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“Right.”
I make it three steps toward the door before stopping.
Kenny stiffens as I glance back at Trevor’s lifeless form on the floor before pinning him with my gaze.
“If I have to come back here because you missed something, I’m going to be annoyed.”
His Adam’s apple bobs once. “Won’t happen. I’ve got it.”
“I hope so.”
I leave him with Trevor.
The Grecos have never called themselves a mafia family.
Other people do.
Reporters, prosecutors, federal agents trying to turn organized crime into something juries can at least attempt to understand.
GRECO CRIME FAMILY looks better across the top of a whiteboard than a collection of legitimate companies, illegal enterprises, old neighborhood loyalties, bribed officials, narcotics routes, bookmaking operations, protection rackets, construction contracts, and laundering networks.
Frank Greco preferred the word family.
Mathias prefers business.
Quillan calls it an organization when he is feeling respectable and an empire when he’s been drinking or “testing” the product.
I usually just call it work.
By the time I came home from Iraq, Frank was already loosening his grip, though nobody outside the inner circle knew it. He had spent four decades making himself indispensable, and then discovered age doesn’t give a shit how feared you are.
He’d developed heart problems and had to get a hip replacement after arthritis damn near ate the whole bone.
Mathias was thirty-two when he effectively took control, young enough that half the older men expected him to fail and spiteful enough to make sure none of them got the satisfaction.
He didn’t fail.
He trimmed the organization instead.
Cut loose people who cost more than they earned. Shifted money into businesses that attracted less federal attention. Stopped tolerating pointless violence that generated headlines without generating profit. Put Quillan over most of the financial side because his younger brother can find six missing dollars in a ledger containing eight million while high.
And eventually he found me, or I found him—depends on which one of us tells the story.
What I needed was money, though money was the smaller part of it. Mostly, I needed somewhere to put the hours, because civilian life was pure shit.
The military had given every hour of my existence a purpose, even when the purpose was boredom, discomfort, or waiting for somebody to shoot at me. Coming home left me with hospital rooms, appointments, medications, physical therapy, occupational therapy, prosthetists, shrinks, forms, disability evaluations, and a thousand well-meaning people congratulating me for surviving as if I’d fucking won the game of war.
Mathias offered simple work. Find a person, retrieve a thing, deliver a message that didn’t require words—that sort of shit. I was suited to it.
My military training helped, but plenty of trained men enter criminal organizations and discover discipline in one environment doesn’t translate into another.
What Mathias valued more was patience and common sense.
I don’t panic; I don’t improvise because I’m bored; I don’t drink while working; I don’t take things personally; I don’t hurt people merely because I enjoy proving I can; and when Mathias gives me a problem, I return with it solved.
By my third year in, nobody questioned anymore why the former SEAL with one arm was being given jobs above men who had grown up around the Grecos.
By the fifth, Mathias stopped assigning anyone to supervise me.
