“Focus on the book, Lara. Just the book. Tell me about it. Only that.”
“The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood. A paperback. I had it with me, and didn’t put it in my bag because I was still reading as I left The Ground Floor. I lost the book. I’ve read it a few times, but I was only half through it this time.” Her heart was so loud, too loud, and slamming against the walls of her chest.
“Listen to the timer, Lara. Try to inhale for six ticks, and let it out for six ticks.”
She listened, and obeyed.
“Now take five more breaths just like it, for six total. Six breaths—six ticks in, six out.”
When she finished the sixth breath, she was steady again. Dr. Rosen let her sit quietly and settle into the restored mental equilibrium, and then he asked, “What happened to the book?”
She knew now; she remembered. “It fell from my hands when I was grabbed. The van pulled up, and the side door slid open—I heard it but I didn’t understand the danger—and hands grabbed me and dragged me in. I dropped my book.”
When Dr. Rosen handed over the box of tissues, Lara realized she was crying. It wasn’t something she did often. Trying for six-count breaths, she wiped her eyes and cheeks.
“That’s a breakthrough, Lara. Very good work, and a very good start. I think we should take these last few minutes and just be quiet.”
~oOo~
On the last Friday in May, one day short of eight weeks after she’d been snatched from her own street and dropped her book on the sidewalk, one day after her seventh session with Dr. Rosen, two weeks after she’d begun to write in her journal, Lara stood with her father at the far corner of her block. Halfway down this block was her own home. All the way down the block was the coffee shop where she’d lost what she’d had before.
She stood on the corner, running numbers through her head, numbers she’d known for all the years she’d lived here, numbers that were constants: The exact number of concrete squares on each side of the sidewalk. The number of windows facing the street on both sides. The number of panes in those windows. The number of front doors. The number of balusters on every porch railing. The number of steps leading up to every porch. Mailboxes. Locks on front doors. Windows in front doors. Plants on porches. Grey porches. White porches. Red doors, black doors, white doors. All those constants, and the patterns they made, the calculations she’d conceived: ratios of locks to doors, windows to panes, steps to balusters to doors to windows to panes to locks to …
Her father’s hand slid into hers and squeezed. “We can try again tomorrow, sweetheart.”
Lara took in a breath, imagining six ticks of Dr. Rosen’s kitchen timer, and six more ticks to let it out. “No. I want to walk to the end of the block and back.”
Just that. Across the street from her house, from The Ground Floor, from her past. Down to the stop sign, pivot, and back.
She took the first step. Her father took it with her.
With each step, her last day on this street came more alive, took on more color, more sound, more texture, more taste. The door was open now, and the monster was loose.
When they were abreast of her building, the apartment she loved, Lara kept her eyes on the sidewalk. She wasn’t ready for that, to see her home that hadn’t felt like her home for one day less than eight weeks.
When they reached the corner, she was shaking and crying and she couldn’t look up. She heard the jingle of the bell over the door at the market, she heard the sounds of people sitting at the tiny sidewalk tables at The Ground Floor. She smelled the baking of their famous cinnamon raisin rolls, which smelled good, but had too much scent, and thus flavor, for Lara ever to have tried. It was all familiar, but she kept her eyes on her feet, on the sidewalk.
“We’re here, Lara,” her father said, his words a croon to soothe a frightened child. “You made it.”
Lara nodded and let her father’s gentle arm turn her around. They headed back the way they’d come.
It didn’t feel like a victory, but it was one.
~ 11 ~
When Trey’s alarm went off, he could have wept. Ugh, fuck. Tempted to hit snooze, instead he grabbed his phone and turned the alarm off, then checked his texts through bleary, half-hung-over, half-still-drunk eyes.
Memorial Day weekend was historically a huge weekend in Quiet Cove, and not only because it was the official start to the summer in this seaside town. His family traditionally held an enormous, blow-out beach bash on the Saturday of Memorial weekend, serving free food and drink to all comers, under the banner of Pagano & Sons Construction. Trey’s grandfather had started the tradition long before Trey’s birth, and the family had kept it going after his grandfather’s death. In fact, they’d expanded it, inaugurating a 10K memorial run in Carlo Sr.’s honor the year of his death. That run had become a significant draw all along the coast, and it had pulled a bigger crowd to the beach for the Saturday party, too.
The entire Pagano family, even those members who’d moved away, and including all the extended family members brought in through marriage, celebrated the whole weekend. These days, the party started Friday, with a big family cookout at the house on Caravel Road, where Trey’s parents still lived, then the beach party all day and night Saturday, then Mass and brunch after at Nick and Bev’s house on Sunday, and chilling out with games and movies the rest of the day, and culminating with the run on Monday morning. For the Paganos, Memorial Day was bigger than Christmas and Easter combined.
Now it was barely dawn on Saturday morning, and Trey was still drunk from the night before, with a woozy headache creeping in hard on the heels of the drunk, waiting to fuck him up for the day. He needed like three more hours of sleep in a perfectly pitch-black room. But his bedroom faced the beach. East, and sunrise.
Plus, he had to get his ass up. As the current resident of the Pagano beach house, he was base camp for the party. He kicked the sheet away and sat up.
Fuck. It was that damn scotch Eli had brought. A whole case of top-shelf shit. Hard liquor was not a drunk Trey ever chased. Booze for a toast, in the right situation, or to sip when Nick offered it, and that was about it. Otherwise, beer and wine was his preference. But his grandfather had been a scotch man, and Eli had arranged for a special label from his friend’s distillery, to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Carlo Sr.’s beloved beach party. Among all the drinkers in the family, Trey thought they’d killed that stupid case of twelve-year-old Scotch in one night.
Usually, he didn’t drink that much around his family. They still saw him as a kid most of the time, so when they saw him with a drink, they gave him these stunted judgmental looks, like What are you—oh, right, it’s okay. Besides, his old man got combative when he was drunk, and Trey was like him in at least that way. When his dad and uncles were younger, there was almost always a brawl at family parties. Everybody hugged it out after, for the most part, but still. Mostly in their fifties now, they’d all calmed down, but they could still get a good shouting match on.
One thing his father had never done was hit him. If they both got scrappy drunk at the same time, though, with the way things had been between them since he’d gone to the other side, they could cross a line they couldn’t come back from. So normally, Trey watched what he drank around his family.
Not yesterday, though. He’d felt weird all afternoon and evening, like he was out of sync with his family. It was such a huge conglomeration of people now, all his aunts and uncles married, most of them with kids, Nick’s family completely assimilated, too—with the whole family together, it was more than thirty people packed into the family house. And a weird, mishmashed bunch they were, too. It should have been impossible to feel out of place in that band.
But he’d felt different yesterday, not quite part of things, and he’d hated it. Which, apparently, had made him fill up his glass at every opportunity.
Thankfully, his dad had been in a good mood. Ben was home from Yale for the summer. Trey’s younger brother, the son that wasn
’t an infuriating disappointment to their father. Studying to be an architect, just like good ol’ dad.
He got up and dragged himself to the window. Even before the sun was more than a glimmer on the water, Trey could see it was going to be a beautiful day. It would be a good day for surfing, too—beautiful, clean waves, rolling in one after the other.
If he got moving, before he called home and Misby gave him his orders for the day, he could take an hour to get wet, while the surf was good and the beach was empty. No better way to get his head clear than that.
~oOo~
Every year, it got bigger. Trey stood at the edge of the tide line, with his back to the water, and surveyed the crush of humanity. For the whole length of the Quiet Cove beach, the sand was packed with people. Beach tents and chairs, umbrellas and blankets, coolers and baskets, inflatable toys and foam noodles, and the crush of people who’d brought them, all in wildly bright colors and patterns and shapes and sizes. The noisy hum of all that human interaction was like an idling jet engine.
The stretch of beach as wide as his house and straight down to the water was Pagano private property, but on this day, with so many people, from so many places, few even knew to respect that line.
His Uncles Luca, John, and Joey, the sons who ran Pagano & Sons, were hard at work at the big barrel grill, preparing, grilling, and serving the meat. Aunts Katrynn and Tina, John and Joey’s wives, were managing the buffet line for condiments and side dishes. Aunt Carmen and Uncle Eli were in charge of the beach volleyball games, and Trey had been helping them out. Uncle Theo, Misby, and Aunt Rosa were keeping an eye on the younger kids. The kids who were old enough to keep track of themselves were mostly getting their asses in trouble. The little band of Trey’s cousins everybody called the Fearsome Foursome—Nick’s two youngest, Carina and Ren; John’s oldest, Johnny; and Rosa’s oldest, Rita—all of them eleven or twelve years old, and bound by some kind of unholy alliance to cause mayhem everywhere they went, tore across the sand, chasing some poor dog who looked like he didn’t know whether this game was supposed to be fun or horrifying.
Nick’s family was here, but Nick hadn’t yet arrived. This was a day of the year that he never asked Trey to work, but it was also a day that he generally set aside for family as well. That he’d sent Aunt Bev and the kids without him meant there was some kind of work that wouldn’t wait.
Trey scanned the beach and didn’t see Angie, either. The Paganos congregated in and around the private beach, so he didn’t have to look far, or through the entire throng, to know that he wasn’t here. Angie didn’t really like this party, but he was a Pagano man and Tina’s brother, so he had to show his face. Unless there was work.
“Hey.”
Somebody bumped his hip, and Trey turned and smiled down at his cousin Teresa. She had a fullsuit on, folded down at her hips to show the top of a blue bikini. Teresa had been born really premature, and she was small because of it. When she was little, she’d been scrawny as hell, and had gotten picked on a lot. Ben, who was a lover not a fighter, had tried to keep her safe, but it had been Trey, six years older, far larger, and much more aggressive, who’d done the fighting for them—or, more often, the scaring. Bullies were cowards, every one of them.
When Teresa was in middle school, she decided that she didn’t want to go through life the weakling, and she’d started taking martial arts classes and working out. That had become a lifestyle, and now she was a buff little warrior shrimp.
“Hey,” he answered with a smile. “You getting wet?”
“Yeah. Ben’s inside suiting up. You want to come out?”
Aunt Carmen and Uncle Theo’s only kid, Teresa was nineteen, the same age as his brother Ben, just a couple of months younger. Ben and Teresa had developed an insanely deep, twinlike bond. They’d started school together, been in all the same classes together, been simply inseparable. They weren’t related at all by blood—Ben was adopted—but their friendship had the ‘private language’ kind of depth that Trey had never understood. Teresa was far closer to his own brother than he was.
He and Ben got along fine, though. The years between their ages had made Trey feel protective, not jealous. By the time Ben was old enough to choose a path that followed their dad, Trey was glad for him, and for their dad, with maybe some wistfulness, but no jealousy. But Ben’s real bond was with Teresa.
There was no one in his generation of family to whom Trey was particularly close. He was six and a half years older than Ben, who was the next oldest of all the kids. Those six and a half years might as well have been a whole generation.
It was his uncles he felt close to. Luca and Joey especially. But the unsettled distance he’d felt yesterday was still on him. In the family orchestra, he was out of tune somehow. Maybe he had been since he and his father had started to butt heads, and he was just now finally feeling it ripple through the rest of them.
Or maybe it was that they’d all figured out he was serious about staying with Nick.
“Trey? Anybody home?” Teresa bumped him again, and he pulled his head out of his ass. To see her peering up at him with bright blue eyes.
“Sorry. Still hung over, I guess.”
“You want to get wet with us?”
He’d taken his wetsuit off hours ago, when the setup on the beach had started in earnest, but it was no trouble to get back into it. Turning to the water, though, Trey made a face. The ocean was crowded with people—surfers bobbing on boards, lined up like a breadline, waiting for their wave, and families and kids splashing in the shallows. That was not good surfing, not for somebody who could go out when he wanted.
“Nah. You guys go on. Show the kooks how it’s done.” He turned back to face the beach and saw his brother coming out of his house, taking his longboard off the wall.
Nick came around from the road behind the house at the same time, with Angie at his side. They were both dressed, sort of, for the beach, in jeans and casual shirts.
Carina and Ren went to their father at once, and Nick hooked his arms around them and kissed their heads. Lolling near the tideline on a shared blanket, Nick’s second daughter, Lia, nudged her older sister, Elisa, and pointed to their father on the beach. They both pulled t-shirts on over their bikinis before their dad noticed them.
Trey chuckled and headed toward Nick. He held out his hand and slapped palms with his brother as they passed each other.
~oOo~
Two weeks later, late on a midweek night, Trey sat in the passenger seat of Donnie Goretti’s Porsche. His Beretta was holstered under his arm. That piece was as much a part of his Pagano Brothers ‘uniform’ as the Armani jacket it was concealed under, but he’d only pulled it in action three times, and only fired it twice.
Would tonight be the next time?
Donnie tucked his head a bit and scanned the view beyond the windshield. “I need you steady, Trey. You’re here to learn, so you do what I say, when I say it, and you keep steady. No matter what.”
“Understood, Donnie. I’ll follow your lead.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
They got out of the car, buttoned their suit jackets, straightened their cuffs, and walked toward a Pagano Brothers Shipping warehouse on the other side of Quiet Cove Harbor from the business headquarters.
~oOo~
Mel and Bobbo stood just inside the warehouse door. Both stood tall and looked sharp when Donnie, Don Pagano’s second, came through the door. Though Trey was taller and broader than Donnie, he was dwarfed by the underboss’s presence as he followed behind.
“Boss,” Mel said. Bobbo tipped his head in something akin to a bow. Both Bobbo and Mel were in their late fifties, older than Donnie, but only one man had more power in the Pagano Brothers organization.
“Talk to me, boys,” Donnie said. “What’ve we got?” He headed to the plastic strip curtain, and Bobbo trotted ahead and pulled the strips back for the boss.
“Nothing yet,” Mel answered, falling in line behind Donnie. “This guy’s tong
ue is tied down tight so far.”
Trey pulled the other side of the curtain, letting Bobbo go through before him, and took up the tail himself. He took opportunities to show the men that he didn’t hold himself above them when they arose.
Inside the warehouse, hanging by his wrists from a shipping hook, was a man Trey didn’t know. He didn’t know who he was, but he knew what he was: a bagman for the Bondaruk bratva. He’d been stripped to his trousers, and his feet were bare. His hairy chest glistened with sweat, and beads of it dripped from his drooping head and spattered on the concrete floor. He’d been badly beaten, but not yet truly tortured. That was why Donnie was here.
“They pulled him from Jersey?” Donnie asked, slipping out of his jacket and hanging it neatly over a workbench peg. As he unfastened his cufflinks and folded his cuffs back, Trey shrugged out of his jacket and hung it up. Following Donnie’s lead.
“Yeah,” Mel answered. “But he’s one of the assholes we’ve marked digging around on our side of the fence. I guess that’s why Berto and Sandy got stupid.”
Two other Pagano men had been in New Jersey on a minor errand for Nick when they’d come across this guy and plucked him right out of Bondaruk turf—without getting Nick’s okay first. Taking ‘initiative,’ they’d thought. Helping the don with his Ukrainian problem. Getting noticed.
They’d gotten noticed, all right. Nick and Angie weren’t here in the warehouse now because Berto and Sandy had gotten all of Nick’s attention they could have hoped for and more, far more than they’d wanted. Now they were wrapped up in canvas tarps, being sent to their salty eternity in the Atlantic Ocean.
Berto and Sandy had been right about one thing: a bagman was a prime catch. Working in collections, a man like this knew all the secrets and leverage. If they’d called Nick, and if he’d approved the grab, or if they’d just waited to make their move until the guy was on Paganos turf, they might have been heroes.
Simple Faith (The Pagano Brothers Book 1) Page 13