13. Nico
NICO
“You were supposed to be watching her,” I say to Anastasio. “Not fucking the store girl.”
"I was watching her."
“Then how the fuck did that cop get to her?”
He has the decency to not try and dispute real facts. The fight slacks out of his shoulders and he shakes his head.
“No excuses, Don Nico.”
“You can’t fuck up like this again, Stas.” I pour a finger of scotch and slide it towards him.
“I won’t,” he says. “I swear.”
“Tell me what else happened today.”
“She was asking questions about you and about your childhood.” He looks at the glass but doesn’t pick it up to drink. “About your scar.”
I clench my jaw. “And what did you say?”
“Nothing. Told her that she wouldn’t like digging too much into your past.”
“Hmm.” I nod. “Good answer.”
"There's more. Two things, in fact." He leans forward. "That cop. The one whose throat you nearly crushed in front of God and forty witnesses?"
He pauses, and I know Anastasio well enough to know that the pause means he's deciding just how much I can stand to hear.
"He’s OCCB. Flashed me his patch when he first came over like he fucking owned the place."
Cazzo. Not a beat cop and certainly not some precinct nobody I can make disappear behind a desk full of favors.
The one division in this city built to take families like mine apart, brick by brick, with a man who now has my face memorized and my hands around his throat as a grievance.
“And the second thing?”
"Called her his daughter."
For a moment, I don't move. The new information slithers down my stomach, and a familiar burning anger begins to smolder in my stomach at the new fucking information.
Her father.
The same bastard who left a bruise on her face is her father?
And suddenly, all I can think about is that moment of confession from my father about what he did to my sister before I put a fucking bullet in his head.
A frustrated sound comes up the back of my throat that I swallow before it reaches the air.
"This is turning into a mess pretty fucking quick." Anastasio spreads his hands. "OCCB. Her father. The dead cop you left on his stairs in Gravesend. To say nothing about the Greeks that you’ve pissed off. Any one of these starts a war. All four together—"
"I know what I'm doing."
"Do you?"
I look at him. He's bled for me more times than I can count. He's the only man alive I'd trust to put a bullet in me clean if it ever came to that.
To hear that shadow of a doubt creep into his voice about my judgment is not something I want to hear.
“Look, we can only handle one crisis at a time,” I tell him. “And right now, the first crisis is the Greeks. I’ll handle that at church this weekend.”
“What about this father of hers?”
“Find out everything you can for now but don’t move against him just yet,” I say. “Learn who he answers to, who he drinks with, and who he owes.”
That house was my mother’s, Lydia told me. She needed my help. That was why I left France.
Whatever it is that I need to find out more about her father in the OCCB, it all ties back to Lydia’s mother. I’m sure of it.
“And find out whatever you can about her mother,” I add. “Especially why she needed help. Put your most trusted man on it and keep a look out.”
“How soon you want this?”
“I want all of it on this desk by the time we come back from church this weekend.”
"And what are you going to do with the father once you get the info you want?"
I think about a bruise the shape of a man's grip, coming up dark on the only face I can't stop looking at.
"I’m going to kill him slow," I say.