Chapter Five
CHAPTER FIVE
Miko
God, I was fucked.
Not with Cosimo or the boss, Lorenzo Costa. Since they had no idea I’d been working on a job for literally months in an attempt to gain more of their favor again.
But fucked regardless.
Because I was out a shitload of money.
And the only clue I had was some random, hot pickpocket I’d been too busy eye-fucking to notice she’d seen me as a mark.
“What’s the matter with you?” Cosimo asked as I sat in his apartment, running my hands over my face.
“Nothing,” I lied.
I wasn’t in the habit of lying to Cosimo. But, hell, I was already trying to repair my reputation after the fiasco with my little brother. I didn’t need him to know I’d fucked up again.
Besides, it wasn’t over.
I was going to figure this shit out.
I would get the wallet, sell the diamonds, and have a nice kick-up for Cosimo and Lorenzo. Plus a little bit left over for me.
“Doesn’t look like nothing. Looks like you got some shit going sideways.”
Shit.
The last thing I needed was him getting suspicious. Cosimo could be a dog with a bone when he was curious about something. I needed to give him something to make him drop it.
“It’s embarrassing as fuck,” I started, watching his brows lift.
“What is?”
“My wallet got lifted earlier today.”
“No fucking way,” Cosimo said, looking dangerously close to laughing. And he wasn’t a guy prone to humor.
“Cross my heart,” I said, shaking my head at the situation.
“Well, everyone has their hustle,” Cosimo said, shrugging.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“What’s the big deal? Cancel your shit. Couldn’t have had that much cash on you.”
“Nah.” Not cash, anyway. “But I had something… sentimental in it. Any chance you know someone offhand who could maybe get me the camera feeds or something?”
It wasn’t as easy to be a criminal in these days of cameras with facial recognition everywhere. As someone in the life, I hated it. But the cameras did come in handy when we were looking for someone too.
“Ah… isn’t one of Nico’s brothers handy with computers and shit? You could ask him.”
“Thanks, I’ll… that’s Nero,” I said when I heard his signature knock on the apartment door. “I’ll head out. He’s got shit to talk to you about.”
I passed my brother on the way out, giving him a nod of encouragement, then hit the street, heading in the direction of the closest of Nico’s siblings.
Moody-ass Gavino.
“This better be good,” a voice grumbled from the other side of the door when I knocked.
It wasn’t that Gav was busy. He rarely was. He just fucking hated interacting if he didn’t have to. Which was an unfortunate personality trait when he existed in a massive family.
“You,” Gav said, looking at me with dark blue eyes that he got from his mother. Like Nico and Cesare, he was tall and fit with dark hair and tanned skin. But unlike Nico, who wore his goodness on his sleeve, and Cesare, who wore his charm the same way, all Gavino had to offer was an air of annoyance. “Cosimo’s guy.”
“Miko,” I agreed, nodding.
“What do you want? I don’t have any work with Cosimo.”
Last I heard, he didn’t have any work with anyone. It was always one of his brothers who dragged him in on jobs. He would be a capo out of virtue of his birth, not necessarily because he busted his ass for it.
I could be resentful about that, but I knew what I was getting into from the jump. It was pointless to be frustrated about the very structure of the organization I wanted so badly to belong to.
“No. I actually just had a question. Cosimo mentioned that one of you guys was good with computers and hacking and shit like that.”
“That’s Zeno, not me,” Gav said, shaking his head. “I’ll give you his address, so you can go bother him instead of me.”
If I wasn’t close to losing my shit about the missing diamonds, I would have had a laugh about that. As it was, though, I memorized the address and rushed right back out, wanting to catch Zeno before he went out or went to bed.
If my memory of this branch of the family tree was correct, Zeno was the second-youngest of the siblings, older only than Lore, the Costa daughter who just married an Esposito to end the rivalry that had been around for over a decade.
He lived over in Hell’s Kitchen in an apartment one floor above a nightclub.
It wasn’t even late, but the noise coming through the floor as I went up the stairs vibrated into my shoes and up my legs.
Zeno, it seemed, must not be bothered by noise.
“You can just leave it there,” a distracted voice called through the door after I knocked hard enough to make the door shake in its jamb just to be heard over the music below.
“Zeno, open up,” I called, raising my voice to a near yell.
“That’s the oh-so-important sounding voice of a member of my family, isn’t it?” he called as something knocked to the ground inside the apartment before, suddenly, the locks disengaged, and the door whipped open.
I was pretty sure right then that I’d never actually seen Zeno before. Because the man was memorable.
Like his brothers, he was tall.
He was a bit on the thin side, and he seemed to be on a mission to out-tattoo his older brother Cesare with how much of his body was covered already. And I knew that because he was wearing nothing but a pair of pink sleep shorts printed with a bunch of ice cream cones on them.
That, a cross around his neck, and a towel wrapped around his head the way my sisters wore one after a shower, was all he had on.
His nails were short but painted black. And he had a ring in one of his eyebrows and one that peeked out on his tongue when he spoke.
“Oh, interesting. Miko, right?” he asked, reaching up toward the towel on his head and pulling it off, making shoulder-length black hair fall in a surprisingly untangled mass.
He reached up, running his hand through the mostly dry strands.
“Sat down after my shower to rest and lost track of time,” he said, waving at himself. “You know how it is.”
“Not really, no,” I admitted.
“Executive functioning,” he said, waving toward his brain. “Not always my strong suit. So,” he said, clapping so loudly he caught me off guard. “You need something from me, I’m assuming.”
“If you’re not busy.”
“I’ve been watching fuckers on social media clean carpets for three hours,” he admitted. “You’d be saving me from myself.”
“The cleaning thing,” I said as I stepped into his apartment. “It’s a spectator sport for you, not a hobby, huh?” I asked, looking at his cluttered kitchen cabinets, the bag of trash sitting behind the door, the desk littered with a dozen coffee cups and energy drinks.
It was a surprisingly small apartment, considering his place in the Family. Just your average-sized studio with the bed wedged against the wall in the corner and the kitchen on the other side. Directly in the center, where you might expect both the living and dining area, instead featured four desks put together to make one big square around a fancy-ass computer chair. Screens of various sizes and elevations were on the desks. There were several laptops open. And one was showing someone power washing some filthy red and tan rug.
“Yeah, I mean… I got this bad habit where I want to clean everything all at once, then start, lose interest, and end up making shit worse than it was to begin with. Here,” he said, finding a folding chair and setting it in front of his desks as he moved behind. “So, what do you need?”
“I was wondering what kind of access you might have into the cameras at an intersection.”
“In my experience, if you’re patient enough, you can get into anything,” he said, taking the address from me and starting to click around on three separate keyboards, each of them making different sounds. “Creamy, right?” he asked, making my brows squint.
“What?”
“The keyboard. The sound it makes? Smooth. Creamy.”
“Ah, yeah,” I agreed.
“Now, when I get in, what am I looking for?”
“Me,” I told him.
“And then a woman ramming into me.”
“She lifted your wallet, didn’t she?” he asked, shooting me a bemused smile.
“She did. I need to know who she is and where I can find her.”
“For what purpose?” he asked, suddenly wary.
“To get my wallet back. I’m not gonna hurt her.”
“Alright. Well, you want to make yourself comfortable or make some coffee, go ahead. This is gonna take a while.”
With that, he put on a pair of bright yellow headphones, and got to work, seeming to forget that I even existed; he was so focused.
Left to my own devices, I got up and made my way toward the kitchen, figuring we could both use a little coffee.
But the trash was overflowing.
So I went ahead and took that—and the other bag that had been behind the door—out. When I got back, it seemed natural to just… clear the counters of trash and bottles. And if I was going to be taking another trip down to the dumpster, then why not just clean up the crap all over his desks and nightstand while I was at it?
The next thing I knew, it was two hours later. My jacket was off. My sleeves were rolled up to the elbows. I had steadily worked my way through all the various dirty dishes and decided to pull all the shelves out of the filthy fridge to scrub.
I wasn’t necessarily obsessive about things being clean. But I kept a tidy home myself. And when I was stressed or couldn’t sleep, I found myself doing some sort of deep cleaning that I’d been putting off.
It was a habit I’d inherited from my mother. Both because she cleaned when she was restless as well, and because chores were simply part of our Sunday morning routine. It didn’t matter how good of a housekeeper she was; when you had seven kids, shit got out of hand fast if they didn’t all pitch in on occasion.
It just stuck when I eventually moved out on my own.
Besides, I’d always rather be productive than sit around and stare at someone else while they were working.
Once all the dishes and shelves were dried and put away, I found a broom and a mop that literally had their tags on, and gave the floor a good cleaning.
I might have even gotten to the bedding and the pile of laundry heaping over the basket that I figured might actually be the reason Zeno was only in shorts, but I had no idea if there was a laundry room in the building or not.
So I went ahead and finally made that coffee.
When I placed it next to Zeno’s elbow, he reached immediately for it, making me wonder if he was as in his own world as he appeared or not.
I sat down with my own cup, catching up on texts until Zeno stabbed the space key hard, making my gaze lift.
“Found me?”
“Dude, that was smooth as fuck,” he said as he pulled his headphones down to his neck.
“Tell me about it.”
“Probably doesn’t help that she’s a bombshell. All kinds of distracting.”
“Exactly,” I agreed. “Can you rewind it to before she put her hood up? Get a good picture of her?”
“Already on it,” he said. I moved my chair to watch his screen, watching the woman walk backward away from me.
“Play it back,” I demanded after Zeno stole a screen grab and started to do… something with it.
Distractedly, he hit the space key, and I saw something I’d missed on the street.
The moment her gaze landed on me.
And it wasn’t intent I saw first, like she had immediately picked me out as a target.
If anything, it looked like interest. That was quickly, for some reason, chased away by annoyance, then determination as she pulled up her hood.
“Look at you, you pretty little criminal, you,” Zeno said as I reached over to hit the space bar at just the moment I saw her stash the wallet in her own pocket.
“Just like you as a friend, man,” I teased, making him shoot me a smile as he turned his screen for me to see.
“She was arrested for trespassing four years ago. The charges didn’t stick, though. Looks like she had a killer fucking lawyer, actually.”
A killer lawyer?
When she was wearing a shitty jacket and cheap shoes? That felt… off.
“What’s her name?” I asked, unable to read the small print from so far away.
“Maxine Anne Taylor.”
“Max,” I said, thinking there was no way the woman in the video would go by such a feminine name. “You got a current address?”
“Let’s see,” Zeno said, turning the screen back to himself and starting to type.
“Seems like she lives in an apartment with some girl named Megan and another named Nicole. Those two are together.”
“Megan and Nicole?” I asked, annoyed with myself that I wanted Max to be into guys. Since she’d fucking stolen so much from me. But I couldn’t seem to help it, either.
“Yeah. And some dude who uses their address as his mailing one but seems to work as a flight attendant, so he’s out of town a solid fifteen or twenty nights a month.”
“So, he’s Max’s boyfriend?” I asked, pretending I wanted to know if there was going to be someone around who might pose a problem when I showed up to take my property back. Only I knew that I just wanted to know if she was single or not.
“No. No, seems like he’s with the other two girls. One, big, happy, ethical poly relationship. According to their social media presence. Max, well, Max doesn’t seem to like anyone but her roommates,” he said, smirking at his screen as he looked at Max’s socials.
“Alright. Let me see that address,” I said, leaning over the desk to look at it. “I appreciate it, Zeno. I will get back to you to pay you for your time.”
“Think you paid it in labor, man,” Zeno said, leaning back in his chair, cradling his coffee in both hands. “Don’t think the place was this clean when I moved in.”
“All you gotta do is your laundry,” I told him, finishing my coffee.
“It’s that or go naked,” he said, confirming my earlier thoughts. “Alright. Go get whatever precious shit is in that wallet to drag your ass all the way over here.”
With that, I made my way out.
Night had fallen by the time I got down to the street, the line for the club wrapping around the side street. Men in tight tees. Women in short dresses. Everyone shivering in the cold.
Taking a deep breath that mingled crisp air with car exhaust and the gyro cart a few buildings down, I made my way toward the subway, figuring it would be the fastest way to get where I was going.
Some part of me felt bad going over to her place in the middle of the night. Three women living alone had to be worried enough already about normal guys being creeps. Having someone like me darken their door was worse.
But I couldn’t risk Max having my diamonds any longer than necessary. It wouldn’t be easy to move that many of them. That said, she seemed smart and ballsy. She’d figure it out. I had to get them back before that.
Max lived in a typical high-rise right across from a newer super-high-rise. By contrast, her building seemed squat and ancient. But it easily had to house a solid three to five hundred people. The kind of busy building that allowed for real anonymity and a certain sense of safety.
Or, at least, that was what I thought as I raised my hand to knock on her door after lucking in by rushing into the lobby behind someone else down below.
But then her locks slid.
The door opened.
And I realized there was no such thing as safety sometimes.
Someone had fucked her up.
There were bruises on her cheek, jaw, and chin. There was a nasty fingerprint necklace around her throat. The whites of one of her eyes was blood red.
Not only beaten to high hell, but strangled.
“Miko,” she said, her swollen, split lower lip trembling a bit.
I knew right then that my diamonds were gone.
But, suddenly, all I cared about was finding out who the fuck had done this to her.