’s a perfectly ridiculous reason why or you wouldn’t have repeated it.”
Jackie went through more phases in her life than any of his other children ever did. Now she was going through hereducated girlphase. The only phase she’d ever been through that pleased Mick.
But when Duke didn’t answer his sister, probably because it was such a nice-nasty response, Mick thought, then Marco asked the question himself. “Duke, why do you wanna be like Big Pop when you grow up?”
“Because.”
“See what I mean?” Jackie said to Marco. “He always starts something and then plays a game to get you more engaged than you ever wanted to be.” Then she looked at her brother. He was annoying to her, but they were still thick as thieves. “Because why, Duke?”
“Because I wanna get shot six times and still be able to put it on my wife the way Daddy’s been putting on Mommy all month long.”
Mick was stunned that Duke would even know what he and Roz were doing in the privacy of their own wing.
But Marco laughed out loud, not expecting that answer, and then he leaned over and fist-bumped Duke. Jackie shook her head. “Both of you are disgusting!” she said.
“Disgusting how? He’s just stating a natural fact, Jacqueline,” Marco said as he plopped back down in his chair. “Big Pop knows how to make all them bitches lay it low and spread it wide. I wanna be just like him when I grow up too.”
“I thought you wanted to be like Teddy,” Jackie remembered.
“Pop too,” said Marco. “I’m proud to be Teddy T’s son. He’s a workhorse who puts respect on that name. I ain’t mad at him. But Big Pop? Now he’s the man. Ain’t nobody like him. He got what it takes coming and going.”
