Chapter Forty-Eight - Weston
Perfect, Romantic, me, Mysterious, and Match all in the same room with Five.
It’s not a good feeling.
Not at all.
The last time this happened we were being charged with rape.
After Pops killed Lucio, the whole place just went crazy. We got the fuck out of there. It’s mob territory and no cops coming, were coming to help. Mysterious led us through the back door. I picked Tori up and threw her over my shoulder. She was screaming. Calling her father’s name. But Match picked him up, all broken and bloody, and took him with us to the helicopter waiting on a roof a few blocks away.
Dozens of people saw us.
No one tried to stop us.
“At least we know more than we did,” Perfect says. Then he shrugs, because really, we don’t. Add in the fact that we don’t know what Allen was doing when he started fucking with Perfect’s girlfriend, or whether or not Romantic’s psycho sibling was in on anything back then, not to mention I’ve still got a secret or two I’m not ready to talk about and… yeah.
Nothing is settled at all.
We might even be worse off than we were.
“How’s Tori?” Mysterious asks. He’s been weird since that night. He’s beating himself up because he didn’t get us there just a few minutes earlier. Just a few minutes earlier and we’d have left Tori out of everything and taken care of business. But he’s getting better now. Calming down. I’ve come to the conclusion I prefer calm, asshole Paxton Vance than agitated, manic Paxton Vance. He’s got one of those mint juleps in his hand. He’s sucked down like six of them since we got here.
“Good, I think. Relieved. Sad about her father. But I for one am glad he’s the one who pulled the trigger and not her.” He died in a Colorado hospital about two days after that whole thing went down. Five arranged the hospital.
Fucking Five.
And no one came looking for us about Lucio Gori Junior.
Fucking Five again, I think.
Tori was a mess. But I’m just grateful—blessed, happy, pleased, thankful… whatever you want to call it—that it was him and not her. I am all of those things. It’s horrible to think that way, but I don’t care. “Or any of us,” I add, looking around the room.
Romantic nods and takes a deep breath.
“So?” Match says. “What’s next?”
“Me?” Mysterious says, making himself a new drink. “I guess. I’m the next target, right? They had my evidence in Nolan’s house. No one saw it but me and Romantic, but how long do you think we have to wait until we figure out for sure that Lucio Gori was not the one who really set us up? I mean, will we have to live with this hanging over us for the rest of our lives?”
“I think,” Five says, leaning up against my kitchen counter, “I think we give it some time, see how things shake out after a few weeks. Maybe whoever it is will be happy with what they got?” He looks at me, waiting to see if I’ll add anything to my story.
But I don’t.
Won’t.
That shit needs to stay where I left it. Buried in the past.
Lucio Gori’s family did steal my money, that’s what Five was referring to. And it’s gone. For good. But I meant what I told Tori. I don’t care. We can start over. Once a self-made man, always a self-made man. That’s one thing I learned from my good-for-nothing real father.
Besides, Mysterious has already transferred the money he owed me into a new set of accounts. I’m good. No man should complain that he only has several million in the bank. So I won’t.
The last time we had a Mister meeting was after all that shit went down with Romantic. And it’s starting to become a pattern. They fuck with us, we win, we settle down, they come back and try again.
I guess we won’t be able to settle down.
“A few weeks, huh?” Perfect asks Five.
Five shrugs. “Give or take. If it was Lucio, then we should be fine. The threat has been neutralized. We should just stay the fuck off the East Coast for a while.”
Despite the seriousness of that warning, we all chuckle. Fucking mobsters. They can have New York. We’re all out west now, anyway.
“It wasn’t Lucio,” Mysterious says. “I think we all know it wasn’t Lucio who set us up.”
Well, I think I’m the only one here who knows for sure who it was. I didn’t before all this happened. Not really. I’ve had my suspicions over the years. But after that island bullshit. That whole Wallace Arlington contract—which turned out to be fake. I called him up after the shit settled down and he had no clue what I was talking about—Yeah. It wasn’t Lucio. I’m glad he’s dead. But it wasn’t him who set us up back in school. Nothing about that makes sense.
“You ever gonna get a girlfriend, Match?” I ask, trying to change the subject. Get them thinking about something else. “I mean, for fuck’s sake. What kind of man runs an online dating site and doesn’t even use his own service?”
“If you headhunt me a girl, Corporate, I swear to God…” But we’re all laughing.
It’s good to laugh about it.
What else can you do? Let it change you? Let it control you? Let it eat you away from the inside out?
“Well,” Perfect says. “Match and I are leaving for Colorado in about an hour.”
“Have fun,” Romantic says. “I gotta get back to the resort, anyway. Big chef’s class coming up this weekend. What about you, Five?”
“No personal details, friends. It’s better you don’t know.”
“Right,” Mysterious says, downing his drink as he gets up from my dining room table. “All secrets all the time with you. I’ve got no one at home for me, but hey, there’s always work. So that’s where I’m headed. New case came in today. Gonna take it, I think. Just to get my groove back.”
He’s not as cocky as he was a few weeks ago, that’s for sure. And I hope they leave us alone. I hope he doesn’t have to deal with the bullshit Perfect, Romantic, and I have gone through.
But it’s wishful thinking.
There’s more coming.
We’re not done yet.
“Hey,” Match says, looking at Mysterious. “What’s with you and these girly fucking drinks, anyway? The last time I saw you, it was straight bourbon all the time.
“My hot new assistant has me hooked on them,” Mysterious laughs. “She’s a fucking wild little trip, man. And goddammit, she’s good in bed.”
“Well, that fucking mint julep reminds me of my damn sister.”
“Ariel?” Mysterious laughs. “I cannot picture Ariel drinking mint juleps.”
We all laugh at that. Fucking Ariel is one tough chick. She’s not a girly-drink kind of girl.
“Not Ariel, you dumbass,” Match says. “Cinderella.”
Mysterious spits out the alcohol he was just about to swallow and it goes all over Five, who narrows his eyes and brushes off his suit. “What did you just say?” Mysterious asks. “You do not have a sister named Cinderella.”
“Cindy, you freak. You’ve never met her. She’s the black sheep. Took off when she turned eighteen and became some kind of wanderer.”
“I gotta go,” Mysterious says. He grabs a pack sitting by the door and two seconds later, it’s like he was never here.
“What the fuck was that about?” I ask.
“Who knows with him,” Romantic says. “He’s probably banging a girl named Cinderella and now he thinks it’s your sister.”
Everyone but Match thinks that’s hilarious.