“Yes.”
Oscar looped his thumbs in his belt as if they were too heavy for his shoulders to carry without support.
“People see what they want to,” I said. “If they trust you, we can get across.”
He laughed so hard his elbows shook. “You want me to be your coyote?”
I didn’t want to look at Antonio. I didn’t want to see his disapproval or disdain. Didn’t want to see the thousand reasons this wouldn’t work. But I did look at him, and he was fixed on Oscar, steady and strong.
“Yes,” I said. “We want you to be our coyote.”
“You know what stinking coyotes get paid?”
“Money isn’t an object, generally speaking,” I said, now totally out on a limb, “but transferring it can get sticky. So I think you may owe Antonio more than an escort out.”
Oscar huffed. “One ride still pays for two.” He held up two fat red fingers.
“I will find a way to pay you if we get across alive,” Antonio said.
“And not into the hands of the Sicilians,” I blurted.
“If they have you,” Oscar said, “you’ll be paying me from the grave.”
four.
SEVEN WEEKS EARLIER[→7]
antonio
didn’t know how I felt about her.
I wasn’t used to thinking much about how I felt or what I wanted. If I wanted a woman, I made sure she was someone who knew omertà, the law of silence, and practiced it. I was a lawyer and former consigliere, and I had too much information in my head to leave unprotected. So I found women already in the circle. I never had to even tell them to keep quiet. I didn’t worry. If I was attracted to a woman outside the circle, I didn’t fuck her. That was all.
But this one? Theresa? I wasn’t even in control of myself with her. It was easy to see her on the television and admire her. The way she stood brought out her curves, and her eyes let you into a mind that turned and churned with something spoken in a language only she knew. She was inaccessible through that screen. I didn’t have to think about what I wanted to do with her body because I couldn’t touch it.
Then when I did, my mind was poisoned and I thought of nothing else.
I fucked her to get it out of my system, then thought, maybe one more time. If I could crack her and hear that language spill, I’d be done.
In the shop office, with Paulie giving me a hard time about the Catholic Charities donation from the day before, I thought about how I could bend her until she broke just one more time.
And that was when Daniel Brower drove into the lot.
I’d never seen a man so bold in my life. He walked onto my property as if he had a right to be there. As if he had an Aston Martin making a high rumble when low was required. I saw him across the lot, through my office windows.
Paulie took his foot off the table. “What the—?”
I turned my back to Brower, who still had half the property to cross, in his beige jacket and flapping black tie. Paulie stood and put his hand on his weapon, which he had no license for whatsoever.
I waved my finger in the direction of his gun. “He’s alone, and I know what it’s about. Put that away.”
Paulie had never looked at me with distrust in all the years I’d known him, but then, I saw it. It was so obvious, it jarred me.
I caught myself. I was acting as if I had done something wrong. I wasn’t doing something wrong. I was doing something stupid. There was a difference.
“This is personal,” I said.
He must have read my face, because his body went slack at the same time he rolled his eyes to the ceiling. He was so American. “You banged his wife.”
“They never married.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Spin. We agreed not to do this. We agreed no women get in the way of business.”
I shrugged. She’d been more than worth it, but I couldn’t tell him that any more than I could tell him that I intended to do it again.
A knock at the door before it cracked open, and Lorenzo poked his head in.