Page 101 of Dirty Pool

Michel nodded, though his father couldn’t see it. “Will do.”

After a quick goodbye, Michel hung up the call. He rubbed the heel of his palm against his forehead, and wished shit wasn’t so … confusing. And difficult. It was all hard, too. Nothing could ever be simple for him when he needed shit to just be one clear path.

But he was the one who worked best under pressure, right?

That’s when he did his best work.

Or it used to be.

Michel leaned back a bit on the table, his hand resting against the felt top. Mistakenly, he hit one of the balls on the table, causing the other player who had been silent during his conversation to give him a look.

“That’s dirty pool, man,” the guy said, “moving balls like that.”

Michel didn’t even answer the man back. He was too busy running through his previous thoughts, and the conversation with his father.

Dirty pool.

Michel had assumed the button for Charles Casey was his daughter—the man said it, essentially, and he believed it to be true. But was there more than one? After all, the man was running a whole family. And not every person in that organization cared for Gabbie the same way Charles did.

They had other priorities. Like themselves, and the men they were protecting. Those are the ones at the top, and the ones keeping them safe.

Was there another button to push for the Irish family besides Gabbie that would force Charles Casey into a war? Could Michel find it? What would happen if he punched that button as hard as he fucking could? What if he did something that made them react?

He bet the city would be in such an uproar, and both the Italians and Irish would be so busy with one another … they would entirely forget about him. Maybe Gabbie, too. At least, for a time.

Michel was going to find out.

• • •

Sal had bad habits.

It was also one of the first things Michel tended to notice about the people around him—he found quirks, or oddities to be something that made people more interesting. He also found that their bad habits were sometimes the things about a person that spoke to deeper beliefs or explained certain choices someone might make day to day.

Sal was paranoid.

Constantly.

It was the second thing Michel realized about the man. Sal didn’t like to shake hands with strangers. The shaking hands thing was an oddity, sure, but not uncommon in the world of Mafiosi. Made men were often careful when shaking hands with someone they weren’t familiar with lest they touch the hand of a cop, or worse, a rival that wasn’t—as a proper made man would say—of their standard.

The paranoid thing?

That’s where it got interesting.

That’s what Michel could use.

Sal was so paranoid, in fact, that when he was inside one of his many businesses, he kept the security cameras turned off. He told Michel once, that should something happen when he was inside, and the authorities asked what happened to the footage on the security cameras, Sal would simply say it must have been a glitch. Shit happened all the time with electronics, and it was a perfectly acceptable excuse.

To Sal, anyhow.

Michel could have poked a half a dozen holes into the man’s theory, but he’d quickly learned that when it came to Sal, it was better to just keep his mouth shut. The man wasn’t interested in the opinions of others, he just wanted people to agree with him, and be done with it. So, that’s what Michel did.

Usually.

Tonight, though, he planned on using Sal’s paranoia and bad habit against him. The cameras in the club Sal frequented every Friday and Saturday night to do his business, never failed, would be turned off. Sure, Michel expected there to be a handful of Sal’s associates inside the club as well, but they were always at their posts.

At the same time, Sal drifted between his office, the VIP section, and the bathrooms in the far hallway that everyone used. Michel never understood why the man didn’t have a private bathroom installed in his office, or at least closer to it, so that he didn’t have to use the public one, but again …

Bad habits.