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I let her hand drop, and she pulled it back and clenched her fist. With a barely perceptible grimace, she lightly rubbed the wrist I was holding as if to rub off my touch as I checked my watch. “I gotta head to a meeting,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”
“Right,” she said.
I stepped out before I answered the call. “What is it?”
“What took you so long, man?” Chase demanded. “I thought someone had gotten to you or offed you already.”
“Ha ha,” I muttered. The truth was that in our business, it wasn’t funny because it could very well be true. Most people in the mafia didn’t live long, especially if they were as high up on the totem pole as Chase and I were.
Although to be fair, I wasn’t sure “mafia” was what I would call us. We weren’t Italian.
But we were a brotherhood, aptly named The Brotherhood, started by my father and a group of old men we called the elders.
My father used to be the frontman, providing a group of legal businesses that were used to wash all the dirty money.I guess he was a leader as well.
And now I was currently in charge of most of those businesses, having expanded some of them well into the millions in profit. But I never felt like any of them was mine. As a frontman, I couldn’t start anything on my own without The Brotherhood knowing and getting involved.
I had tried to distance myself from the whole thing, but I learned early on that it was impossible to separate myself from my family. They had a hand in everything I did, as well as shares in all my companies. They kept a close eye on my financials, so I couldn’t sneeze without them knowing what the hell I was up to.
According to the laws of The Brotherhood, the leader cannot start a business without alerting the rest of the elders, who would then invest in it. The transparency was supposed to build trust between the head and the rest of the family.
Short of just disappearing, I couldn’t get away from them.
Even if I tried, the rest of the elders’ families would take me down. Not even my brother would be able to stop them, and they wouldn’t necessarily do it by killing me. They would come after my businesses and tip off the police about the light money laundering. Then, once I was in jail, they would take everything from me.
At least I wasn’t forced to lead The Brotherhood per se. While I ran the business side, Chase managed most of the criminal parts of The Brotherhood.
It was just as well because I wasn’t about to do it. I hated all the old men in charge and didn’t give a damn about any of the petty criminals they recruited, either. And I especially didn’t like the police sniffing around my ass, looking for a chance to catch me.
I detested that everything could be taken from me with a snap of the finger.
“What’s up?” I asked as I unlocked my sleek black Jaguar.
“You were supposed to be here thirty minutes ago,” Chase pointed out.
“I know,” I said. “I stopped by the pawnshop to check something out.”
That something being…my new shopkeeper.
“Check what out?” he probed.
“Something,” I said evasively.
“You’ve been spending a lot of time at the pawnshop lately,” Chase pointed out.
“Yeah, because it’s my business, and it’s making me a neat profit.” I tried not to sound defensive when I added, “Is there a reason for this questioning?”
Chase was a few years younger than me, but sometimes he acted like he was older. “Nothing. Just looking out for you.”
“Why?” I asked. Even though Chase was a notoriously suspicious bastard, he was not the type to ask questions for no reason. “What happened?”
He was quiet for a moment before I barked, “Spit it out.”
“You remember Ricky Ramoni?”
“Yes.” I remembered everyone who owed me the kind of money Ramoni did. And the damn scammer had tried to get away with it by trying to sue me for entrapment. I won the lawsuit, but he still wasn’t satisfied, and last I heard, he was cooking up some other legal bullshit to get away with my money. “What’s the bastard up to this time?”
“Nothing,” Chase said. “He’s dead.”
