His Read online

  3

  Dominic

  Packing doesn’t take long. I’m hoping this will only take a day, two tops. I pack two suits and a casual outfit just in case. Travelling without luggage is something I don’t do even if I’m just going to New York for the day. It catches people’s attention and that’s the last thing I want.

  I put my gun and knife away so I can make it through security. As soon as I take them off I feel naked without them. In New York I can pick up another gun just like it, if I need it.

  “How long are you going to be gone?” Mary asks as she adds my toiletry kit to my bag.

  “I’m not sure, a day or two.”

  She hands me my bag. “Have a good, safe flight.”

  “Thanks.” I grab two books I’ve been looking forward to reading and tuck them into the bag, then text Everett I’m on my way down.

  The flight doesn’t last long, going through security takes longer. When I land in JFK I grab a cab and head straight to Johnny’s office in Midtown. It’s an uneasy peace between Johnny and the Mafia here in New York City. The Mafia is different than the Outfit in Chicago, a difference the Outfit takes pride in. We don’t get involved in their business, they don’t get involved in ours, unless it’s a big fucking deal.

  Johnny’s cancer was considered a big fucking deal. Last year the doctors were close to calling Johnny good. He was on the verge of coming back to Chicago. Until one last test showed they were wrong. There were plans for another round of chemo until Johnny said fuck it.

  Johnny has told the Family but no one else, and he won’t go into hospice. Although he’ll be buried in Chicago, the place he considers his real home, he wants to die in New York to be close to his mother, who has been on her deathbed for the last six years. Considering the woman is ninety-two, no one is willing to call the tiny old woman a liar. The way things are now, she’ll bury her son.

  Francis is waiting outside the door of what a gold plaque says is an import and export business. “Dom, it’s good to see you. How is your father?”

  “Good, you look good. You lost weight.”

  Francis nods as he runs a hand over his stomach. “Had a heart attack, the wife put me on one of them low-carb diets. The only problem is I can’t cheat on it, the minute I eat a plate of pasta I blow up. It’s not easy, I miss bread.”

  “Better you than me. I’m not going without Pop’s gnocchi.”

  “Ah, your father’s gnocchi.” He sighs. “I miss it. Go on in, Johnny is waiting for you.”

  I open the door to the office. It’s been two years since I last saw Johnny. It was in Chicago right before he found out about the cancer and moved to New York. It was a meeting like most we had. He gave me the name of a guy to kill. That’s pretty much how meetings with Johnny went: it was either a money discussion or getting the order to take care of someone.

  It’s not that he hasn’t needed me to kill anyone in the last two years. I got the orders and made my payment through his underboss Carlo, who ran Chicago on his behalf.

  I take in Johnny for a minute, damn, he looks awful. The once large man has been whittled down to half of what he used to be by the cancer treatments.

  “Dom, thank you for coming.” He rises to shake my hand.

  I return the shake. “No problem.” I sit down across from him, as he indicates, unbuttoning my jacket as I do. “I hear you’re having a problem with your daughter. I’m happy to help, I’m just not sure how I can.”

  He laughs. “Come on, Dom, you look in the mirror every day. I need you to do whatever it is you do to make women fall for you and forget everything else. She thinks she’s marrying a white knight but she’s getting a bum. The guy is an associate of the Bruno family. Alonzo’s son, Benny, brought him in.”

  Alonzo Bruno is the head of the family here in New York. He’s also fucking psychotic. The man has killed one of his sons already when the kid pulled a dumbass move. Word is he’s warned Benny he has no problem doing it again.

  “Benny has the guy, Richard Taylor, cleaning money for him and Alonzo. This bum, he thinks he’s a made guy, some fucking big shot. He’s sniffing up enough coke a night to kill a fucking horse. He’s fucking strippers and is a damn mess. He thinks if he marries Gina I’ll bail him out of the hole he’s in. Him and Gina think they’re getting married at the courthouse tomorrow. I need you to make sure that doesn’t happen and she forgets he ever existed.”

  “How did you find all of this out? Can you show her what you found?”

  “There’s nothing I can show her. It’s all from digging into him through my people. I didn’t know about any of this until a few days ago. Danny was supposed to be keeping an eye on her to keep men away from her. Instead the little fucker has been helping them. She thinks I don’t know it was Danny—he’ll pay for it, but not yet. I got her in her room, she doesn’t know I know about tomorrow. Danny is trying to save his skin by telling me about the eloping thing.” He sighs. “We don’t have the best relationship. Regina wouldn’t want to hear anything I have to say. I’m afraid to push her too much.”

  I’m confused, Johnny isn’t known for delicate sensibilities.

  Running a hand over his face. “She went mute for like four years when she was little. Stress, the psychiatrist said, the school tried everything. I had to send in someone here from the States, and it still took over a year of working with Gina before she started talking again. The lady ended up staying—she was too worried Gina would lapse again to leave.”

  Going mute for four years? That’s some fucking stress and now Johnny’s desire for a softer touch makes more sense. “I’m not sure how to make this happen in just one day. If she thinks she’s getting a white knight, those stars in her eyes aren’t going to disappear overnight.”

  He leans back. “I need you to do whatever it is you need to do, while not killing the bum or hurting my daughter. I know she thinks I don’t care about her, and it’s my fault. Her mother died. I couldn’t take her home to my wife, my mother didn’t want anything to do with her. So I sent her off to school overseas, best school I could find. I’m not gonna lie. It was too damn easy to forget she was even there. I got two updates a year, I figured it was better than anything I could do.”

  His eyes go down, he clears his throat. “Then she turned thirteen, and Sandra died. I went to go get her, thinking, you know, I could do it right. She didn’t want anything to do with me, wouldn’t come with me. When she graduated from school, she still wouldn’t come back to me, to Chicago. Told me her life was in Italy. I had to beg like a fucking dog to get her here. Had to use cancer as a way to see my only daughter before I die.”

  In all the years I’ve known Johnny, I’ve never seen his look of anguish as he talks about Regina.

  A heavy sigh as he looks up at me. “She’s my daughter. I don’t want anything to happen to her or hurt her bad enough for her to do the mute thing again. If I kill him like I want, she’ll never speak to me again for sure, and she might shut down completely. I’m also on unsteady ground with Alonzo, he thinks I’m not paying him enough to operate here. I don’t want to have to ask permission to kill Taylor. I’m trusting you, whatever you think you need to do, I’m giving you permission.”

  Fucking hell.

  “Dinner tonight, be there. I’m getting a new lawyer. I want to make sure he can handle business. You meet Gina and see what it is you can do.”

  I nod, without any idea what the hell is possible in a single night.

  “Dinner is at eight, come early.”

  “I’ll be there.” I’m about to leave when I wonder if I can do this another way. “Can I get his details? DOB, address, any other particulars you have on him?”

  Johnny smiles, he opens a drawer and hands me a single sheet of paper. It has everything I need, address, company he works for and the times he’s there. “This right here is why I picked you to handle this.”

  Another nod is my only answer. I don’t want to disappoint him, but I have no idea how to do it.


  In the elevator I take a picture of the info and shoot it with a text message to Valdez, telling him I need everything Taylor has said and done for the last year with a focus on how it relates to Regina Conti, and I need it as of yesterday. I’m out on the street when he responds to give him a few hours. I reply I need it by seven. He promises I’ll have it. I don’t doubt he’ll deliver. Johnny might not have anything he can show Regina, but I’m sure Valdez can give me something I can use.

  I consider making an approach on Regina now. Yeah, I know I’m good-looking. I don’t have to work to get pussy—I’ve had women try to crawl on my cock without asking if I was even down to fuck. But those were women who were looking for a fuck, not women convinced they were in love with someone else. I’m not sure what the hell Johnny thought I could do with only a few hours over a dinner. Yet going in blind on who Richard Taylor is as my competition doesn’t work for me.

  There isn’t much I can do while I wait. I hate shopping, Pop is the only person I’m willing to do it for, especially when it comes to making up for forgetting his birthday. I make a call. “Patrick, you doing business today?”

  “For you, Mr. Sabatini, I’m always open.”

  “Good, I’m in midtown now. I’m guessing I’ll be forty-five minutes, to an hour.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  I hail a cab. The driver’s accent tells me he’s not from the US but I couldn’t even guess from where, typical New York cabbie. I tell him where I want to go and offer him five hundred to turn off the meter and drive me for the day.

  He considers it. “Show me the cash.”

  When I pull out my money clip he nods. “Get in.”

  The drive is just short of an hour. He pulls to a stop out front. “I’m going to be a little while. You want to go grab something to eat?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Here’s half the cash. Be back within the hour.”

  He nods. “I’ll be here.”

  I open the door of a converted barn, and an electronic chime echoes throughout. Books are everywhere, haphazardly shelved—the sign above the closest standing shelf of books says photography, but there are several memoirs as well as cookbooks crammed onto the shelves.

  “Mr. Sabatini, it’s been a while.” He’s a small man with big glasses. His hair is graying and when he smiles, which he does often, his teeth are a little crooked. Patrick Gransom is the epitome of a nerd, with two PhDs. He also has the in for rare and hard-to-find books. I’ve purchased a 1492 Chronicle of illustrated Rome and Venice from him and a first edition of a fifteenth-century account of the sack of Rome.

  Pop loves to read everything from classical literature to PI mysteries, but he treasures old books. The older and more obscure the better, anything after the seventeenth century is too new.

  “How can I help you?”

  “I need something to make up for forgetting my Pop’s birthday.”

  He chuckles. “Fathers and their birthdays, the shopping never gets easier. Can you believe I got my father the car of my dreams and I thought his, and he says it’s too expensive, he can’t take it?”

  “What did you get him?”

  “A 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS LS6. It’s gorgeous and it’s sitting in my other barn. I can’t take it home, if my wife finds out I have it she’ll divorce me.”

  “You willing to sell it?” My grandfather had one, him and Pop spent hours working on it. I keep my poker face. This would be the best damn gift I’ve ever gotten Pop. I want the car.

  “Hell yeah, I’m willing to sell it. I’m serious about my wife divorcing me. She threatened it when I brought it home. I told her it was for my dad and I still had to sleep in the guest room. Come take a look.”

  We go a few hundred feet to another barn, this one barely cleaned from its original use. There are three other cars, a Ford Mustang, a Pontiac GTO, and a Ferrari from the ’70s that’s seen better days. And I understand why she’s threatening divorce.

  “You weren’t exaggerating, it’s gorgeous.” It’s a deep navy with chrome wheels. “How does it drive?”

  “Like a dream. Let me get the keys.”

  I open the driver’s door. Pop would love this, he used to talk about how he and my grandfather would drive around the city making collections in this car. How they would spend a weekend changing the oil, tuning up the motor. My grandfather loved his car.

  It was the car he was driving in with my grandmother when they were killed. A driver skidded behind them on the icy Chicago streets, pushing them into traffic where another car ran into them. Both my grandmother and grandfather were pronounced dead on the scene. For a minute I wonder if this car would bum Pop out.

  “Want to take her for a ride?”

  I nod. If I hadn’t known better I would think the car just came off the line—the interior is perfect. The car turns over smoothly, the motor roars to life like a pissed-off bobcat. Damn, the streets aren’t huge in the small town, so I can’t get the speed up past fifty. I’m floating on glass even when I stop short, the brakes catch and hold.

  Twenty minutes later, we exchange a cashier’s check for the keys and paperwork. I pay the cabbie the rest of what I owe him and he’s gone.

  On the drive back into the city it isn’t easy to keep my foot from getting heavy. Once I’m in the city the stop-and-go traffic has me frustrated. I pick a hotel two blocks from Johnny’s condo.

  In my hotel room I order up some food. As I’m letting in room service my phone pings with a text from Valdez, it’s a notice he’s hit my email with the results of the investigation. I open my email and double click on the file.

  Sonofabitch.

  ***

  Regina

  I make it home with almost an hour to get ready for dinner. Johnny always has me on show for at least a half hour before the actual time of dinner. I hate how I’m just supposed to sit there nodding and smiling, not saying a word as the men sit around talking about death, beatings, and drug and gun deals like it’s no big deal.

  Okay, it’s not often they discuss murder—usually they talk about how they want to kill someone but can’t because they have to make deals instead. The older men especially hate how things have changed.

  At first, they hadn’t wanted to talk in front of me, which I had appreciated. Then Johnny told them that they needed to act like I wasn’t there. I had to make up for the time I had been away. This was my life. I was a mafia princess and I needed to know the life I was a part of. If my future husband didn’t want me to know, then it was up to him; for now he wanted me sitting in.

  He said it when I’d been here all of two weeks. After he ordered the death of a man for skimming off the money he was laundering for Johnny. Ever since then, I’ve perfected a blank face as I floated away inside my head. Sometimes I thought of the books I was translating or reading; for the last few months I had been thinking of Richard and imagining the life we would have together.

  Tonight, I know I won’t be able to stop myself from thinking of Richard. At least it will be just a lawyer and maybe the lawyer’s wife or girlfriend. Johnny never discusses business with them, so it won’t look odd if a smile escapes me.

  I spray my hair to protect it from the heat of the flat iron. If it were up to me I wouldn’t straighten it at all. Except Johnny thought my hair looked better straightened. I did it so I wouldn’t hear him bitch. My hair is my one saving grace as far as Johnny is concerned. It’s long, down to the middle of my back. The color is so black it’s almost blue. When I don’t straighten my hair it curls just enough to be annoying, not enough to be pretty no matter how many times I try to follow the stylist’s instructions.

  Opening the door to my walk-in closet, I sigh. I prefer maxi skirts with loose T-shirts or soft, silky blouses. When I came from Italy one of the first outings I had was a visit to a department store. Johnny told me I dressed like a peasant from the country. I left with a bunch of clothes I hated. They were all stiff and looked like they were for a wannabe executive.

&
nbsp; I pick a plain black velvet wrap dress that has a long skirt with a slit along the side of my thigh. I’ve worn it before and Johnny was fine with it. Since I can’t walk in heels, I pick out plain black ballet flats. I’m not great with makeup and Johnny wasn’t a fan of me wearing it either, so I stick with just mascara and lipstick. I finish with a careful application of Joy, the ridiculously expensive perfume I’ve fallen in love with. It was my mother’s favorite.

  A last glance in the mirror is the same as always. I’m not bad; I’m not stunning either. I’ll never be one of those timelessly beautiful women that stop men in their tracks. I’m okay with that. Or maybe I should say I’m reconciled to it. A pang of unease hits me as I wonder again what will happen if I can’t lose the weight Richard wants me to. Glancing at the clock, I push down the concern—it’s time for me to make my appearance.

  As I leave my room the doorbell goes off. Maria is already at the door. She opens it and I watch her blush. Interesting, I’ve never seen her do that, and there have been several good-looking men who’ve visited. With a giggle, she closes the door before she takes off toward the kitchen. That must be some new lawyer. The last one was eighty if he was a day with large, bulbous eyes. My eyes flick to the man.

  Holy shit, everything in me stutters to a stop as I take him in. He is a black-haired, blue-eyed Roman god come to life in a cut-to-fit black silk suit. Below his broad forehead, a sharp nose looks like it’s been broken and reset at least once, maybe even twice, yet the slight imperfection doesn’t detract in the slightest. Oddly, it only adds to his appeal. I’m annoyed at the shadow of a beard along his jaw hiding his beautiful face. His mustache and beard frame wide, sensually molded lips perfectly. Dimly, I’m aware he’s tall, six three or six four. He’s also wide, a wall of muscle, yet not so much he’s bulging out of his suit. Our eyes meet and I’m plunged deep into the churning ocean of his intense blue eyes. I can’t look away, can’t blink.

  My first thought was Roman god, yet the longer I stare into bluer than blue eyes, so at odds with his glowing caramel skin and black hair, I can’t get the idea of an angel out of my mind. A fallen one with wicked thoughts clear in those eyes. Is my mouth seriously watering? Then he sends all the air out of my lungs with a woosh when he smiles, flashing two deep dimples in each cheek. I have no idea how I stay standing. I think I’m smiling back, I’m not sure.