by Harley Stone
“I do have to. My boss asked me to, remember?”
His answer reminded me our ride was just part of his job, which upset me for some strange reason. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but the disappointment stung. “Oh, yeah. Fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I reached for the doorknob, but he got to it first, his hand freezing midturn. “Does that piss you off?” he asked, humor sparkling in his eyes as he watched me.
“No. I don’t know. It shouldn’t.” I really wanted to get past him and into the comfort of my house.
His lips twitched like he was fighting off a smile, which actually did piss me off. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, opening the door for me.
“Whatever,” I said, stepping past him and into the house, where I caught Papa peeking through the blinds.
When the door closed behind me, he asked, “Who brought you home?”
I rolled my eyes. “He’s nobody, Papa. Just one of the security guys from work.”
Papa’s eyebrows rose. “Nice car. They must pay their security well.”
“Yeah.” Too confused about Dominico to discuss him, I waved Papa off. “But don’t you want to hear about my first day?”
He smiled and stepped away from the window to hug me. “Of course, luce dei miei occhi. How did it go?”
Thankful for his willingness to let all talk of that frustrating security guard drop, I gave him a full rundown on my day while I made us a snack, shoving Dominico and his flashy car firmly from my thoughts.
CHAPTER SIX
Dominico
AFTER I DROPPED Annetta’s sweet ass off at her house, I headed to the casino for a meeting with Carlo. Taking my seat beside Michael, I waited as a few more soldiers from Carlo’s team filed in.
When Carlo entered, he brought us up to speed on the details of the attack. Then Michael stood and gave everyone a rundown on what we’d found out about Chains before Carlo took over again.
“If you’re on a job, I want you to continue it,” he said, leaning against his desk. “We need to keep money flowing in, but every single one of you needs to be on the lookout for this stronzo, this bastard, and I want to know the instant you get eyes on him. Also, we know he didn’t act alone. We need to pull him in alive, so we can pinch him for information on the rest of his crew and make him rat out his employer. They won’t get away with this. Not a goddamn one of ’em.”
Carlo released the team, but told me and Michael to hang back. Once his office cleared, he sat us back down and reminded us of our duty.
“Regardless of who finds Chains and his gang, your father wants you two to handle this,” he said. “He wants you to make this asshole squeal like a pig.”
Michael nodded, his expression guarded. “I figured as much.”
I had, too, unfortunately. Father had people—people who could pry the deepest hidden secrets from anyone—but he insisted that me and Michael needed the experience, so lately we’d been getting all the torture gigs. Lucky us.
“I’m hoping we find them before this weekend, but if not, we’re gonna need extra security at the engagement dinner. Since we don’t want to look like we don’t have our shit together, the boss has been hesitant to bring Don De Lucca in on our situation, but I don’t know how long he can hold off. If the De Luccas feel we hid the information from them…” Carlo shook his head.
“When’s Father gonna make the call?” Michael asked.
“Tomorrow evening. Unless we have Chains and his crew by then.”
Michael blew out a breath. “Twenty-four hours doesn’t give us much of a window.”
“Do we have any leads?” I asked.
“I’ve got a guy inside the Durante family. He’s been snooping around and found out Chains has a girlfriend who works at the Plaza. I reached out to her. She’s not much of a girlfriend. Couldn’t give me much on him—didn’t even know his real name—but I did manage to squeeze his address and phone number out of her.”
A guy inside the Durante family? I wondered who would be crazy enough to take that gig. Focusing on that was easier than allowing myself to think about whatever Carlo had done to “squeeze” the information out of Chains’s girl. We couldn’t afford to be lenient, especially not when our own guys had been killed in cold blood. But other than dating an asshole, she probably hadn’t done anything wrong.
“I have a team watching his apartment, one on the Plaza, and one on his girlfriend’s place. If he shows his mug, we’ll know.”
Michael nodded. “Tom has my pager number and promised to reach out if Chains, or any of the assholes he hangs with, shows up in his bar again.”
“So now what? Back to the streets?” I asked, stifling a yawn. I’d gotten maybe eight hours of sleep over the last forty-eight hours and the idea of spending the rest of the day in the car made me want to pass out on the spot.
“Yep,” Carlo said, clapping me on the shoulder. “And keep your eyes open. I heard you’re already on babysitting duty, and I’d hate to see my brother have to discipline you again, Dom.”
Discipline… a nice way of putting it. Like labeling the scars littering my body as “training.” Nobody would ever accuse my old man of sparing any rods or spoiling any children.
“Yessir,” I replied.
Carlo gave us a few locations to check into and dismissed us. Michael drove as I rattled off the businesses on Carlo’s list. Each of the borgatas (crime families) had a turf consisting of businesses owned, ran, or protected. My family offered protection to several local shops, but our best investment had come in 1986 when Father had gone in with a couple of his allies to start up a corporation. They currently owned three casinos—the Big Top, the Oasis, and the Round Table—with plans for two more to go in toward the end of 1993. Father’s most influential Las Vegas ally, Don Caruso, ran the Big Top. My family operated out of the Oasis, and the Round Table—which had only been open for two years—was currently in the hands of Don Pelino, boring Valentina’s father.
Father’s enemy, the reigning capo dei cappi (or boss of bosses) of Las Vegas, Don Maurizio Durante, owned a controlling share of our rival corporation, which currently held six casinos: The Pelican, Nero’s, Sammy’s, The Columbian, Blackbeard’s, and Jafar’s. The Durante family operated out of Nero’s and the Columbian, putting their allies in charge of the others. My family made nice with Don Durante’s allies, but we stayed the hell out of any properties Maurizio ran directly. I wouldn’t put it past the crazy son-of-a-bitch to gun us down in cold blood as soon as we walked through the door. Best not to tempt him.
Still, Carlo had kept all rival casinos off our list. Everyone knew Michael and I were Marianis, so we’d have cameras on us from the moment we entered the lobbies and nobody would dare talk to us. Instead, we stuck to neutral casinos, not owned or protected by either family.
We covered the Mojave, the Caribbean, and the Imperial Casino. In each, we respectfully approached the managers and explained enough to show Chains as a threat we needed to unite on, while careful not to make our family sound vulnerable or weakened by the attack. The managers promised to alert their staff and pass on the information about the reward being offered.
After the casinos, we started the onerous task of covering Vegas’s many restaurants. On our fifth one, we stumbled across another lead.
“Yeah, I know Chains,” a cook by the name of Leslie said.
We’d caught her out back of some greasy spoon restaurant off East Desert Inn Road, dingy apron slung over her shoulder as she puffed on a lit cigarette. I lit up my own smoke and joined her.
“What’d that idiot do now?” she asked.
Michael avoided her question by asking one of his own. “How do you know him?”
“Used to work with his mom. Nice lady, but she let that boy run over her from the day he was born. I told her she needed to put her foot down and kick his ass every now and again, but she had guilt about his daddy being wrapped up in some mob.” Leslie paused long enough to eye me and Michael in our sui
ts. “You’re not with the one of the mob families, are you?”
“No ma’am,” Michael said. He pulled his wallet out and flashed her a fake badge. Most of the time our family credentials busted down the doors we needed opened, but sometimes a badge worked better. Ours were barely higher quality than toys—fake enough looking that if we were ever caught, our attorney could make the argument that nobody would accept them as real—but people rarely looked closely enough to notice. “We’re detectives with the Las Vegas PD. We believe Chains messed up and got himself involved in a robbery that went south. Two men are dead, and we need to find him and ask some questions.”
“You’re shittin’ me,” Leslie breathed out.
“No ma’am,” Michael replied.
She blew out a stream of smoke before snuffing out her cigarette. “Damn, that’s a shame. Can’t say I’m surprised, though. I’m tellin’ you, I tried to warn her about that boy.”
Sensing Leslie wasn’t the sharpest knife in the restaurant, I jumped in to move the conversation along. “We need to find him as soon as possible. Your friend probably doesn’t know what her son did. But it’ll hit the news tonight, and then if we find him staying with her, she’ll be arrested for harboring a criminal. The DA will stack up as many charges on her as he can… obstructing justice, aiding and abetting, you name it.”
“But she… she’d never do anything like that. Only thing you could charge her with is loving her son too damn much and not knowing when to say no.”
“We know that,” Michael said, raising his hands. “But we gotta get Chains locked up before the news airs and the DA can start making a case against her. Most likely one of her neighbors already knows if Chains is staying with her. The family of the deceased is offering a decent reward for information so…”
“Oh?” Leslie asked.
It took everything I had not to shake my head in disgust. Carlo always harped on the payout mentality of Vegas, insisting most everyone in the city believed they’d hit the jackpot someday. Which explained the city’s love of lawyers and malpractice suits. Those who couldn’t win big, sued big. Learning how to hustle meant using that mentality against people, and judging by the gleam in Leslie’s eyes, she saw her potential payout on the horizon. I’d been trying to win her over by manufacturing concern for her friend, when Leslie would have gladly blabbed the second I waved a few bills under her nose.
“Yes ma’am,” Michael said. “Ten thousand for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Chains.”
We could have offered a hundred thousand, because Chains would never be arrested or convicted. He needed to die horribly and swiftly, preferably after he ratted out his crew. Leslie didn’t know that, though, and I could almost see the wheels spinning in her brain, going over ways she could spend the money. Forcing her mouth into a frown, she looked back to me.
“A reward like that and Glenda would turn him in herself,” she reasoned, letting Chains’s mom’s name slip out.
“We’re gonna need a last name too,” Michael said.
“Rollins. Glenda Rollins. She lives in a little two-bedroom house on Heart Avenue, across the street from an auto shop.”
“Chains’s real name?” I asked.
She looked from me to Michael, and then whispered, “Arthur. Arthur Rollins.”
Michael and I thanked her for her time, took down her name and phone number for the imaginary reward, and headed to Heart Avenue to check up on Glenda Rollins. It was almost nine p.m. by the time we parked in front of a small canary-yellow bungalow across the street from a graffiti-covered auto repair shop. A boarded up abandoned house was Glenda Rollins’s closest neighbor. With the windows dark and no car in the driveway we figured nobody was home, but knocked anyway. No answer, so we left our pager numbers with the neighbors and headed for a payphone to check in with Carlo.
Carlo said he’d send in a team to keep watch over the house and told us to get back to hitting up the restaurants. I dragged my tired ass back to Michael’s car, and we continued our search.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Annetta
TRUE TO HIS word, Dominico picked me up and took me to work the next day. When I finished my shift, he was once again leaning against the wall by the back door, waiting. It made me realize that other than during my interview I had yet to see him actually working in the restaurant. I’d asked a couple of the kitchen staff about him, but they all looked at me like I was crazy.
Brandon went so far as to insist we didn’t have security and recommended I stay far away from anyone who pretended to hold the position. But Dominico had been present during my interview, had been a perfect gentleman while driving me to and from work, and I couldn’t deny the little thrill I got from finding him waiting for me.
“Hey, how was work?” he asked, taking my backpack from me.
“Busy. Crazy. I think Collin’s gonna blow a gasket over this dinner coming up.” Then my brain kicked in and reminded me that Dominico and my boss were probably close, and that I should keep my big mouth shut. “I mean, I know it’s gotta be stressful for him, and I don’t mean to sound critical, I just wish he wasn’t so…”
“Wound up?” Dominico provided.
I nodded. “Yeah. At least I finally got him to filter his freakouts through me, rather than going directly to the staff. It’s helping me earn their respect.”
“Wait, he yells at you?” he asked, his brow furrowing. “And you want him to?”
I shrugged. “He growls, but doesn’t bite. I can take it. And it’s part of the job, you know? I signed up for this, and I’m glad he’s trusting me to do my job. But enough about my drama, how was your day?” I took a good look at Dominico, noting his rumpled suit and bloodshot eyes. “I’m guessing… rough?”
“You could say that.” He gestured me toward the parking lot and we started walking. “The boss is riding my ass about this dinner, too. I’ve got some things to take care of so I can focus on security. Lots to do, unfortunately.”
“I hear ya.”
He opened the car door for me and I slid in. When Dominico got behind the steering wheel, he turned to face me and said, “Right now I could go for a nice cold beer, though. You feel like grabbin’ a drink?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
I sniffed my hair. “For one, I smell like I’ve been cooking for eight hours. For two, I’m still wearing my uniform.”
“So? People will know you work. It’s not a big deal.” His voice took on a pleading tone. “Come on, Annetta. It sounds like you could use a beer as much as I can.”
A drink did sound good. More than that, I kind of enjoyed Dominico’s company and wanted to spend a little more time with him. My best friend had been out of town with her family on vacation for more than a week now, and I missed just hanging out with someone. Still, I resisted. “I’m not much of a beer person.”
“Great. We’ll go somewhere that serves everything. What do you like?”
“Fruity drinks, low on the alcohol.”
“I know just the spot,” he said, starting the car.
Dominico took us to a small bar not far from the restaurant. I felt super self-conscious about my work clothes and stench until we walked in and past a table of dusty construction workers. Apparently this was the watering hole for working-class locals. We sat in a tucked away corner booth and I sipped on a piña colada while he drank a beer.
“Tell me something about yourself,” he said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“What’s your family like?”
“Not much to tell. It’s just me and Papa. He works at the paper mill. I cook. Our lives are positively riveting.”
He chuckled. “What do you do for fun?”
Fun? Who had time for fun? “Read. Watch T.V. Accept rides from strangers.”
Dominico nodded, pounded out a cigarette, put it up to his lips, and lit it. “Can I ask how your mom died?”
Talk about a mood killer.
Disappointed that he’d steer the conversation in that direction, I looked away and replied, “Lung cancer.”
“Shit. Sorry. Did she smoke?”
“Not once. She worked in a restaurant. The doctors said secondhand smoke did her in.”
Dominico swore again and snuffed out his cigarette. “Sorry.”
Everyone said they were sorry when they heard about my mom, but the unexpected sincerity in his voice warmed me. “It’s okay.” I eyed the pack of cigarettes. “It’s not a big deal for most people. For me, it… it’s complicated.”
He nodded. “I get it. So, she worked in a restaurant? Was she a cook like you?”
“No. Mom got pregnant with me right out of high school. She and Papa eloped, moved out here from the east coast, and she took the first job she was offered and stayed there until she died.”
Dominico watched me. “She worked… did what she had to do. No shame in that.”
“Yeah, and she was happy. We were happy. Papa hated it, though. He wanted her to go to school and do something more with her life. I think he always felt guilt about… well, me.” I shook my head, annoyed with myself for sharing so much. “Sorry. I’m not good at small talk. I know it’s supposed to be surface information, but I like it when it goes deep.”
My mouth snapped shut as I realized all the inappropriate ways that could be taken. What was it about this guy that made me blurt out inappropriate crap? My cheeks felt like they were about to burst into flames. “The conversation, that is,” I hurried to say.
Dominico laughed. I’d been fidgeting with a napkin and he trapped my hands in his, sprouting goosebumps up my arms.
“I want you to feel comfortable telling me anything. Everything,” he said. “We can go deep any time you want.”
His voice was husky and his tone was suggestive. Something hungry and exciting lurked within his dark eyes, inviting me to come out and play. And I wanted to. It was a serious struggle not to crawl across the table and straddle him right there in the restaurant. What the hell was wrong with me? Looking away, I fought for control of my misbehaving libido.