Deep (The Pagano Family Book 4) (26 page)

“
Il vero amore è senza rimpianti
.”

His eyes widened, and the dark mood between them was broken as he smiled warmly. It wasn’t easy to surprise Nick, but she’d managed it. “Where’d you learn that?”

“The internet. I was trying to look up the thing you say about sunshine and I came across that. I liked it, so I tried to memorize it. How’d I do?”

“You did pretty well. Do you know what it means?”

She’d spent so much time trying to memorize the Italian words that she’d almost forgotten their meaning. “I think…it’s like, ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry.’ Or something like that.”

“Something like that, but not quite. It’s better. It’s ‘true love has no regrets.’ I think it’s more than just not saying you’re sorry.” He laced his fingers with hers. “So tell me,
bella
. Knowing what you know, experiencing what you’ve experienced, do you regret falling in love with me?”

She gave him the simple truth. “No. I should. I’m probably crazy not to, but I don’t. Do you regret loving me?”

“No.
Sei tutto per me
. You’re everything to me.” Smiling, he added, “It must be true love, then.” He leaned in, slowly, giving her a chance to turn away. She didn’t.

He slept with her that night, as every night now, dressed in his boxer briefs and a t-shirt, holding her in his arms.

~ 17 ~

Nick stared at his office door as it closed behind the most recent hustler to come to Pagano Brothers Shipping with his hat in hand. The men still standing after Church’s collapse had been lined up for weeks now to pay tribute to the men who’d taken him down.

Though he enjoyed their fearful obeisance, he loathed the idea of sitting down with anyone involved with Church. But wiping out all of his contacts would create another vacuum, and that was what had caused all the trouble in the first place.

When, three years before, the Pagano Brothers had taken personal vengeance on a powerful business associate, they had crossed the careful separation between family and business that Nick’s uncle and father had built up over painstaking years. James Auberon had been as influential as Ben in Rhode Island business and politics, in worlds both legitimate and otherwise. Removing him had caused a seismic shift in both worlds—especially the underworld.

Church had exploited the gap created by that shift. He was crude and without finesse, and it had taken him some time to build up the power and associations he needed to become more than a gnat at Ben’s ear.

Ben himself had given him his first in. When he’d accepted as payment on an old debt the sponsorship of two mixed martial arts fighters—when the fighters had essentially been sold to them—he had brought the Pagano Brothers into an unfamiliar world. Then, he’d learned that that world was corrupt in a way he considered dishonorable. Fights were being fixed as a matter of course, and Ben decided that the Paganos would purge the fight world of that plague.

Nick had advised his uncle and father against taking on the fighters—whose contracts had since been sold away—and he had advised against meddling in the way of that world. Ignoring that advice had been one of Ben’s few missteps in half a century. But it had nearly been enough to bring down everything they’d worked for in that time.

They were out of the fights now. Though Nick had often been frustrated, sometimes infuriated, by his uncle’s stalwart adherence to his old ways, an adherence that had only become more impenetrable after the debacle in the fight world, he had to admit that his uncle’s old ways at least had the potent benefit of balance. And as Nick received tribute from the men who’d survived their alliance with Alvin Church, he saw the balance in action.

The Paganos controlled much of the underworld. Yet they were predominantly legitimate. The shipping company ran about eighty-five percent clean. The myriad clean businesses the Paganos owned in whole or in part all ran at a profit. Sometimes, managers and co-owners needed some persuading, but not often. A few businesses straddled the grey line, laundering unclean money. In the dark of their world, the Paganos stayed on the side of a line Ben had drawn long ago. No drugs. No guns. No human trafficking. They had girls, but they were there by choice, paid well and taken care of. Any associate or client who laid a violent hand on a girl working for the Paganos would be lucky to keep that hand.

Ben would have liked to eradicate drugs, guns, and cheap, abused whores from the landscape completely, but he was pragmatic enough to understand that he could not. Turning back the Zapatas had put a damper on trade, but already that hole was being filled.

But Ben’s way had been to refuse to do business with anyone doing those kinds of business. In order to rise to a true level of power in Rhode Island, legitimate or not, one needed to be on Ben’s list. His edict had had the effect of creating two underworlds, one under the other. Church had risen from those grimy depths.

As Nick met man after anxious man handing over a reparation payment to hold the Paganos at bay, as he turned down every request to sit down with the don, he knew that though this way was balanced, its equilibrium continued fragile. Alvin Church wasn’t the first man who wanted to cast off baggy jeans for tailored suits, and he wouldn’t be the last. Ben’s way kept half the underworld blocked from real power. In time, someone else would fight back against the old ways.

And someday, the men who ran the drugs and the guns and the cheap whores might find that their power lay not in taking the place of the Paganos but in making that place obsolete.

Nick knew he would likely be don when that time came. He’d be ready.

~oOo~

That afternoon, Chief Lumley made an unexpected visit to the warehouse. Paganos did not go to the police station, not even on social calls. Ben took great pride in the minimal incidence of arrests within the organization, and he didn’t want a Pagano or associate to be seen even crossing the threshold of the station.

Nick had been pinched twice, years ago, and his cousin Luca had landed in a holding cell a couple of years back—all events had occurred when new staff were on duty and not yet learned in the way of things in Quiet Cove. Nick, having been young and too careless at the time of both incidents, had called Fred and been released both times without even being processed. Luca, the idiot, had not seen fit to contact the other side of the family, and, once they’d learned of the incident, they’d had to do some backtracking to get him out of the system.

But if Irv was visiting the warehouse—and unscheduled at that—he was not making a social call. So something was up. As Nick stood and shook the chief’s hand, he tried not to sigh.

“Have a seat, Irv.”

The chief sat. “No disrespect, Nick, but I was hoping to meet with Don Pagano.”

Nick was handling the fallout from the demise of Alvin Church, and Ben was beginning to slow down. He’d gone home shortly after lunch.

“He’s not available. I’ll have to do.” Nick smiled in a way meant to convey that Irv had been disrespectful and should be careful. But his attention was acute. There was definitely something up.

“I fielded a call this afternoon from a DHS agent. She had a lot of questions.”

“DHS? Homeland Security?” Those were not the Feds who usually had their sights aimed at organizations like the Pagano Brothers.

Irv nodded. “They’re on the Neon bombing. This agent—Amy Cavanaugh is her name—followed some kind of magical trail of breadcrumbs and connected the diner to the nightclub.”

“How the fuck did she do that?” The Paganos weren’t connected in any material way to Sassy Sal’s. Nick had never been in the place until that last night. The owner had borrowed big from Donnie, but there was no fucking paper trail that anyone would be able to find. Donnie kept a notebook—all the shylocks kept paper, not digital—but they kept their books on their persons, and Donnie had devised an elaborate and sophisticated coding system that took the other shys days to learn. And Matty had gotten his book before the ambulances had come that night. So there were no breadcrumbs.

Donnie could simply have been there that night as a friend. The only people alive, who weren’t in the organization itself, who knew that the Paganos were involved in both events were Bruce and Beverly. And Irv.

And Skylar and Mills.

Jesus Christ. Mills had dropped a dime. Letting that realization germinate and flourish, Nick concentrated on the chief. “What does she know?”

“Far as I can tell, nothing. The questions she was asking, she was digging. I’d say somebody tipped her off, but they didn’t have anything but rumor and recrimination. Enough to get this woman wet, though. She sounds young. Might be fresh on the job.”

“Fuck.” Fresh agents were a pain in his ass. They weren’t major threats, because they had no juice at all, and the Paganos had good relationships with their superiors. But they were usually filled with a righteous naïveté that turned them into little terriers. Not unlike his mother’s Yorkies.

And she was DHS—the Paganos had never worked with DHS before. They didn’t have a standing relationship there. Ben would have to contact a senator to exert pressure on this Agent Cavanaugh. And that would be expensive.

“Fuck.” Chris Mills was going to die, and before he did, he would repent all of his sins.

“Nick…I was thinking.”

Nick regarded the chief. He lifted his eyebrows but didn’t speak.

“I was thinking about Chris Mills, what he was yelling about that day I brought him up to your uncle’s.”

Still, Nick waited silently. He knew what the chief was going to say.

“If Mills contacted this agent, I know what your play would be. But he’s a business owner. He’s involved in the Chamber of Commerce. He’s a visible presence in this town and has been for years. He’s a decent guy, well liked. People will notice if he disappears.”

“Is that advice I didn’t ask for?”

To his credit, Chief Lumley didn’t blink. “Take it as you will. A lowlife falling off the radar is one thing—I don’t lose sleep over the trash getting taken out. But this is a regular guy we’re talking about now. Our arrangement has always been about making Quiet Cove better.”

“Are we going to have a problem?”

The chief stared at him. Nick stared steadily back.

“No,” Lumley sighed. “I’m just letting you know that I don’t know how I’d clean that up.”

Nick knew. The sea wouldn’t feed on Chris Mills. He wouldn’t be made to regret his transgressions. He would have an accident instead. He would get a funeral. His friends would mourn him properly.

But would Nick keep the truth from Beverly?

He didn’t know.

~oOo~

Before he went home that evening, Nick stopped at Uncle Ben’s house. In a clear sign of the new peace in Quiet Cove and among the Paganos, Ellen, their housekeeper, answered the door rather than Bobbo or one of Ben’s other guards. The days of twenty-four-hour security were over. Privacy had finally returned.

“Hi, Mr. Nick.” The stocky redhead stepped back and let Nick in. “Mr. Ben is in his study.”

“Thanks, Ellen. Is my aunt home?”

“No, sir. She’s got the church charity fair meeting this evening. I’ve got a meat loaf in the oven for Mr. Ben, if you’d like to stay.” Usually, Aunt Angie did her own cooking, but when she had evening plans, Ellen stayed and took care of Uncle Ben. Angie called it ‘babysitting’—when Ben wasn’t around to hear.

Ellen’s meatloaf was delicious, but Nick wanted to get back to Beverly. “Thanks, but not tonight.”

She smiled and ducked her head, then went back down the hall. Nick went into his uncle’s study.

Ben was napping on one of his leather sofas. Nick was struck by how aged he seemed, lying on his back, his arms crossed over his chest, his mouth slightly open. He was pushing eighty. He had slowed noticeably over the past few years, and the fight with Church, cycling the way it had, had taken an obvious toll. The era of the first Don Pagano was nearing its end. But he was still sharp and wise, and he had understood better than Nick the way to finally beat the man who likely had been his final opponent.

Nick walked over and shook his uncle’s shoulder. “Uncle.”

Ben came awake immediately and gracefully. As he sat up, he smiled. “Nicolo. I wasn’t expecting you this evening. Are you keeping me company while your aunt plans tag sales and dunking booths?”

Nick chuckled and sat on the facing sofa. “No, I’m sorry. I need to get back to Beverly.”

Standing, Ben went to his bar and poured them each a scotch. “How is your lovely woman?”

Still reserved and subdued. Nick was growing impatient—not with her, but with himself. He couldn’t find a way to help her return to who she was. His world had broken her, and he didn’t know how to help her heal. “Better, I think. She has a way to go yet.”

“She breaks my heart.” Ben handed Nick his scotch. “I hope the fires of hell are deep and scorching hot for the
cafones
who hurt her. Going after women. Innocents. Those men were the worst kind of scum.” He sighed. “But you’re not here to update me on Beverly, are you? This is not a family call you’re making.”

“No, uncle. I’m sorry. It’s business.”