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Debating on what to tell her, I go with the truth; it’s public knowledge anyway. “He and my mom were both casualties of the Russo war. I watched as they were killed by a pipe bomb hidden beneath the floorboards of the front porch of our house.”
“God, I’m sorry,” Katerina says, cupping my cheeks and pressing her lips to mine for a soft kiss. Pulling back, she wonders, “And yet you still chose this life?”
Fabio, sixteen-years old
“What does your tattoo mean?” I ask Darius, eyeing a wicked-looking devil tattoo on his right forearm.
“My calling card,” he answers, pumping out a set of bicep curls, and all the little hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end. My old man had a calling card—his street name was the Chemist, and he had the periodic table tattooed on his right forearm.
“You a dealer?”
He snorts a laugh. “Nah, drugs will kill you.”
There’s a buzzing sound, and he drops the weights and reaches into his pocket. Pulling out a pager, he reads the message. “You wanna roll with me this evening? I’ll throw you a little piece of the pie so you can afford my regimen. But only if,” he pauses, “you can be trusted.”
I square my jaw. “I’m no rat.”
“Glad to hear it. Cause otherwise, I’d have to kill you, and it would be a shame not to see your big transformation here in a few months,” he tells me. “So, you in?”
Nonna would not be happy, and that’s why I’m not going to tell her. “I’m in.”
Having crawled out my bedroom window and climbed down the lattice, I’m now standing on the corner three blocks from Nonna’s house. It’s borderline sketchy in this neighborhood anyway, but at midnight, I keep glancing nervously over my shoulder, jumping like a scared cat at every groan and creak.
A car rolls up, and I breathe a sigh of relief when Darius rolls down the window. “Get in.”
He doesn’t have to tell me twice. I scramble into the passenger seat and slam the door, and he pulls away from the curb. “You gotta work on confidence, man. If I were looking for someone to mug, you would have been target numero uno.”
“Lucky for me you weren’t looking for someone to mug. Where are we going?”
“I’ve got a package to pick up. Why didn’t you tell me your old man was Frankie Mazza?”
My eyes wide with surprise, I say, “You didn’t ask. How do you know about my old man?”
“I do my homework.”
“Didn’t know there was homework in the school of hard knocks,” I say, and Darius chuckles. I want to ask more questions, but since I don’t want to be accused of being a cop again, I bite my tongue.
We ride in companionable silence for some time, arriving at the outskirts of AC. Darius turns down a deserted road, where we reach an old barn. A refrigerated truck is parked in front of it, and we stop, Darius backing up his car until the vehicles’ trunks are facing each other. “Let’s go,” he says, and I step out of the car and into the pitch-black night.
A man exits the truck, and he and Darius have a quiet conversation. I can’t make out what they’re saying, but the man finally turns his attention to me. “Damn, that kid’s got one ugly mug.”
“The package, Matteo,” Darius says, ignoring the man’s commentary about my face.
“Pop your trunk,” Matteo tells him.
Darius walks over and opens his trunk, and Matteo opens the back of the refrigerated truck, where two men are seated inside. They hop out, carrying a third man who’s bound and gagged. I’m not sure if the “package” is alive or not; the man’s not moving, and his eyes are closed.
“You searched and secured the package?” Darius asks.
“I don’t need the Greek to tell me how to do my fucking job.” Matteo waves his hand in annoyance. “Run along, delivery boy, with the package and the pizza.” He eyes my face again when he says the last part, and his men snicker.
Darius says something in what I guess is Greek, smirking.
“You know I don’t speak Greek gibberish,” Matteo says, clearly annoyed.
“I do. Gentlemen.” Darius nods to the other men before signaling for me to go.
When we’re on the road, Darius says, “I noticed you fisting your hands back there when Matteo was talking shit about you.”
