Page 66 of Mafia King
“So?” There’s nothing strange about that. The only thing strange is her worry that anyone’s going to shoot up the place.
“Re Santino finally rolled his ass in here!” Tommy, the club’s owner and Loretta’s boss, interrupts in a white suit and black shirt. “They was going to start without you.”
“No, they weren’t.” I smile and put a heavy hand on his shoulder. The man has irritated me for most of my adult life, but he knows where his bread is buttered, the customers love him, and he’s terrified of me, so I haven’t bought the club from under him.
“Loretta,” Tommy says, “Mikey needs rolls of quarters. I’ll take care of thecapo di capohere.”
She nods to him, then once to me, and I read her like the newspaper. She’s telling me to be careful.
I will be.
Past the doors, the space stinks of sweat and alcohol. The air’s cut with the promised lasers, and the music isn’t more than a beat and a warble. At a back table, Damiano jabs a cigar between his teeth. A woman in a green dress leans over his shoulder and lights it. When she stands, I recognize her as his niece, Theresa Rubino, from Green Springs. The girl whose cunt stink was on Roman’s tongue before I replaced it with the taste of blood.
She waves to me timidly and goes back to the bar with her friends.
“Sit, sit.” Tommy indicates my chair. “You having the usual?”
“Sure.”
Two men stand in the corners with their hands folded above their dicks. Gennaro is one, but the other… I don’t know. Damiano’s guy apparently.
He shouldn’t need protection here. Not from me.
Damiano and I shake hands, and I sit.
“You going to introduce me to your friend.”
“Oh, sure.” He waves the man over, speaking Italian. “Lucio, this is Santino, thecapoof this shithole town.”
I shake the man’s hand and hold him long enough to look him in the face.
“You’re from the other side,” I say in English.
He just smiles.
“I saw you peeking out of the closet when I was fucking your mother in the ass,” I add.
Lucio keeps smiling, then glances at Damiano.
“You’re a fucking dick,” Damiano says to me. I let the man’s hand go. “He’s one of my dad’s guys. On loan.”
I have to reassess this entire situation. Cosimo sent a guy for his son, who he’s barely on speaking terms with. For what? To protect him? To spy on him? Both?
Or to start planning the coming war?
“Sit down, would you?” Damiano says to me, then switches to Italian for Lucio. “Back it up.”
The man moves back to his dark corner. As a young woman offers me a cigar, and I refuse, Damiano leans back and makes a show of checking out her ass, and with a shake of his hand, declares it gorgeous.
“How old are you?” I ask him.
“Old enough to tap that.” He watches her leave as if he’s some kind of ravenous animal. I don’t know this cigar girl and I don’t care, but who is this guy trying to marry my cousin?
“You’ll have more respect for Gia.”
“That your way of getting to the point?”
“I’m not interested in hanging around”—I indicate the club, the noise, the flashing lights—“this.”
