Tony opened the fold. And tried not to react. It was a lot of money. He had no idea if it was fair market or not—he hadn’t run any numbers—but it looked substantial, and he didn’t think Nick was trying to get over on him.
“This would separate the basement from the rest of the business,” Nick was saying. “No more civilians using that area. Any training the men want to do in other areas, that’s on them, to pay for memberships, or work a deal with you. I just want the basement. The men need more diverse training. It’s not enough for them to be strong and know how to shoot. Obviously, they need more.”
“Okay. Yes.”
“You don’t need to talk it over with your partners?”
Tony knew that was a formality, and Nick intended it to be nothing more. He wanted this, and he would have it. But it truly was a formality. The other guys hated the basement and would be thrilled for this income stream. “No, I don’t. They’ll be on board.”
“Good. We’ll get the paperwork done tomorrow, then.” Nick turned now to Billy, who’d sat quietly in her avid interest. “Now, Billy. I know West Egg is about to go under.”
She took in a slow, deep breath. “This summer has been hard, yes.” She cleared her throat. “Don Pagano, I know I shouldn’t ... I don’t want a partner. If that’s what you’re offering.”
Nick regarded her without speaking or reacting in any way. He waited until the tension had Billy shifting on the sofa, crossing and re-crossing her legs.
“You would rather lose your business?”
Billy didn’t answer. Or blink. Or look away.
After another pause long enough to let the tension fill the space between them, Nick went on. “Your choices are to fail, or to deal with me. I haven’t made you an offer yet, but I mean it to be a help to you. I have no desire to run a nightclub. I don’t even like one in my town. But you’ve suffered because of your association with Tony, and thus with me, and I like my ledger balanced.”
“What are you offering?” Billy finally asked. She couldn’t keep a quaver from her voice.
“I don’t want to be your partner. I want to rent out the second floor as a private meeting space.” He pulled another sheet from the folder. “This would be a quarterly payment, for that space to be held always in reserve for me, and for the use of your chef and waitstaff when I want to arrange a meeting there.” He pushed the paper to her.
Dominic’s had been that place for decades. Nick must have had word that Dom was really ending his run.
She picked up the paper and read. After a few seconds of staring, she said, “I live on the second floor.”
Nick didn’t answer. Tony felt a twitch of jealous worry, but kept control of himself. She’d been staying with him. All this time. Living with him. Yeah, they were still taking it day by day, but she lived with him.
Billy’s head swiveled stiffly to Tony. He stared back, trying to say everything he was thinking with his eyes.
One tight little corner of her mouth turned up, and Tony calmed. She returned her attention to the don. “This”—she waved the paper—"and you cancel my protection payments, for as long as you’re renting the space.” One Pagano eyebrow went up, and Billy added, “If you’re renting the second floor, then you should be responsible for some of the insurance costs, anyway. I’d build that in with any other tenant.
“Would any other tenant pay that amount of rent?” Nick asked.
“No other tenant would bring even close to the same level of risk or threat.”
The room fell into yet another tense silence while Nick considered. Then he said, “Agreed.”
“Then we have a deal,” Billy said—and brightened the room at once with a wholehearted grin.
“Excellent,” Don Pagano said, with a satisfied smile of his own.
He always got what he wanted.
But this time, he’d given other people what they wanted, too.
~oOo~
“You doing okay?”
Tony had just pulled away from Nick’s private lane and was headed toward his place. He and Billy hadn’t said much since they’d left the don.
They hadn’t stayed much longer after the business was finished; it had not been a social call after all, and Tony thought Nick was pushing himself to seem stronger than he yet was. He was definitely not at full power yet.
But one thing Tony could say without equivocation: Nick Pagano was just as sharp and shrewd as he’d ever been. There was talk, inside the Pagano Brothers and all through the underworld, that he’d lost his mental edge. Some had even wondered if maybe the trauma had turned him senile. All that rumor because some flapping lips in the ICU had leaked that he’d been slow and confused after the coma.
Tony knew that was true. But he hadn’t stayed that way long, and now Tony had no doubts at all that the don’s brainpower, at least, was back in full force.
Billy hadn’t answered his question. He set his hand on her knee. “Bill? You okay?”
“Sorry, yeah. Just thinking. He just turned West Egg into Dominic’s, didn’t he?”
“I think so, yeah. But Nick doesn’t repeat his mistakes. He’ll learn from what happened and be prepared for anything that comes in the future.”
“That’s what he’s doing at the gym, right?”
He’d taken her a couple times to CBSD, and she’d worked out on the weight machines. Now, she kept calling it a gym. “It’s not a gym, Bill, just because you can work out there. It’s a training center.”
“Sorry.” She gave him a little quirky smirk that he could have thought condescending, but he was in too good a mood to be bothered by it. Let her think it was a macho affectation not to call it a gym. The distinction he made was based in material reality. Anytime Fitness was a gym. It didn’t have a shooting range or interactive engagement scenarios. Neither did CBSD, after today. That would be something else entirely now.
“That number on your paper—that enough to keep you afloat?” he asked
“And then some. I can hire an assistant manager for sure.”
“Cain?”
She shook her head. “No. That was a mistake before. We’re too unsteady. I can’t have him that deep in my business, not until we figure things out. Right now, weekly lunches are all I can deal with.”
Tony hadn’t laid eyes on Billy’s old man since that night he’d shown up unexpectedly and Tony had nearly put the piece of shit through a wall. Cain was keeping his distance from the club, and from Tony, and Billy was meeting him halfway, geographically, between the Cove and Narragansett for lunch once a week.
He still hadn’t worked out bringing her to his family for a meal. His mom wanted his sisters there, and Aurora’s family, too. She thought that would make ‘everything easier on everybody.’ Tony disagreed. All his family all at once could not possibly be easier on Billy.
“Tony?”
“Yeah?”
“I just rented out my house.”
That jealous, unhappy twitch he’d felt at Nick’s, the first time she’d said that, came back as a hard cramp. He pulled into an empty space along the curb and parked the Giulia.
“No, you didn’t. You live with me.”
“Not officially. Just day by day.”
“For almost two months, Billy. Come on. Your stuff is in the closets, the drawers. Your books are stacked on every flat surface. You live with me.”
She smiled. “I’m saying ... I want it to be official. I want my address to be your address. I want to mix my life up with your life. It’ll be a huge mess, but I don’t care. Because I love you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Her eyes peered into his, but she didn’t ask the question he could see in them.
He answered it anyway; he’d been chewing on those damn three words for weeks, waiting for her to say them first. “I love you, too.” He leaned over the console and sealed it with a kiss.
~oOo~
“Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It’s been more than two months since my last confession.”
&nbs
p; Father Sabatini’s Sicilian accent rolled through the ornate metal screen. “May the Lord be in your heart and help you to confess your sins with true sorrow, my son. Unburden your soul and be absolved.”
Christ the King Catholic Church had been closed only a few weeks. The truly devout, like his mother, had gone to the Catholic church the next town over, but Tony hadn’t attended Mass, or confession, since the attack.
This Sunday was Nick’s first back in the pews, and all the Pagano Brothers men would be sitting with him. There was even a line for confession, a whole lot of dangerous men who did dangerous things sitting, awaiting their turn in the box.
For a moment, Tony sat quietly and thought about what he had to say. He’d started going to confession a year ago—almost exactly one year since that October night when he’d shot without seeing the whole scene and killed a little boy. Every time he’d sat in this small, intimate space, scented with years of incense, candlewax, and wood polish—and now the fresher aromas of sawdust and new plaster—he’d struggled to know what to say, how to say it. How to lift the burden of what he did, who he was, and seek absolution. For months he’d tried and had never been able to speak the thing he regretted most in his life.
But now, sitting here today, the weight was gone, or at least so much lighter it seemed gone in comparison. Artem Honcharenko no longer haunted him as he had. When he thought the name, remembered the face, he still felt that raw remorse, but he had to consciously think the name, conjure his face. For months, the boy had been standing center stage in his mind, always present in every thought, every moment. But in the past few weeks, he’d stepped into the shadows.
Tony sat here in the confessional and tried to understand why he felt different, why he was different. This summer had changed him.
Finally, he saw it. in the past few months, he had gained two things he’d never had before: First, he had the esteem of his don. He had impressed Nick, and Donnie and Angie, too. They had all brought him closer.
And he had the love of a good woman. Billy loved him. She was smart and strong and beautiful, and she saw something worthwhile in him. Enough to fight to pull it out of him, bring it to the surface.
Tony had value. He didn’t think he’d felt that before, ever in his life, but he felt it now. He was worthy—of respect, of love. Of forgiveness.
“My son?” Father Sabatini prompted.
“Sorry, Father.” Tony took a deep breath. “I want to tell you about a bad mistake I made last year. It’s the worst thing I ever did, and I’m so fucking sorry about it.”
~ 24 ~
Billy stood in the doorway to Tony’s mother’s kitchen. Mother and daughters were bustling about preparing Thanksgiving dinner, but Billy couldn’t figure out where to go so she’d be helpful and not in the way.
At Bradford family meals, a staff did the cooking, so all she had to do was drink cocktails, eat hors d’oeuvres, and listen to the blithe chatter of her aunts and uncles, until one of them turned their attention to her—which usually happened at the dinner table.
Billy had only been to the Cioccolanti family home once before—a stilted, awkward ordeal where it was clear that everybody was trying not to do anything wrong—but that night, the meal had already been laid out on the table when she and Tony had arrived, and no one had let her do any of the clean-up either.
Now, Tony, his father, and his brother-in-law, Lou, were watching football in the living room, and his mother and sisters were scurrying around in a fairly small kitchen, yelling at each other over the television, which kept being made louder over their voices.
She felt trapped in this doorway, unsure where she belonged, and afraid to choose wrong.
Over in the living room, sitting on the sofa beside his brother-in-law, Tony was holding his new nephew, Brandon.
That was a wild sight to see. Her hot-headed hitman with a seven-week-old infant snuggled up on his chest, sleeping through the chaos while his Uncle Antony patted his little bottom. It stirred up feelings in Billy she hadn’t known she had.
So she spun back to the kitchen before Tony saw her watching him.
Sheryl, Tony’s mom, was arguing with Aurora, Tony’s older sister. They stood before the double wall ovens—Seventies style—and bickered over something Sheryl had just put in. Kiki, Tony’s little sister, mashed potatoes with a fervor that suggested she’d been horribly wronged in a potato-related incident and still bore a grudge.
There were a third as many people in this house as were usually present for a Bradford Thanksgiving—a holiday her family took extremely seriously, since they claimed a family presence on the Mayflower—and yet about ten times the ruckus. She’d of course heard the stereotype about Italian families being loud and raucous, and hey! It turned out to be true.
She’d caused a minor scandal in her family when she’d sent back the engraved reply card to the invitation for dinner—Aunt Madeline was keen on social niceties; even family functions got formal invitations—with a polite decline. Nobody declined the Bradford Thanksgiving.
But Billie’s uncles had gone so far as to send her a formal letter from an attorney, announcing their intent to challenge her inheritance, two years after it had been disbursed. On the grounds that she was dishonoring her grandfather’s memory and legacy. Assholes.
They’d backed off when she’d had her lawyer send a letter back, name-checking Nick Pagano and his rental agreement. Yellow-bellied assholes.
There was no way she was sitting at Uncle Elliott’s table and pretending she didn’t want to blow them all up. So here she was, in a little split-level home, the décor of which would give her Uncle Gareth the vapors, surrounded by noise and wondering if any of this clamor would set Tony’s father off in some terrifying way.
Rick Cioccolanti looked, to Billy, like a guy who beat his wife and kids. He was shorter than Tony but not by much. He had the heavy, rounded shoulders and sunburnt skin of a man who’d done heavy outdoor labor most of his life, and the belly of a man who’d come home from that work to a nightly six-pack. His face was shaped into a permanent suspicious scowl. Both times she’d been around him, he’d been dressed pretty nicely, in a crisply pressed button-up shirt and khakis, but she could imagine him in a dirty beater, with his fist around a can of beer.
Knowing what the man was capable of, she was uncomfortable around him, though he’d been pleasant enough to her. She could see in the sidelong way he looked at his son that Tony was right—the father feared the son now. Billy supposed that was, at least, an improvement over the reverse. Not healthy, but her family wasn’t healthy, either. They were merely more socially acceptable. With Cain as an exception, of course.
Sheryl, Tony’s mom, was soft and sweet, and a little hyper and frazzled. Today, she had an apron on over a nice skirt and blouse, and fuzzy slippers on her pantyhose-covered feet.
Billy took advantage of a break in the disagreement to raise her voice above the general din and say, “Is there anything I can do?”
Sheryl and Aurora both turned to her. Kiki kept bludgeoning the potatoes.
“Oh, no, honey. You’re a guest,” Sheryl said.
“I’d like to help, if there’s something I can do.”
“You can set the table. I need to feed the baby,” Aurora said, and as if the words were magic, Brandon let out a forlorn little wail, and Tony was at the doorway, holding the baby a few inches from his chest.
“Ro, I draw the line at diapers,” he said, grinning. “He’s cute, but no.”
Aurora took her son from him. “You better get over that, Tone, before you have your own. It’s the twenty-first century. Babies aren’t just women’s work anymore.”
“And yet Lou didn’t jump up to take care of it when this baby let a wet one rip.”
“Hey!” Lou called from the living room. “I’m just sittin’ here! Don’t get me in trouble!”
Tony’s eyes met Billy’s and held. He grinned. Billy couldn’t help but grin back.
~oOo~
Th
at night, still full and sleepy from a Thanksgiving dinner that had been wholly different from anything her family put on a table and yet really delicious, Billy turned as Tony slipped into bed and settled into a familiar embrace, with her head on his chest and his arm hooked around her, his hand resting on her bare hip. While he fussed with his phone with his free hand, checking his texts and setting his alarm, Billy played her fingers through his chest hair and rubbed her thumb over the crucifix he never took off.
He set his phone aside and kissed her head. “Thanks for today. I know they’re a lot, but ... this was the best Thanksgiving I ever had.”
“I liked it, too. It’s different from anything I’ve known, and there’s some weird stuff, but it was fun.”
“Weird stuff because of Pop.”
“Well, yeah. It’s gonna be hard from me to like a man who did what he did to you.”
A quiet chuckle shook his chest. “We’ve got that in common—shitty fathers.”
Things were going okay with Cain so far this time, so Billy took a little bit of umbrage at the thought her loving but hapless father was comparable to Tony’s abusive one, but they’d had that argument already, and the place they landed was simple: abuse came in different guises. Cain had hurt her plenty, though she had no scars.
“Do you think Aurora worries about Brandon around him?”
“First, Pop knows I will feed him to the sharks if he’s even snappy with the baby. Second, I don’t think I’d have the chance. Ro would tear him apart. Have you seen the Wonder Mom thing she’s got going already?”
“Yeah, it’s wild.”
“She was born maternal, though. Always playing house, trying to make me and Kiki be her kids. She had about twenty baby dolls, too.”
They lay together quietly, caressing each other in light ways that were intimate but not suggestive. Simple loving touch. Billy’s mind darted around the day, thinking of Tony’s family, and her own. Baby Brandon. Tony’s affinity for him and his gentle care.
“Do you want kids?” he asked, softly.
“I don’t know. I never thought about it, either to hope or to rule it out.” She kissed his chest and let her mouth linger, feeling his heartbeat on her lips. “I didn’t play house when I was a kid. I had this huge, elaborate dollhouse handed down to me from my mom, and my grandma, but it wasn’t something to play with, and I didn’t really have any other dolls. I had books and instruments, and I played rock star. My parents are both so weird. I don’t know. But I saw you with Brandon today, and ... it moved me, the way you were with him.”
Accidental Evils Page 29