Chapter 11 Elio #3
“I have no father,” James said bitterly. “None of us do. Didn’t you know? We’re The Rejects. Better to be fatherless than to live under the shadow of sin and crime.”
“But we’re also not powerless, Mr. Harrow,” Ronny Oslow said. “You come after one of us again, and it’ll be your entire business that goes up in flames and not just this warehouse.”
“What—”
Ethan and Nathan Lazlo emerged from the crowd, both of them holding an RPG launcher each.
“We’re going to burn this place to the ground, just so you know we’re not all bark and no bite,” Ethan said. “Say, Nathan, that tall pile of packed cloth looks mighty flammable.”
“After you, brother.”
“No, brother. After you.”
“Let’s do it together, then.”
I watched with awe as the two brothers pulled the triggers of their RPG launchers. Two rocket-propelled grenades launched forth and made straight for the warehouse supply stacks of flammable raw cotton cloth.
The towers of raw material exploded in a burst of bright orange flames as the rockets collided with them. Fire leapt at everything in the main warehouse area. The guards ran out of the building.
“See, Father,” James said, leaning close to his father.
“We’re trying to shake off old habits, but each of us was supposed to be the next don of our respective areas.
You have to be a certain degree of powerful to be the next don in line.
You have to be even more powerful than that to walk away from a life of power, money, and privilege.
You’d best remember that lesson, and never think of us as weak. We are anything but.”
“Come on,” I said, wrapping my arm around Maria and escorting her outside before the smoke and the flames could make it out of the warehouse.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Maria said.
“I’ll explain when we get back.”
We each got in our cars. James and I got in his Maybach. I watched Dresden Harrow hurry out of the burning warehouse and get into one of the cars that his guards were beginning to reverse out of the lot.
Behind us, we could hear fire trucks and ambulances blaring.
It was a good thing that the warehouse was not joined to any other building and had been empty. Otherwise it would have been a heavy thing sitting on our consciences.
“I’ll keep an eye on what he does,” James said apologetically, standing there by the curb, leaning on his car. “Dude, I’m so fucking embarrassed he’d do something like that.”
“Don’t be. That’s not you. That’s your father. You helped me today. That’s the kind of man you are. I’d have been able to do nothing if it wasn’t for all of you,” I said.
“Maybe we need to make The Rejects a mafia organization of its own. Fight fire with fire,” Ethan said, a wild look in his eyes. He and Nathan stood beside us, as did the others.
“That’s not a bad idea,” James said. “We have crazy power if we pool it between all of us. What do you say? Business would boom. People would fear us. No one would cross us.”
“Let’s talk about this later, when all of us convene for our next business meeting,” I said, nodding at him. “Something of that magnitude requires great deliberation.”
“All right, then,” he said, shaking my hand, and then getting in his car. One by one, they all did, and then they left, as fast as they’d come, leaving me standing there on the sidewalk with Maria.
“Bro,” Maria said exhaustedly. “What the fuck was all that about?”
I tried to breathe slowly, but my breath was still frantic and caught up in my throat. In a single day I was excommunicated from my family, had Maria kidnapped, went to the warehouse where she was being kept, showed Dresden who was boss, set fire to the warehouse, and came back.
Needless to say, I was reeling from it all.
And then she placed her hand on my chest, slowing down my heartbeat, calming me down.
“You really went all out and saved me,” she said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ll have PTSD from this for years, and I’m definitely going to be paying my therapist thousands of dollars in fees to forget all of this, but I’ll always remember that you came to save me.”
“What else was I supposed to do?” I sighed and chuckled all at once.
“Well, you could have been a mafioso, counted me as collateral, and moved on, but you didn’t do that,” she said, placing her hand on my cheek. “You’re all sorts of lost and confused, aren’t you, Elio Romano?”
“You have no idea. I don’t even have a place to stay.”
“You can stay with me.”
“But I thought….”
She smiled wearily. “I’m not vapid, El. I feel like I can call you El.
I know what you are. I did my research on you.
You… you are not at all who I thought you were.
I mean, when I read the things about you, I was like, am I even reading about the same person?
I feel like, given how much I know you and how little you know me, scales need to be evened.
I should tell you about myself, and I’d rather do it in my apartment than standing here on the curb. ”
I smiled cautiously, not knowing where this could lead or what she’d read about me.
But at least there was an inkling of hope.
At this point, an inkling was all I needed.