The place was a fucking hole—a big shack right on the road that had once been either a nice-size house or little apartment building. It was hard to tell, because most of the interior walls were gone, and all the fixtures had been pulled. The copper had been ripped out of the walls, most of the lights, even the flooring. For the most part, the place was a shell, just subfloor and bare walls with gaping holes everywhere, showing the studs with their guts missing.
Tony’s father was a contractor, and he remembered, back when he was a kid, one of the times the housing market tanked, and foreclosures and short sales had been like a plague, all over the country. His dad had bought up a bunch of foreclosed places to fix and flip, and Tony had been conscripted into the work. This place looked just like those places. When people got thrown out of their house, they generally raped it of everything with the slightest value on the way out, and left the biggest, nastiest mess they could.
His father had been wrong about when the market would turn around. It had taken a lot longer than he’d thought, and he’d lost his shirt. Those had been some hard damn years, and not just because they’d been broke, and almost lost the house, and his mom had had to go back to work for a while. His father had been the worst thing about those years.
Tony cracked his neck and his jaw and got those thoughts out of his head.
The windows had all been painted out, and nailed shut, so it was dark even now, in the afternoon, with these windows facing west. The place was lit with cheap battery-operated camp lanterns and a bunch of colored candles, all their varied scents mixing to form a miasma like a Pier 1 had puked all over the place.
No electricity and painted-over, nailed-shut windows also meant no air conditioning, or any movement of air at all. After hours in this hell, Tony’s dress shirt was plastered to his back and chest, and he really fucking wished he’d put on an undershirt this morning. But when he’d dressed, he’d decided it was too hot for an undershirt. Ironic, that.
Angie was wearing an undershirt, so he’d stripped out of his suit coat—his suit was custom—and dress shirt. In just a beater, his slacks, and his thousand-dollar Ferragamo dress boots, his flashy gold crucifix on its thick rope of gold chain glinting in the crappy light, Angie stood now before a skinny Dominican shithead named Alonzo. Alonzo was also wearing a beater, but, to put it mildly, there was a significant difference in quality and cleanliness. Currently, drool, puke, and blood adorned Alonzo’s saggy, Target version.
Duct-taped to a metal and vinyl kitchen chair, Alonzo was also wearing tattered camo cargo shorts and a pair of brand-new Jordans at the bottom of his pencil-thin, hairy-as-fuck legs. The shorts were wet and stank of piss, but the Jordans were still gleaming clean.
The corpses of two of Alonzo’s buddies lay in a twisted heap about four feet away, at Tony’s side. They’d died hard, and now Angie was in a mood. He’d wanted this to be a simple ambush. Barge in, knock them around, tie them up, get to work on making an impression. But these guys had an attitude problem. The first one had spat in Angie’s face, which had cost him all his teeth, courtesy of Tony’s ball-peen hammer, and then his tongue, courtesy of Angie’s locking pliers.
He’d ripped the guy’s tongue from his mouth with a pliers. Tony had seen Angie do some deeply fucked-up shit in his years as one of his enforcers, but that had turned his stomach all the way over. If he’d had a chance to get lunch before he got pulled into this, he’d have lost it.
The guy had died shortly after that—of a heart attack, Tony thought. He’d just gone rigid and then limp, and been dead. The body could take only so much pain before it decided to move on to greener pastures.
Guy #2 had been Tony’s job. But Guy #1 was his brother, so he’d been even more hysterical and combative, screaming foul words and threats in Spanish at him, between shrieks of pain, until Tony had just fucking shot the shithead in the face. That had earned him a cuff upside the head from Angie, but it had been worth it to stop that mouth. Even duct tape hadn’t made him quiet.
Anyway, it was just as much of a pain in the ass to erase two bodies as it was one, and Angie had already fucked up the rest of their day and night when he’d killed the first guy. They didn’t need information from these shitheads. They knew who they worked for. What they were trying to do was kink up the pipeline and get them out of the Cove. All they needed was one guy alive to get the message across: Get the fuck out of the Cove, and all the way out of Rhode Island, or the Pagano Brothers would remove them. Piece by piece.
Two down, two waiting. But one of them was a woman. They’d bound her ankles and wrists with duct tape, and put another stretch over her mouth. Alonzo was her guy. They knew his name because she’d shrieked it before they’d gagged her.
The woman was safe. Tony couldn’t see anything more happening to her than what already had. Angie wouldn’t even lean on her. The only way Angelo Corti would ever hurt a woman would be a direct order from Nick, and Tony couldn’t imagine a situation in which that order came down.
Neither Angie nor Tony had qualms about causing her grief, however. So her man was getting the full-court press. Very slowly.
Fuck! It was hot in this fucking shack. Tony couldn’t take it anymore. He unbuttoned his shirt and yanked it off, turning to lay it on the chair with his jacket and tie.
“You see that, Zo?” Angie said. “You don’t mind if I call you Zo, do ya?”
Now bare-chested, Tony turned back and saw Alonzo and Angie both looking at him. Goddammit.
“Turn around again, kid,” Angie said. Tony did, showing his bare back, but not before he shot his capo a look. He fucking hated when Angie did this.
“Look at that,” Angie said, talking to Alonzo like they were old buddies. “You know who did that to him? His old man. His own father. Living through something like that, it builds rage in a man, lemme tell ya. And you know, that wasn’t a one-off. A man who can do that to his own kid, he doesn’t do it just once. And that rage, it builds, Alonzo. It makes the man who endures it capable of just about anything.”
The really fucked-up part of this speech Angie had crafted and memorized was that he himself had had a fantastic father, who’d doted on his children and had worshipped his wife. Angie had no fucking idea what kind of rage built up in a boy who’d gotten whipped to bloody strips a good dozen times between the ages of eight, when Tony’s father had decided that he was old enough, and disobedient enough, for ‘real discipline’ and eighteen, when Tony had moved out.
And that was just the worst of it. Angie had no idea what it was like never to know when a fist or the back of a hand would fly out and connect with his face, or when a foot would kick out and shove him reeling forward.
Tony knew. Angie had no idea.
But Angie sure as fuck liked to make this show.
“You think I’ve been hard on you, Zo? You think I did your friend harsh with my pliers? You think my friend here’s shown you what he’s about already? No, buddy.” Angie chuckled and patted Alonzo on the head. The guy was a bloody mess, but none of the wounds was life-threatening or even serious. Angie knew just where to cut, or break, or gouge. When he killed, it was because he wanted to. Even if it wasn’t planned, it was intentional. “No, if I turn my guy here loose, you are going to feel the full impact of all that rage he stored up all his life.”
Tony’s snarl was really aimed at Angie. He respected his boss. He liked him. Got along with him. But he despised being his circus freak. Angie knew it. Used it.
The guy tied to a chair thought Tony’s look was meant for him.
His woman thought so, too. From the side of the room she screamed into her gag.
Alonzo shook his head, throwing it back and forth. He whimpered, and Angie ripped the duct tape back. It was starting to lose its stickiness; it had been peeled and replaced a few times over the past hour, and bodily fluids were coating it now.
“You got something to tell us, Zo?”
Alonzo spoke in a rush of Spanish. Angie looked back at Tony. He’d st
udied Spanish in high school, and he’d dated a Puerto Rican woman for a while. He also had occasional cause to use it at work, so his Spanish was fair. Dominican Spanish was fast, though. Hard to keep up.
“He says don’t hurt the woman. He’ll do what we want, just stop, and don’t hurt her.”
Angie grinned at Alonzo. “Well, see? That’s all we wanted. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
Alonzo started to cry.
~ 2 ~
Billy pulled down the long driveway, past the pastures and the tennis courts, through the lush flowering bushes lining the lane, and emerged from that verdant explosion to the Currier and Ives vista that was her family’s ancestral home.
They really called it that, her mom and uncles: the ancestral home.
Seeing that the wide sweep of lane near the house—Grandfather had always called it a manse—was full of gleaming cars, she sighed. She was late, she was virtually always late, ten minutes past was her natural habitat, but she’d held out a hope that her mother would be later. Twenty minutes past was Allie’s natural habitat.
Sadly, the dingy baby-blue Miata was parked right between Uncle Jameson’s Benz and Uncle Gareth’s Lambo.
The whole parking area was packed with luxury sedans and sportscars. It looked like everyone else was there, and therefore waiting. She puttered forward and squeezed her VW at the end of the line, then fought against a wildly flowering bush to get her door open.
Okay. Time for her family’s repressed, passive-aggressive, pearl-strung version of The Jerry Springer Show. She shoved the tail of her blouse into the waistband of her jeans. Shit, it was hot. Too hot for June. This summer was going to suh-uck. Casting a baleful glance at her un-air-conditioned VW bus, she trotted up the long walk to the door.
The uniformed maid answered her ring and grinned up at her. “Hello, Miss Billy!”
“Hiya, Margaret.” She stepped in and kissed the older woman on the cheek. She looked around and marveled at all the natural light and airy space in this foyer that had been dark and stuffy all her life, and for decades—no, centuries—before that.
In the year and a half since Grandfather’s death, Uncle Elliott had gutted and totally renovated the ancestral home, making it something unrecognizably new, like he meant to erase Grandfather entirely. And yet he’d kept the staff in old-fashioned uniforms. Margaret and the other maids even had to wear little white caps.
“Are they all waiting?”
Margaret gave her a little whaddaya gonna do shrug and took her bag. “In the library. Shall I announce you?”
“No, that’s okay. I’d rather come up on them unawares. Gotta get my fun where I can.”
Margaret tittered quietly and took her bag to the cloakroom. Out of nervous habit, Billy swiped her hands over her jeans pockets, front and back, to feel the bulges of her keys and phone. In a pinch, she could escape, even if she didn’t have time to reclaim her bag.
That was ridiculous, of course; she wasn’t actually at risk of anything more painful than dignified condemnation. She wouldn’t have to flee for her life. Her family weren’t vampires or demons. Not in any sense but the figurative, at least.
She went to the double doors of the library and gave them a push, entering the room with a flourish.
“Hi guys! Sorry I’m late!”
Fifteen mouths went quiet, and fifteen sets of eyes turned to the door. Uncle Elliott and Aunt Madeline. Their daughters, Caroline and Alicia. Alicia’s husband, Andy, and their two little kids, Bianca and Bennett. Uncle Jameson and Aunt Mary. Their children, Louis, Jane, and Merrick, all of whom were younger than Billy. Uncle Gareth and his husband, Kenneth.
And Billy’s mother, the youngest sibling. Alexandra Bradford-Jones. She’d dumped Billy’s father while Billy was still in Huggies, but she’d kept the hyphenate, because she thought it sounded ‘brainy.’
Draped irreverently over the arm of an antique chair, Billy’s mother offered up an indolent smile. “Hello, darling.”
“Hey, Mama.” She cast a bright smile around the room. “Hi, everybody. Sorry I’m late.”
“Wilhelmina,” Aunt Madeline, doyenne of the ancestral home, glided regally toward Billy and leaned her cheek close for a kiss. She smelled, as always, of Chanel No. 5. “Delighted you managed to find your way here.”
Yep. This was the Passive-Aggressive World Cup.
Billy let her aunt take her arm and lead her into the giant room. So much more light than before. Uncle Elliott had taken down all the heavy draperies and let the sun through the fifteen-foot-tall Jefferson windows. The view of the grounds was fabulous. But ...
“Can all this light be good for the books?”
Her grandfather had been a collector. There was easily a million dollars’ worth of first-editions lining these walls. The one and only thing she’d really cared about inheriting from Grandfather had been these books—not for their monetary value, but for their historical and sentimental worth. And she’d really thought he’d leave them to her; she was the only one in the family who enjoyed talking with him about the volumes. Her whole life, he’d recommended books to her, lent books to her, and expected her to be ready to talk seriously about them. She was the one who loved his books.
But he’d left the whole house and all its contents to Uncle Elliott, along with the other homes, and all the business holdings and most of the liquid holdings as well. Everybody else had gotten lump sums in cash, in varying amounts according to some calculus known only to Grandfather himself.
Uncle Elliott came up and kissed her cheek. “I had the windows treated, darling. Not to worry.”
She looked again, and saw that the glass was no longer the wavy, flawed original glass of this colonial-era manse. Grandfather had probably dug his way through the Earth by now, with all the rolling he must be doing in his grave. Served him right, actually.
“Oh, okay. Well phew, then.” She turned and tried another cheerful smile. “So. What’s the topic today? Why’d we need a family meeting?”
All the people in the room who were old enough to be in the loop exchanged glances with each other—all but Billy. Nobody looked at her.
And that was when she knew.
She was the topic.
Well, fuck.
~oOo~
They’d all moved to the dining room, so she would be sure to see every one of them sit in judgment of her. Even fucking Merrick, who was only sixteen years old, had a front-row seat.
As usual, Aunt Madeline had made a show of being a good hostess. Arranged down the middle of the table was an array of light snacking options. In Bradfordland, ‘snacks’ meant brie and caviar. The devilled eggs were quail.
As if this family ambush were just another social event on Aunt Madeline’s busy calendar.
The dining room was completely new as well. The whole manse seemed to have been redone in a Scandinavian aesthetic—pale, sharp-edged, airy, and light. A complete rejection of the colonial style every other generation had preserved. Uncle Elliott was in his sixties, but he obviously still had some daddy issues to work out.
Billy put her foot on the upholstered seat of her chair, slouched, and hooked her arm around her knee.
“Wilhelmina,” Aunt Madeline chided. “Be a lady, please.”
“I’m not a lady, Aunt Madeline. If I understand this whole scene, that’s kind of the point.” She picked up her wine glass and gulped the whole thing down, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. To make her own point.
“Don’t be histrionic, Wilhelmina,” Uncle Jameson huffed and turned to Billy’s mother. “Honestly, Alexandra. Of all the things you should have taught her, why is that the thing you did?”
“Hey!” her mother barked. “Don’t pull me into this. I think you all need to get the redwood out your collective ass.”
The younger people in the group all laughed or tried not to. The old farts paled, groaned, or gasped. Aunt Mary clutched her pearls. Literally.
Billy’s mother smirked at her. “Just ride this
out, billy goat. What can they do?”
Not much, actually. Her inheritance was hers, to do with as she wanted. That she’d wanted to open a nightclub was her choice, and she didn’t care if the Bradfords, of the Mayflower Bradfords, thought her new career was ‘undignified.’
Well, actually actually, she cared a little. She’d owned the building for less than a year, and West Egg had been open for only a few weeks, but it was sinking fast, and she was going down with it—and she couldn’t figure out why. The place had been a hit from the grand opening. Weekend nights were at capacity. She had a line at the door when they opened, and through most of the hours thereafter. Most weeknights were solid, too. They were in peak season, and she couldn’t handle any more business. But she wasn’t anywhere close to breaking even. She’d been prepared to be behind at first, until the income could cover the initial outgo, but not this behind. Not even with a telescope could she see the black.
It was possible she’d bitten off more than she could chew. The building had been basically gutted when she’d bought it, so she’d had to lay out for not just a remodel but almost a full buildout. She’d felt flush back then, with her inheritance swelling her bank account, and she wanted to have something to be proud of, so she hadn’t cut any corners.
West Egg was gorgeous. Exactly as she’d imagined it.
But boy howdy, had it been expensive to get it ready to open.
They charged a cover for the eighteen-to-twenty crowd and a two-drink minimum for the legal set. Drink prices were on the high side of the average range. No full menu, but a whole card of gourmet appetizers and small plates, cooked fresh on site—the kind of food that made people keep drinking. The music was good, and she had a good DJ, as well as a nice stage for live-music nights. She was doing the booking herself, and didn’t really know what she was doing, but she was learning.
Her staff was good. Attractive, knowledgeable, and graceful.
All the ingredients were there. And still, she was sinking. Already.
It might have something to do with the fucking ‘insurance’ premium she had to pay the Pagano Brothers every month, on top of the actual insurance her business license required she maintain. But she’d known about the mobsters before she’d bought. Everybody knew about them, especially in Quiet Cove. She’d even gotten pulled into the Pagano Brothers office to talk with Angelo Corti, who made sure she understood how things worked in their town. And there were scary rumors about the nightclub that had been in West Egg’s location before—that the Pagano Brothers had chopped off the owner’s legs when he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, pay, and then completely destroyed the club when he’d tried to report the attack to the police. Hence the very empty space she’d bought.
Accidental Evils Page 2