Page 88 of Alonzo

“No. Not exactly.”

“What the fuck?” My father never swears. Well, almost never. “Lonz, this isn’t a joke! We have a job this weekend.”

“I know. I said I’m on it, OK? She’s not going to interfere, I promise.”

“Even if that’s true,” Tony says, “we have a new, potentially bigger problem. Johnny Boston is in town.”

“What? Why?”

“You tell us,” my dad says.

“I don’t know,” I tell my dad. “I tried to talk to him over Christmas and see what kind of shit he thinks he saw last summer, but he wouldn’t take my calls and he spent all of Christmas Day hiding from me in that massive shit-show of an apartment up in the Bossy.”

My dad frowns. “He’s here for a reason. We need to know what it is.”

“Ask your new favorite son, Jesse. I’m sure he’s here because of him.”

“No,” Tony says. He’s really starting to get on my nerves. “Jesse has no idea he’s in town. I talked to him at breakfast and he said he was just gonna hang out at the marina with his stupid client today. But that was before I saw Tara, Rosalie, and that dude they’re with practically jump on him as he was walking past the rental cottage towards the beach. They went with him.”

“Hmm. Well… I might have something to do with that. I kinda hired Tara to… look into the Boston family.”

“Why?”

“Dad, seriously? They’re dirty as fuck. And Jesse admitted that Emma’s now in on it. Have we or have we not been lying to Emma and Mom for eighteen years about what we really do? Now these Boston assholes think they’re gonna just what, drag Emma into their own dirty business after we’ve kept her out of ours all this time? No. I want to know what they’re into, OK?” I point at Tony. “So that’s what you saw today. Tara is on a job for me. And if Belinda—”

“Rosalie.”

“—becomes a problem, well, that’s your mess to clean up. Not mine.”

“It’s not his mess, Lonz. It’s not your mess. It’s our mess. There is way too much action happening on Dumas Street right now. We need Rosalie—”

“Belinda,” I say.

“Whoever! She needs to go. And so does your girl and that boy. Who is he?”

“I don’t know.”

Tony points his finger at me. “That’s a problem.”

“Look, we can use the hostel this time. That’s why we bought it, right?”

Tony isn’t convinced. “And what if Rosalie goes back over there asking where her mother went?”

“She won’t. No one over there knows anything anyway. We got rid of all her people when we got rid of her mom. I’ll handle Belinda and her friend, OK? You two just concentrate on the job. Now I gotta go. It’s late and Tara is probably waiting for me at home.”

I don’t wait for the sneer I know is coming from Tony at that statement. Just slide out of the booth and turn my back to them.

But my dad is right about one thing. There’s way too much happening on Dumas Street right now. Because when I get home the first person I see when I walk through my door isn’t Tara, or Belinda, or her friend, Vann.

It’s Johnny Boston. He’s sitting on my fucking couch with his ankle propped up on one knee and a tumbler of whiskey in his hand.

“What the fuck are you doing? And where the hell is Tara?”

Johnny takes a sip of his drink, narrows his eyes at me, and says, “I think we might accidentally have mutual business together.”

“I think you’re mistaken.”

“I think you should sit down.”