Chapter 13
13
MICKEY
T he two guys that Jeremiah took down in the parking lot were dealing drugs. One of them worked for me until that moment. I won’t have drugs on my bottom line. I don’t care how profitable they are or how people will find a way to score them with or without me. I refuse to allow anyone on my payroll to deal. They better not so much as charge somebody a dollar for some Tylenol because I’ll fire them no questions asked.
I know someone in the organization is dirty. Somebody is using my territory and part of my network to move drugs and sell them on the downlow. It isn’t just the principle of the thing. It’s the risk of impaired judgment for the individual and the overall harm to the community—people driving, working, raising kids while they’re high or when they need a fix. I won’t feed into that cycle. Rory still thinks it’s hilarious that I run a criminal organization, but I insist on random drug testing for all my workers, him included. I run a clean operation and I want everybody’s head on straight.
When Jeremiah reported to me that one of the men had a bunch of pills, I sent Rory in ahead of me. We flushed the pills while the asshole cussed about their street value and what he’s gonna do to get us back for destroying his inventory.
He won’t do much in the way of hands-on revenge anytime soon since we broke his right hand. The hand was for throwing that rock that could’ve done worse than it did. I had a guard take care of it because I knew if I got my hands on him I’d tear him the fuck apart. It’s supposed to be a punishment for stepping out of line and going against our values, not a vent for my fury. And fury possessed me then.
“It takes a real man to keep a cool head like that, sir,” Jeremiah says to me. “I woulda bet that you were gonna beat his ass from here to the Canadian border.”
“Don’t mean I didn’t want to,” I grumble. “But losing my temper is a shitty business practice. Nobody wants to trust a hothead.”
“I sent Vito and Dante to the guy’s apartment to clear out anything he had hidden over there. Drugs, cash, guns. Anything we can use to tie him to the drug ring, any clue about who’s running that shit show.”
“Thanks, man,” I say.
Then I tell my secretary to clear my schedule for a long lunch. I spend a couple hours in the gym to clear my head. I’m not used to feeling powerless. When I saw blood well from the cut on Katie’s forehead, it was like a trap door beneath me dropped open and I plummeted twenty stories down. Fear, powerlessness, then the swell of protectiveness. I want to hold her against my chest, put my arms around her and dare anyone to come near her.
If I had no self-control, if I was the hotheaded punk I’d been ten years ago, I’d have pulled my gun and double tapped that son of a bitch before he knew what hit him. But just because it would’ve been satisfying to kill the guy doesn’t make it a sound business decision. Impulse control is the hardest part of my job. It didn’t used to be much of a problem, but having Katie Donahue around has rewired my brain from efficient and dispassionate to sometimes homicidal.
I am not a man who fears much less one who panics. Finding myself with a physical need to see her, to be with her and assure myself she is fine is humbling, alarming. I have a business to run. I can’t freak out about this or waste my time and energy worrying about Rory’s sister. That’s what I have to call her in my mind, not her name. To make myself remember she’s not mine and never will be.
It was madness, a one-time mistake brought on by the incident in the parking lot. Danger, threat, adrenaline—that accounts for it. Being with her last night has nothing to do with anything beyond the fact we were both keyed up after an intense shared experience.
After I inspect progress on a nightclub I’m building on a Zoom call, I follow up with my executives on a couple of things. All my scheduled meetings finish on time and I’m ready to head over to the Pearl. Before I leave my office, I check my messages. I have two from Katie. One is a picture of the cheese dip we had the other night at the bar. The second is, You hungry? Meet u there 6:30 ?
I scrub my hands over my face and try to focus on the fact that she’s too young, she’s my best friend’s little sister, and she works for me. Not one but three disqualifying conditions that make her an impossibility for me.
But I can’t seem to quit fixating on what could’ve happened to her, how it could’ve been a gunshot instead of broken glass, how it could’ve been me holding her half on my knees and begging while she bled out on the concrete. The ache in my chest gets worse. I’m torturing myself now, and I can almost feel the gush of hot, sticky blood pouring out over my fingers as I try and fail to stop the bleeding.
I cough to cover a strangled noise that wants to escape me. I’m alone in my office but I won’t sit here and let myself cry over something that didn’t even happen. The possibility, the danger to her, was too real, and I have an eerie sense that it’ll come back to me in nightmares until the day I die. Maybe that’s why I text her back, and why I’m sitting at the same little table by 6:15.
Katie’s wearing a dark red sweater dress that clings to her in all the right ways and tall boots. Her hair is in a ponytail again, and the small bandage on her forehead is the only sign of what happened to her last night. I stand when she gets to the table and I reach for her hands. I take them in mine and brush my lips against her cheek. I couldn’t just sit back down once she was seated, with no greeting, without even the slightest touch.
Katie’s smile is as bright as her eyes and after we order, I ask her how she slept.
“I think I could sleep about three more days,” she says ruefully. “I went home, showered, went right to bed. I scrolled on my phone for hours because I couldn’t shut my brain off.”
“You were pretty sleepy before I took you home,” I comment.
“That’s different. I was snuggled up with you.” She looks wistful for a second and then takes a drink, looks around ready to change the subject.
“Did you sleep okay?” she asks.
This would be a good time for me to lie, but I don’t want to.
“Not for more than an hour probably. You’d think I would’ve been exhausted, but I couldn’t get to sleep.”
“Did you doomscroll like me or what?”
“I sent some emails, looked through the preliminary contracts on a paving and concrete business I’m buying. Then I gave up and watched some crap on YouTube.”
“What’d you watch? Goodfellas? The Sopranos?” she teases me. I don’t crack a smile but it takes an effort to keep a straight face.
“Jackie Chan,” I say.
“Really? Kung fu movies?” she wrinkles her nose.
“The guy’s made something like 150 movies. They’re pretty good.”
“I had no idea you were this adorable. You’re so dorky about this, I can’t stand it.”
“Dorky?” I repeat, feigning offense.
“Does Rory know? About the Jackie Chan thing?”
“Not really. We typically have more important things to discuss.”
“How many times have you seen Kung Fu Panda?” She challenges.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I lie, grinning.
“You were how old when the first one came out? I was eight or nine so you’d have been like, what, thirty?” she teases.
“If you were eight or nine, that made me…” I wince a little at the thought of being fifteen years older than her. “Twenty-three.”
“Wow,” she says. “I was being a smartass about your age but when you put it like that, it just really shows the contrast. I still had baby teeth and you were old enough to drink and have tattoos and shit.”
I drink the rest of my beer and try not to think about it too hard.
“So, when you got your driver’s license I was like one year old?” She ventures. I nod.
“I never heard the end of how they made Rory put a booster seat in his first car so he could pick me up from daycare,” she says.
“I remember he didn’t love that,” I say. “I tried to tell him it made him look like maybe he just had a baby mama and knocked up an older broad.”
She laughs, “God, he was so embarrassed. I remember that from when I was little. He said it was disgusting, that he had to think about Mom and Dad having sex when he was a teenager because they got pregnant with me.”
“Your parents weren’t that old,” I say.
“My mom was like thirty-five when I was born. God, I miss her. My dad was probably about your age.”
“Jesus, Katie. Could we keep my age and your dad out the same sentence?” I nearly spit out my cheese dip.
“No way. If I knew it was this much fun roasting you about your age I would have done it a long time ago,” she says visibly enjoying herself.
“You miss them a lot,” I say. She nods.
“Don’t you miss your parents?”
“I don’t remember my mom. She died in an accident when I was pretty little. And my dad worked a lot. I guess I miss Fiona. She was my nanny.”
“Did she pass away?”
“A few years before my dad, yeah,” I say. “She was great.”
Just like that, she reaches for my hand and squeezes it. “Growing up without a mom must’ve been awful. I’m so sorry.”
“It was fine. I don’t remember her or anything so it’s not like I miss her.” I say, uncomfortable.
“At least I have Rory. You don’t have any family left, do you?”
“I got some cousins. They work in the business. Marco runs the car dealership,” I say.
“That dealership, that was like the coolest thing to me when I was a kid that your family owned the biggest dealership in Southie. I thought you probably got to drive all the new cars.”
“Not really,” I say. “I washed some of them, filled the gas tanks just to help out around the place.”
“Did your dad have the Pearl or is that something you started?” she asks.
“My dad had the Oyster and the car dealership and a couple loan shark joints, pawn shops. I wanted to diversify the business holdings and open up a classier casino. Less video slots and more old school gaming tables—roulette, craps, blackjack, high roller poker tournaments. He was against it.”
“So that beautiful place was all your idea,” she says, “you did a great job. It’s a long way from pawn shops and loan sharks.”
Something stops me in my tracks. If I was gonna act stupid about something I would’ve nave guessed it would be Katie Donahue saying I did a good job with the casino. But here we are. Because it doesn’t hit me so much as I feel aglow like embers kindle to life in my chest or behind my eyes. I feel the warmth of it all the way down to my fingertips. She’s proud of me. And maybe I’ve waited all my life for someone who matters to be proud of me and say so. Or it could be that I’ve been so goddamn lonely all these years that this is what it feels like when there’s a crack in the ice.
I’m breathing hard like I’ve sprinted half a mile flat out. Her smile is soft and fond, warm as a fire crackling on the hearth in a room I can see through a window, from outside in the freezing cold.
So, I reach for her hand. It feels like something in a movie then—like she’s pulling me free of icy water that threatens to engulf me, like she’s bringing me in from the cold.
“Mick?” she says, holding my hand in both of hers. I have to clear my throat before I can answer her.
“Yeah?”
“Let’s get out of here, okay?”
“You want me to take you home?” I say.
“No,” she says. “I want to go with you. Are you going home?”
“I can,” I say. “I had planned on going to the Pearl, but I’d rather take you home.”
“Where’s home exactly these days?”
“I’ve got a couple different places. Some nights I stay in the apartment above the Pearl.”
“But where do you live? Your actual home?” she presses.
“I got a place out on Castle Island,” I say.
“Castle Island? And to think Rory thought he was the shit when he got an apartment on East 8 th Street that was about 100 square feet and the stairway smelled like a dead rat. You live on Castle Island?”
“Yeah. It’s pretty. Got a little roof deck, nice view,” I say. I keep my answer short to try and hide how much it excites me to get to show it to her.
“Take me there?”
I’m touched by the shyness in her voice. I pay the check and walk her out to my car. In the haze of the streetlight, I stand there and look at her face for a second. I can’t help leaning in and kissing her forehead right by the bandage.
“I don’t ever want to feel like that again,” I say with a reluctant groan.
“Pissed off that some jerk threw a rock at you?”
“I looked down and saw the blood running down your face. I wanted to buckle, just go to my knees, drag you down with me. I didn’t know how bad it was. Scalp wounds bleed like a sonofabitch. I know that. But when I saw you bleeding, it was the worst thing. And I’ve seen some terrible shit, Katie.”
She hugs me then, hard, just throws both her arms around me and squeezes me as tight as she can. I capture her in a bear hug and kiss the top of her head. Then I take her to my place.