1. Pearce #2
Pauly and I went back to having a stare off. As far as I knew, my father had never done direct business with the mob, but there was a mutual respect among all the major players in Diamond Cove.
When I didn’t respond, Pauly sat back in his seat. “How much do you charge for a kill?”
“Different jobs have different prices, but I’m not even entertaining the idea of a hit for less than $100,000.”
“I’ll give you $200,000.”
I was really close to telling Pauly to suck my dick. I was sure he could see it on my face, so he continued his spiel.
“My son is a fucking disgrace. He stole more than a pound of heroin from me less than a week ago, and he’s already shot it all into his veins.
His first stint in rehab, he was seventeen.
I spent $75,000. He was there for two months came home and overdosed the same night.
Damn near died. Five times he’s been to rehab already, and he’s only twenty-seven.
The knucklehead is dying slow anyway. I was cool with him being an embarrassment with tracked up arms and cornball behavior, but stealing from me and his mother, putting himself and his family in vulnerable positions because he’s weak as fuck is no longer acceptable.
At least this way, I won’t have to keep waiting for the phone call. ”
I could have sworn I heard Pauly’s voice crack.
And that was the reason, I didn’t want to take the job.
Calling a man emotional wasn’t exactly respectful, but more than likely, that was what it was.
Pauly was in his feelings, and I feared he was making a decision that he would end up regretting.
I took jobs at my discretion. The most I’d ever been paid for a hit was $140,000.
The fact that he was offering $200,000 was tempting as fuck.
“You have my word that this will not come back on you.”
I felt like Pauly’s patience was wearing thin, and I gave no fucks.
I wasn’t so thirsty for bread that I was going to jump at his proposition without considering all of the possible outcomes.
His moral compass was shot to hell if he was hiring me to kill his biological child, but being that he’d given me his word, I had to assume he meant it.
Honestly, I could see my pops doing some shit like that, so it wasn’t too far-fetched.
You didn’t become a crime boss by being practical, having a conscience, and not possessing the courage to do the unthinkable.
Finally, I gave a curt nod signaling that we had an agreement.
Pauly had never used my services, but he obviously knew the drill.
Leaning forward, he lifted a small gym bag from underneath his large cherry oak desk.
Pauly maintained eye contact with me as he nudged the bag across the table. “Half up front. The rest when the job is done.”
“I need all the info you can give me. His address, frequent hangouts, the kind of car he drives, all that good stuff.”
Pauly released a snort that reminded me of the disgust he harbored for his son.
“Last year for his birthday, the idiot was gifted a brand-new Aston Martin. You know what he does when he doesn’t have the money to get high?
He rents it out to his dealer and anyone else that can put a few hundred bucks in his pocket,” Pauly scoffed.
I didn’t have kids. In my entire life, out of all the women I’d dealt with, there were only a couple of pregnancy scares.
My father and I weren’t close. In fact, the relationship was mainly tolerating him on my part simply because he was my father.
If for any reason, I brought him shame or did something horrendous, Kalim wouldn’t be above doing to me the same shit I was going to do to Pauly’s son.
And that shit made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
There wasn’t anything other than self-defense that would make me even consider putting my own child in the dirt.
Pauly slid one of the desk drawers out and removed a small, burner cell phone. “Everything is in this phone including the name and phone number of his dealer. Make it clean.” There it was again. His voice cracked just a bit.
He wanted his son eliminated, but he didn’t have the guts to do it himself.
I’d never had instructions given when I was hired for a hit, but I could respect his wishes.
Oddly enough, I could understand just a bit.
I knew Tasha would never in life wish death on her mother, but I knew if the day ever came that Maria overdosed and died, Tasha would in a very weird way be able to release the breath she didn’t know she held every time the phone rang.
She constantly lived on edge and with the fear that something would happen to her mother.
It was a stressful way to exist and though I could sympathize, having your own kid murdered was still a level of coldness that I never wanted to reach.
Pauly’s security was stationed directly outside of the office door.
I was sure he didn’t want anyone to know what he’d done.
Rightfully so. Getting inside my truck, I placed the gym bag on the passenger seat.
The first thing I needed to do was get the money home because being stopped with that kind of cash on me would bring issues that I didn’t need.
And in the current climate we were in, cops pulling niggas over simply for driving while black was at an all-time high.
The drive out to my home in Cayden Cove Estates would take twenty minutes to get to from Pauly’s restaurant.
The same suburbs that I escaped from every chance I got as a kid, was now the only kind of environment that I’d ever lay my head in.
I didn’t have neighbors directly beside me.
My 8,000 square foot home sat on two acres of land.
It was a gift from my father for my twenty-first birthday.
Like too many rich, powerful men, Kalim gave gifts.
He expressed his love by giving money and material items. That had always been fine by me.
I was a grown ass man and made my own money, but I was never opposed to anything my father gave me.
Thanks to a massive life insurance policy his grandfather had, years of hustling drugs, and almost ten years of running several successful strip clubs in Miami, Charlotte, Diamond Cove, and Atlanta, along with a large construction company, my pops had more money than he could ever spend.