The car stopped at the curb and Roz lifted her sunglasses and placed them on top of her hair. “Why are you two standing there like palace guards?” she asked with a smile. “Bring y’all asses on!”
Both ladies laughed and hurried to the car. Tamron sat up front, she and Roz had been friends the longest, and Zina got in back. But Zina moved to the middle and leaned toward the two front bucket seats, as soon as she sat back there. “So this is yours?” she asked as she checked out the leather seats, the elegant door handles, the thousand grids and buttons.
“It’s not mine,” Roz responded as she looked up at the office building. “So this is where you two work?”
“It’s Mick’s then?” Tamron asked, still too curious. “It belongs to the guy you came to town to see?”
Roz nodded. “Yes, Tamron, it’s Mick’s. Which floor are you on?”
“Thirteenth,” Zina said. “Which should be bad luck, right? But we’ve been doing okay for ourselves.”
“Now that’s good to hear because it’s still surprising to me. I never would have thought you two would leave Broadway, leave the place that you love, to become telemarketers.”
“Tele-associates,” Tamron corrected her. “And don’t knock it, girl,” she added as Roz put the car in gear and drove off. “I’m a supervisor and Zin’s on her way too.”
“It pays the bills,” Zina said. “It pays better than you think.”
“Like what?” Roz asked.
“Like thirty-three dollars an hour,” Zina said.
Roz was amazed. She looked at Zina through the rearview. “Thirty-three? Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack,” Tamron said.
“That’s what? Fifty-two hundred a month? Dang. I’m barely clearing thirty-two.”
“See,” Tamron said with satisfaction. “Don’t knock it. Some of these private companies knows how to pay their employees.”
Roz shook her head. “I don’t knock it,” she said. “I can’t. Are you kidding me? I need to get a job here too.”
“I’ll hire you,” Tamron said. “Come on down!”
“You’ll be bored to tears working here,” Zina said. “I know I am. But it’s different for you anyway, Roz. You can teach acting. All we could do was act, but just couldn’t get that break. You had something to fall back on to keep you around. We had nothing. We had to change course.”
Roz glanced at Zina through the rearview. Of all the people Roz had taught, Zina was one of the ones who showed the most promise. But she gave up too quickly.
“But money should be the last thing on your mind right now anyway,” Tamron said. “Your boyfriend drives a Bentley. He can’t be no pauper. You’re set for life!”
It was a joke, and Roz knew it, but she also knew how blown away both of her friends would be if they knew everything else Mick drove. Or the full extent of his wealth. But one word unsettled her. “I wouldn’t call him my boyfriend just yet,” she made clear. “It’s not that deep. Not yet.”
“But it’s going in that direction?” Zina asked.
Roz smiled. “It’s headed there, yeah,” she said. And now, she inwardly added.
And she kept smiling as they directed her to their favorite eating spot. Roz realized as she drove, and as she and her old friends caught up on old times, that this was turning out to be the best vacation of her life. She was so glad Mick had asked her to come. She was so glad she took the chance and came.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They didn’t understand. They were seeing a problem when they should have seen an opportunity. They were thinking immediate when they should have been thinking long term. But Mick didn’t argue with them. He let them have the floor. He sat at the conference table in his huge office and listened to three of the most powerful organized crime figures on the East Coast, three Dons who answered to him, complain about what he saw as, and they should have seen as, a minor setback.
“I say we shut it down,” Vito DeLuca said. “I say we don’t let Provensano make fools out of us by sitting back and watching it happen. We wouldn’t be able to live it down. It’ll be like open season on Poltergeist. We’ll be the joke of the town, Michello!”
“I agree with Vito,” Carp Bianchi said. Both men were fat, but Carp took the cake. “Stanislav Provensano is a powerful man. We four together, you and the three of us, owns half of the coast. But Provensano owns the other half. If he starts muscling in on us, we’re fucked. You know it, Michello. I know it. We don’t want to go down that road. We don’t want a war with a man like that!”
Mick stared at Bianchi. Like Vito, he was much older than Mick. But unlike Vito, he was Mick’s least favorite Don. “Why not?” he asked him.
Bianchi frowned. “Why not what?”
“Why do we not want war with Stanislav?”