“What’s up?” I say as I open the door. He gives me a nod and looks over my shoulder then back at me.
“Can we talk?” he says. I nod and step out onto the porch with him and shut the door behind me. He paces back and forth a few times before he speaks. “I don’t think that shit was on Mancuso.”
“Who the fuck else would it be?” I snap. Wyatt’s got Junior at his house now, and has since the day Leo Scavo showed up at the safe house. Wyatt’s getting tired of playing babysitter though, so I don’t know what we’re going to do with him next. Leo Scavo has been missing since that day, when apparently he and Jim swung their dicks around until they both got tired and gave up.
Duke and his theories are getting old, but Mancuso’s silence has been unnerving. He may have been right about Junior, but that doesn’t mean I want to listen to this shit about Mindy’s attack.
“Larry Jennings,” he says. He pulls a plastic hospital bracelet from his pocket and hands it to me. I take it and inspect the information on the label. Sure enough, it belongs to Darren Jennings.
“Where’d you get this?” I ask, feeling my temper rise.
“Someone left it on Nic’s car the morning of Chief’s funeral,” he says. “Didn’t show it to anybody because I wasn’t sure it meant anything.”
My temper gets the best of me, and I lunge and shove him backward. My words come out in a fierce scream. “Guess what, asshole? It fucking means something.”
Everything comes together and makes sense all of a sudden. The fucking tweakers talking to Mindy as if she were Nic. Them calling Duke and telling him that his and Nic’s baby was going to die. I know my brothers have been spending more time figuring out who was behind this shit than I have, but I don’t know if anyone else besides this fucktard in front of me has put two and two together.
“I fucked up. What do you want me to say?”
I shake my head. “There’s nothing you can do unless you can unfuck my woman’s head. You should have brought this to the club months ago.”
“Yeah, I should have,” Duke says. “What do we do now?”
I toss the wristband back at him and rub the back of my neck.
“Make sure it’s Jennings who orchestrated that shit, and then he suffers worse than his pussy son did. I want that entire fucking family dead,” I say with gritted teeth.
Epilogue
I NEVER THOUGHT I could love someone as much as I love Chey. Layla didn’t come close. She’ll always have a part of me, but that’s my past. The insane, hormonal woman who can’t sing to save her own life beside me has ownership of my soul. She’s just two feet from me, but it’s too far. I’m one lucky motherfucker because now I know what it’s like to love someone with every fiber of your being four times over.
“And the wheels on the bus go ‘round and ‘round, ‘round and ‘round,” Holly sings along with the horrible fucking kid’s song that’s coming out of the car speakers. She’s seated in the passenger seat of our Tahoe with the visor flipped down and the mirror flap open. Her tired brown eyes are trained on the backseat through the mirror at the little disaster who’s kicking her feet in the air and trying to pull her shoes off.
At eleven months, Charlie is a handful. Her dark brown hair and big brown eyes remind me so much of her older sister. She’s more mobile than I remember Chey being, but what the fuck do I know—I rarely had a sober day back then. Layla didn’t really give a shit what I did. Chances were good that whatever I was into, she was doing it, too. That was also twenty years ago. Shit, I’m fucking old.
“Babe,” I say, keeping my eyes on the road. My shoulders are stiff and my back hurts. I fucking hate staying in hotels, but even worse than that, I hate driving in the city. San Francisco traffic can go fuck itself with an itchy dick. Holly doesn’t hear me—either that or she’s ignoring me, which is something she’s a goddamn expert at—and she keeps on singing. I’d take a bullet for Sweets and all, but that doesn’t mean I’ll listen to this lame shit on repeat. Besides, Charlie doesn’t like this crap anyway.
“Babe,” I say again. I peek to my right and catch sight of her rolling her eyes in the mirror. She purses her lips and cuts off the stereo. I breathe easy for the first time since we got into the car over twenty minutes ago.
“You interrupted our song,” she says in mock annoyance. Or real annoyance. Fuck if I know. Charlie scrunches her face up and grabs a hold of her foot. Her face is bright red. She yanks at her little brown boot and becomes furious when she can’t pull it off.