Footsteps (24 page)

“Who’d you ride with?” The Uncles’ men
worked in pairs.

“Donnie’s kid is sick.”

“You went alone?”

Even behind the bruising and swelling, Joey
managed a miserable expression. “It was supposed to be cake. We do
this run once a week. It’s always cake.”

Carlo loved his brother, loved him fiercely.
But God, the kid could be such a moron. Whether it was chicks or
work or whatever, Joey Pagano thought with his littlest head. He
couldn’t believe the Uncles even
wanted
him on their
payroll. “Shit, Joey. What do you think I can do? You think I have
$40,000 stashed in a coffee can or something? I’m bleeding red
here, kid. If you’re here for help with the money, I just don’t
fucking have it.”

But Joey shook his head. “No—no. I thought…I
thought maybe you’d talk to Uncle Ben for me? Since you’re, like,
most-favored nephew or whatever, with the thing with Sabina and
Auberon? Maybe you could get him to ease up, give me time?”

Joey was asking him to ask for another
favor, and with that, Carlo’s sympathy for his careless, reckless
baby brother shrank to a fraction. He stood up. “You want me to
make a deal with Uncle Ben. To save your ass from your own
screw-up.”

“You did it for a chick you hardly knew. I’m
your brother.”

Carlo barely caught back the impulse to
punch Joey right in his broken face. Instead, he stood and walked
away, counting to ten, then again to another ten, before he turned
back. “You signed on for this gig, Joe. After everything Pop said,
all the years we were growing up, knowing exactly what business the
Uncles were in, knowing what you’d have to do, knowing how much it
would hurt Pop, you signed on, because you wanted to play
cumpà
. Well, now you are. No, I’m not asking Uncle Ben for a
favor.”

“Carlo, they’ll kill me.”

“Maybe.” Carlo doubted it. If he were anyone
other than blood family, then yes. But regardless of family ties,
Joey wasn’t half as broken as he would be once Uncle Ben knew about
this, of that Carlo was sure.

“Please, big brother. Please.”

With a sigh, Carlo sat back down. He’d
helped raise this kid. In the first years after their mother died,
when their father had been an empty husk who’d been able to work
but nothing more, Carlo and Carmen had taken on the daily care and
feeding of Joey and Rosa, the only kids still school-age. Joey had
been fourteen then. Just on the cusp of figuring out how to be a
man. Hell, maybe Carlo hadn’t taught him well enough. Their father
had been lost, and John and Luca had been off doing their things,
coping with their grief in their ways. It had been up to Carlo.
Maybe he was to blame for the way he’d come up.

“Did you get a look at any of the guys who
jumped you?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I know who they are. They hang
around at the Port—they use a storage unit down there. They’re not
organized. Just some shithead tweakers who caught me with my pants
down.”

“You got rolled by a couple of skinny-ass
tweakers?”

“Three. Not a couple. And those fucks are
crazy strong when they’re fried.”

“You know ‘em, you know where they are, why
don’t you take Donnie or somebody and get your cash back before it
all goes in their heads?”

“Nobody in the company can know about this.
Carlo, please. Help me.”

Sighing again, Carlo leaned back in the
chair and wiped his hands over his face. “Okay. I’ll call Luca.
Jesus, Joe.”

Tears leaked out of Joey’s swollen eyes.
“Thank you, Carlo. I’ll make it up to you, I will.”

~oOo~

“It’s that one—E15.” Joey’s mouth was
getting progressively mushier. Their next stop after this would
have to be the ER, or at least a twenty-four-hour urgent care
center.

Luca drove past the unit and parked his H3
in a dim corner, though the precaution, Carlo thought, was likely
unnecessary. At an unattended storage facility with the broken gate
left wide open, the security cameras were probably just for show.
Still, better to be cautious. To that end, Luca tossed him a dark
knit cap. “It’s the kind with a face mask. Cover our beards.”

He nodded and pulled the cap over his head
and face. Luca and Hugh Quinn, their friend who owned the bar, with
whom Luca shared a fighting history, did the same. Luca had called
Hugh when they hadn’t been able to reach John. He was always ready
for a fight. Clean-shaven Joey pulled his hoodie over his head,
yanking it as far forward as it would go.

Luca turned and glared at their little
brother. “Here.” He pulled a 9mm handgun from a holster under his
seat and handed it to Joey. “Do. Not. Shoot. Unless you have no
fucking choice. Use your brain, JoJo. Your brain. You can’t fight,
so your job is to have our backs. But Jesus fuck, asshole, keep
your head straight. Not only do we not want to kill anybody, but
we’ll be in a room with cement walls. Don’t fire unless there’s no
other choice. You got it?”

Joey looked pale beneath his bruises, and
miserable with pain and shame. He nodded. “Yeah, Luc. I got it. I’m
good.”

Just like old times. Well, except for the
cut-rate ninja getup.

Carlo was a fucking architect, but here he
was, preparing to skulk around through a shitty self-storage place,
an aluminum baseball bat in his hands. His life had taken a bizarre
series of turns in the past several weeks. He was losing his sense
of direction. But at least this night had a weird sense of
nostalgic familiarity.

Though he was the responsible, rational,
levelheaded brother, he was also the oldest. Protection and defense
of his siblings had been his responsibility since a little brat had
pushed Carmen into the water when she was three and Carlo was five.
When Luca came up, by nature physical and confrontational, Carlo
had spent a few years getting his little brother out of scrapes.
And then Luca had gotten bull-strong, and the two of them helped
everybody else out of scrapes. John, though the quietest and
gentlest of all the siblings, found a kind of manic fury when his
family was hurt, and he joined in, too. By the time Joey and Rosa
were in school, the substantially older Pagano boys had a fearsome
reputation among the young people of the Cove, a reputation
enhanced by, though not built on, the reputation of the Uncles.

It had driven Carmen utterly apeshit that
nobody feared her the way they’d feared her brothers—especially
when she was a teenager and even her younger brothers had gotten
more respect than she had. She’d hated that because she was a girl,
nobody thought to be afraid of her. But Carlo had eventually made
her see that for the advantage it was. Nobody saw her coming.
Carmen on the warpath was extra scary. Not because she was all that
strong, but because she was wily. She didn’t need to throw punches
or swing bats. She found other ways to make somebody pay. Nobody
ever underestimated her twice.

It had been a long time since the Pagano
boys had gathered together in premeditation to right a wrong. Now
three of them, and Hugh, walked through the dark alleys between the
storage buildings, returning on foot to E15. The roll-down overhead
door was pulled to about six inches from the ground, and an a
weakly golden light oozed under it. Luca went forward, turned back
to check on the others, and then yanked the door up with both
massive arms. It flew to the ceiling with an ear-crunching rattle
and crash, and the tweakers—there were five of them, three men and
two women—screamed and jumped.

They’d been having themselves one hell of a
party, and Carlo knew that they wouldn’t be coming out of this with
the full forty grand. But he didn’t have time to wonder if that
meant this exercise was futile, because one of the tweakers, an
emaciated, toothless guy with oozing sores over his face and arms,
was facing Luca and reaching behind his back in a gesture that
could only mean one thing, and Carlo charged, swinging the bat.
Right behind him, Luca and Hugh let out war whoops in a wild
harmony and flew into the fray.

“Hi, honey! You here for lunch or just a
jolt?” Edith leaned an elbow on the pastry case and smiled warmly
at Sabina as she crossed from the front door.

“Lunch today, thank you. I’m meeting Carmen,
though. So I’ll sit, please, until she comes.”

Edith laughed. “Always so polite. Sure
thing, honey. You don’t want a cup while you wait?”

Sabina shook her head. “No, thank you.”

The Cove Café was becoming one of Sabina’s
favorite spots in Quiet Cove. Edith, the owner and one of only two
workers Sabina had ever seen, was a plump older woman with tightly
permed, light grey hair and always-rosy cheeks. She wore
elastic-waist jeans and one of apparently dozens of Quiet Cove
souvenir t-shirts she owned. She had a smile and a kind word for
everyone who came in, whether she knew them or not, but Sabina felt
a little proud that she had been in here enough to warrant a few
extra lines of conversation from the happily busy woman.

The café was the kind of place to get a good
cup of coffee—not too many frills, but for this heavily Italian
town there was a busy espresso machine—and a small assortment of
baked goods. They also had a limited menu, hung over the counter
and spelled out in little black plastic letters, of sandwiches,
salads, and a soup of the day. The décor was simple—white linoleum
floor, white walls, white Formica tables. The chairs were a mixed
bunch of old-fashioned vinyl sets, some in red, some green, some
blue and white, one set of three with an image of a rooster on the
chair backs and also on the seats. The café curtains in the window
were white eyelet. And then, covering a majority of the wall
surfaces, were photos of Quiet Cove—events in the town and on the
beach, the sand, the water, the people, surfers, boats, sunbathers,
shorebirds, sea animals, parades, picnics, parties. Some of the
photos were obviously recent; others were faded by age and sun and
showed beachgoers in swimwear fashions from days gone by.

Sabina didn’t mind waiting for Carmen; she
enjoyed her little museum tour of Quiet Cove. She still hadn’t had
a chance to look closely at all the hundreds of pictures on these
walls. She thought maybe when she had, she’d really be home in this
wonderful little town.

The day Carlo had gone back to Providence
with Trey and Elsa, Sabina had gone into town to sell the ring
Auberon had bound her with. Joey had told her there was a little
pawnshop not far off the town square. Most of its stock was
surfboards and elaborate fishing rods and other kinds of beach and
ocean gear, but there was a case of jewelry, too, and Sabina had
handed the canary diamond in its platinum setting to the small,
thin man behind it. His eyes had gone wide before he’d masked his
surprise with an affect of disdain. Then he’d taken out a jeweler’s
loupe and studied the ring, and the surprise was back on his face.
And then recognition; he’d known her from the media attention
surrounding the disappearance and death. His eyes had gone avid,
then.

He’d offered her $45,000 for the ring, and
she’d taken it, even knowing that it was worth many times that
amount. She didn’t know how to haggle, and she hadn’t wanted to.
She’d just wanted the ring to be gone. He’d gone into a back room
and brought out a few stacks of bound bills. $45,000 in cash.

Apparently it had been unusual, and
dangerous, to receive so much in cash, and apparently she had been
disrespected by not getting more. When she’d shown Joey later, he’d
been angry, with her and with the pawn man, and he’d wanted to
‘handle it,’ but she’d said no. The ring was gone, and she had some
money, and all she wanted to do was to put it in the bank and start
her life.

A few days later, $45,000 had not seemed to
be enough. In her life before, she’d had handbags that had cost a
quarter of that amount. Now she was going to try to live a whole
life on it, and her worry that she would not be able to do so
settled like a rock in her belly. Learning to be poor would be the
first challenge of her new life. Still, it brought her a feeling of
excitement, too. There was fear, yes—it came from wondering what
she would do if she failed to learn how to live. But for now, she
was making her own life, and, small though it was, it made her
happy.

She’d found a little furnished apartment in
the top floor over a florist. It was just an attic studio, the
whole apartment not even as large as her bathroom in Providence,
but it had two skylights and two big dormer windows, so it was
flooded with light, and it always smelled of flowers. The kitchen
was little more than a tiny refrigerator and a microwave on a
chest, but Sabina wasn’t much of a cook, so she didn’t mind. The
furniture was sparse and worn but comfortable, and the rent was
cheap. She used a little bit of what she’d taken to calling her
‘freedom fund’ to buy some brightly colored linens for the brass
bed, and to add pillows and throw rugs and some inexpensive prints
to the whitewashed floor and walls, and she thought it was sweet
and cozy.

She didn’t have a television, but she’d
never really watched television, so she didn’t miss it. There was a
used bookstore a couple of doors down from the florist, and she’d
gotten a whole box of books for thirty dollars; that would keep her
entertained in her quiet hours.