Chapter 14 – Peter
Chapter Fourteen
Peter
Idon’t like not knowing, but Flora texted me that Michael showed up at my place and he was red in the face wondering where I was because he had left Myra and Gianna Rae all night to track down the bartender we suspect drugged us.
I hastily scribbled a note to Aricia, which hopefully she didn’t interpret as an avoidance of the intensity that erupted between the two of us.
When I get to my place, Flora managed to calm Michael down, so he’s chuckling like fucking Santa Claus when I get there.
Flora gives me a look that tells me she’ll be demanding payment for that later.
I suspect she just wants the heat off her and I still won’t trust her until this little search tonight yields results.
“Flora said you found the bartender.”
“Yeah,” Michael says. “Crazy, 20-year-old biracial chick from downtown with green hair, a nose piercing and lots of tattoos.”
“So, she’s trouble.”
“I’m surprised I don’t remember someone that distinct,” Flora muses, as if a heavy dose of drugs wouldn’t wipe any memory out of our heads. “But I wore mom’s old Juicy Couture jumpsuit with the zipper down here and the manager gave me all the footage on a hard drive. You’re welcome.”
She touches the middle of her chest, clearly proud at the results of her cleavage. Michael and I couldn’t be more uncomfortable. Times like this, I see why he appreciates the tomboy twin.
“I’m the one who had to sift through the damn footage,” Michael snarls, easily returning to the prickly mood Flora met him with when he showed up at my place. Flora doesn’t appear bothered. I hope Michael gets his moodiness under control.
“What do we know about her?”
“Her name is Lorena Ramos, and she lives with three roommates close to the University of Buffalo student housing.”
“Why the fuck would she be a part of this?”
“She works at a bar, has a nose ring and a bunch of tattoos. I’m assuming drug addiction.”
Flora clucks her teeth and calls us both ignorant and backwards, but she doesn’t provide an alternate explanation for this bartender’s connection to us.
Michael traced her apartment building and he’s pretty sure she has an early morning class at the university, so we can corner her outside her apartment before there are any witnesses and get the answers we need about why she did this.
I don’t relish the idea of torturing a chick in her early twenties, but I don’t want to face Aricia again without getting answers about what happens to us. It hurts me not to have answers about her pregnancy. I want her pregnant…
How much more do I need to know about Aricia? We’re both in our forties. We know things that we didn’t know when we were younger. It makes everything easier.
We take Michael’s new car and I find out that Luigi knows about this, which I don’t appreciate. I don’t want him to think that I’m a liability. Michael assures me that isn’t the case. Luigi might be the future head of this organization, but Leandro still rules for now…
“Are we making progress on Gino’s case?” Michael asks.
I’ve been handling the situation with Gino.
He got into a fight that ended badly at the behest of his father and we’re hoping he doesn’t have to end up serving time because of it.
Leandro has funny boundaries with his children.
Thankfully, I don’t have to worry what my father thinks anymore.
“The law firm is good.”
Michael hasn’t asked what he really wants to ask, and I hate that I can tell. I wait for him to drop the bomb on me and in under a minute, he does.
“Are you still nailing the lawyer?” Michael grunts at me.
I feel immediately defensive. I can’t blame Michael for assuming I don’t feel anything for her, because I haven’t had any deep emotional attachment to a woman since my early twenties.
But I want to protect the connection I have to Aricia, even in the smallest moment of this conversation.
I haven’t ever had someone in my life that I genuinely want to protect, so this is all very new to me and terrifying, considering every part of my life is dangerous.
“It’s nobody’s business.”
“I won’t judge,” Michael says. He’s right about that. His position as the underboss offers me more potential protection as well. I don’t want to rely on him, but nobody survives in our world alone. Cosa nostra is filled with those sorts of unspoken rules.
“She’s not the lawyer on the case.” I don’t want to talk more about Aricia and expose her to more vulnerability. Michael doesn’t seem completely convinced to leave the topic alone.
“I can tell that you like her,” Michael says, smirking and making me feel like we’re teenagers again and he’s making fun of me for having a crush on a chick way out of my league. I know I look good, but it’s hard to be in Aricia’s league when she’s fucking outstanding in every sense of the word.
“Michael…”
He barrels forward, like my older brother usually does. “Is that where you were tonight? Flora lied for you.”
My ears burn with embarrassment. I know Flora only wants to help, but I’m not a child and I’m not hiding Aricia. “I never told her to do that.”
“Sure. But maybe we should reward her for her loyalty.”
I don’t know if I would go that far. Flora’s loyalty should be her duty, especially since we’re keeping her from the fate that consumed Cosima and Angela.
Leandro remains determined to keep the peace in Pittsburgh, so if she gets kidnapped and there’s a viable marriage claim, we won’t fight it.
Flora’s position with me is precarious, which does lead me to doubt her involvement in drugging me.
We’ll find out when we talk to this girl, Lorena.
Michael drives over to the questionable part of town with trash everywhere and powerlines slung low over the rundown buildings.
Half the streetlights are broken, so the brightest light on the street emanates from the liquor store, which is somehow already open this early in the morning.
He parks and looks around with visible disgust written on his face.
“This area is crap.”
“How long do we have to wait?”
“Not long.”
“How the fuck did you get this type of intelligence?”
“I put Flora to work. Haven’t you noticed her staying out of trouble recently?”Michael asks. I genuinely and perhaps foolishly believed that the experience shook Flora up on its own, but if a combination of things worked to suppress her urges to be a nuisance, I suppose I can’t complain.
Michael has the decency to provide a thermos of coffee while we wait. I can tell from the taste that Myra made it, since Michael never washes out his Thermos properly and I normally have to survive stake outs with the slight aftertaste of his dish soap. This coffee is good. Very good.
The two of us sit patiently for a while. Michael doesn’t say much and neither do I. We were never the sort of brothers to talk more than necessary, but we got along better than Luigi and his twin brothers.
I finally break the silence when I see a massive bouncing orb of green curls and hone in on the woman with the incredibly garish hairstyle to find her matching Michael’s description.
“Lorena?” I ask him. But Michael, of course, already noticed. I already feel a sense of victory coursing through me.
“That’s her.”
She’s small and has her headphones on. Michael and I barely make an effort to stay quiet as we get out of the vehicle. Those headphones will make our job much easier. I always tell Flora not to walk around with those on in public.
“Gino’s apartment by the water is empty,” Michael says. “It’ll be easy to keep her quiet if you put a gun on her. We’ll take her down there.”
I grunt in response. It’s an easy enough plan.
Within a few seconds, we close what little distance there was between us and our target.
Michael grabs her, I use a weapon to keep her quiet and make sure nobody watches us snatch the chick off the street.
Michael acts quickly with his hand over her mouth, so she doesn’t get a chance to scream and she’s smaller than the average woman, so if she makes any effort to fight back against Michael, it doesn’t affect him.
I threaten her before we both shove her into the back seat of Michael’s two-door Maserati coupe.
She won’t be scrambling out the door and the windows are tinted super dark.
Once we’re back in the front seat, I turn around and point at weapon at the girl, who seems to think we want to rape or rob her.
Clearly, she can’t tell that this car costs way more than double her annual rent.
“You make one sound, I’ll blow your brains out, princess,” I growl at her, keeping my semi-automatic pistol pointed at her face.
No bullets, but she doesn’t know that. She just sobs quietly and stammers to herself in shock as she works out why the fuck this is happening to her as well as her status with the guy upstairs.
I sense Michael’s annoyance with her emotional state.
He disobeys traffic laws with even more brazenness than the situation requires and cuts down our time crossing town by at least four minutes, which takes some doing.
By this point, Lorena’s loud emotional explosions fade into much weaker but still persistent soft sobs.
She hasn’t once mentioned in any of her emotional stammering anything close to the reason why we’ve brought her here.
Michael and I lead her to Gino’s ground floor apartment.
He’s staying with Leandro while he’s out on bond until the end of the trial.
The boss gets paranoid whenever a member of the family ends up in court and he keeps a close watch on every aspect of the unfolding legal drama.
We have the one bedroom apartment to ourselves for questioning this wimpy twenty-two-year old, who seems more like a girl than a woman, and not just because of her size.
Once inside, Michael offers her a glass of water which she accepts with a hoarse voice.
She doesn’t think twice before scarfing it down.
“Any clue why we’ve brought you here?”
Lorena looks up at him with slightly hooded, espresso-colored eyes, nestled deep beneath a plump monolid. Her off-centered nosering drives me insane with the impulsive urge to adjust it. I can’t imagine this waif being a criminal mastermind.
“To rape and kill me,” she answers Michael somberly, sending a shiver of disgust straight through me.
I would never lay my hands on any woman with those vicious intentions, especially not a scrawny, sniveling green-haired brat like this one.
She’s half my age, and the thought of touching anyone except Aricia sickens me.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Michael answers, although I’m just as capable of handling this brat as he is.
“We have good intelligence that you went around slipping drugs into drinks around two months ago when you worked at Belladonna’s.”
Her body stiffens. Michael and I don’t have to say anything to each other to become deeply aware of the tension now surging through Lorena’s body.
Deception? Perhaps yes. Perhaps not yet.
Our instincts as truth-hunters are well-honed.
If one tactic doesn’t work, another will.
This little pipsqueak will crack eventually.
“I don’t work at Belladonna’s anymore,” she says, betraying a possible source of the tension. “I got fired for vaping in the bathroom.”
“Uh huh,” Michael says, clearly unimpressed (if not outright livid).
“And sending Snapchats,” Lorena adds.
“Do you think this is a joke, little girl?”
“I don’t.”
“Surely, you remember me at least,” I tell her, bluffing through my teeth and staring straight into her na?ve eyes, that might be young but clearly still hold the potential to deceive. “I remember you.”
She betrays herself with a slight smirk and speaks with a heavy Upstate accent. “I never seen you before.”
Michael presses her. “Is that so?”
“I swear.”
Lying brat.
“Interesting,” Michael says, his voice remaining steady, even as I detect the quiet shift in his mannerisms as his frustration heightens. He doesn’t have enough coffee in his body right now to tolerate games. If this green-haired girl doesn’t fear us… she should.
Michael clears his throat and continues.
“If you don’t remember, I would be happy to help.
” He fishes into his back pocket for a small, black leather booklet.
Lorena, perhaps thinking he would pull out a gun, keeps her eyes totally glued to Michael.
He opens the booklet and she flinches backwards as Michael reveals an array of torture devices.
Scalpels. A large fishhook. Small knives with long blades.
“Peter, where do you want to carve her up for what she did to you?”
I meet her terrified gaze, feeling a flicker of satisfaction that I can cause this little creature as much torment as she caused Aricia.
Unlike my brother or my cousins, I have absolutely no mercy in my bones.
I would kill for Aricia before I struggled at diplomacy.
I might have to kill now and I definitely know exactly what I want to carve up on this escaped subway rat.
“I’ll take her eye out,” I respond calmly to Michael, who himself has one eye due to an accident long ago.
The girl probably can’t tell because he has the false one in, but the long scar over Michael’s face from when it happened is hopefully enough to signal to Lorena that this mistake will cost her in blood.
Michael reaches for a scalpel with a blade that has a scooping element to it, perhaps intended to perform this sort of task on a sheep or another farm animal. Once my finger wraps around the blade handle, the pipsqueak shrieks.
“My boyfriend made me do it!” She yells, sitting all the way back in the chair and nearly causing it to tip. “He’s an asshole!”
We can agree there. Michael gives her a sharp look as if to say keep fucking talking.
Lorena continues. “I thought he was in the mob! Don’t scoop my eye out. I only did it because he promised this would help us get to Pittsburgh together.”
Michael and I exchange glances. Pittsburgh? We’ve had personal problems lately extending as far south as Pittsburgh. Michael nods and I set down the scalpel. We both pull up chairs across from Lorena.
“Are you ready to talk?” Michael asks. “You co-operate with us, maybe you’ll get that money you need to go to Pittsburgh.”
“You’re not going to rape and kill me?”
Michael glares at her. “I haven’t decided yet. Now answer our questions.”