Anger spikes through me. However, the emotion isn’t as intense as it could be, given our father’s distrust. We’ve met the specialist Roberto mentioned, and he’s one scary motherfucker. Straight up and down, though. No fucking around. He’s not a bad guy to have on your side. I sure as shit wouldn’t want him on anyone else’s. I grunt my ascent, fixing my eyes on the road. “Fine. Do it. Get it out of the way.”
Sal hits the number saved in his phone and we both sit there, stewing over the injustice of having to answer to some outsider. Or ask for his advice. I know my brother, too. This is a particularly bitter pill for him to swallow.
He hits speakerphone, and the line rings six times before someone eventually picks up. There’s no voice, though. No one says anything. Sal looks at me, pissed off, rolls his eyes, and then speaks into the receiver. “What’s up, asshole. Roberto Barbieri asked us to call you.”
“Roberto Barbieri shouldn’t even have this number,” someone growls on the other end of the line. The guy’s voice is pretty much the sound of an earthquake. Of rock grinding on rock. I remember that about him—that his voice alone was enough to make people shit their pants. I take the phone away from Sal and speak into it quickly, before Sal gets the chance.
“Mr. Mayfair, we met back in Seattle a couple of months ago. I believe we had a common enemy. The Monterellis? You took care of one brother? We took care of the other?”
The Monterellis had always been cocky motherfuckers. When Frankie got shot in the face by this Mayfair guy for fucking up some skin trade deal, the younger brother, Archie, had risen up the food chain and started overstepping boundaries that had been in place for years. The Monterellis don’t run gambling on the east coast. They don’t deal with the Russians anywhere in the USA. The Russians are ours, especially if they want drugs or guns or women. The only thing they should have been buying from the small time west coast Italians was fucking vegetables.
Roberto sent us over to Seattle to deal with the problem, and once again Sal had gone off half cocked. He’d shot the guy three times in the chest but hadn’t actually killed the fucker. We’d had to break into a hospital of all places to finish the job: Colombian necktie this time, just like our father would have wanted. Colombian neckties are his speciality. His cut throat razor has actually cut more throats than I can count.
“I remember,” the guy on the other end of the line answers. “The cops pinned me for that one, too. Made life very difficult for me and my girl.”
“We’re sorry about that. The method of execution’s usually enough to tip the cops off over here in New York.” It shocked me the first time I saw someone having their throat cut—just how violent the force of the gushing blood could be. When Sal had laid the steel against Monterelli’s skin, the spray of blood had literally hit the ceiling.
“Seattle cops don’t know shit about Roberto Barbieri. And they don’t care, either. You guys made a mess.”
Sal bristles, reaching for the phone, but I won’t let him have it. “Irrespective of what happened, Roberto wants to hire you. He’s offering big money for you to fly out to New York.”
“I don’t work for other people, Theo,” Mayfair says. He knows my name, which is pretty typical. He’s the kind of guy who will know everything about me, the same way he knows everything about every single member of organized crime syndicates in America, just so he has the drop on everyone. No surprises that way.
“You’d be a contractor. My father would give you free rein to handle the job however you pleased. You’d be here for a couple of days, do the work and then you’d be flying home again. Simple.”
“The kind of jobs your father hires men like me for are never simple. I’m west coast these days, Theo. And I don’t kill people for money anymore. Tell your father thanks but no thanks. Don’t call this number again.”
The line goes dead. I can feel Sal’s eyes searing into the side of my head, burning into me. “Well, that went well,” he says, his voice flat. “At least the old bastard can’t say we didn’t do as we were told.”
It occurs to me that our father told us to get the motherfucker on side, not call him and have him tell us no. That’s semantics, though. I’ll worry about Mayfair and Roberto’s massive score later, after we’ve dealt with this girl and gotten the old man’s birthday celebrations out of the way tonight.
I shift up a gear, swerving the innocuous Lincoln town car I’m driving through a maze of yellow taxicabs and other Lincoln town cars. This is how everyone travels in the city. If you have money, you don’t take the subway. You don’t ride the bus. You have a driver and a sleek five-door sedan that will take you anywhere you want to go.