Hell's Kitchen (2 page)

The Monterellis had always been cocky motherfuckers. When Frankie got shot in the face by this Mayfair guy for fucking up some skin trade deal, the younger brother, Archie, had risen up the food chain and started overstepping boundaries that had been in place for years. The Monterellis don’t run gambling on the east coast. They don’t deal with the Russians anywhere in the USA. The Russians are ours, especially if they want drugs or guns or women. The only thing they should have been buying from the small time west coast Italians was fucking vegetables.
 

Roberto sent us over to Seattle to deal with the problem, and once again Sal had gone off half cocked. He’d shot the guy three times in the chest but hadn’t actually killed the fucker. We’d had to break into a hospital of all places to finish the job: Colombian necktie this time, just like our father would have wanted. Colombian neckties are his speciality. His cut throat razor has actually cut more throats than I can count.
 

“I remember,” the guy on the other end of the line answers. “The cops pinned me for that one, too. Made life very difficult for me and my girl.”
 

“We’re sorry about that. The method of execution’s usually enough to tip the cops off over here in New York.” It shocked me the first time I saw someone having their throat cut—just how violent the force of the gushing blood could be. When Sal had laid the steel against Monterelli’s skin, the spray of blood had literally hit the ceiling.

“Seattle cops don’t know shit about Roberto Barbieri. And they don’t care, either. You guys made a mess.”

Sal bristles, reaching for the phone, but I won’t let him have it. “Irrespective of what happened, Roberto wants to hire you. He’s offering big money for you to fly out to New York.”

“I don’t work for other people,
Theo
,” Mayfair says. He knows my name, which is pretty typical. He’s the kind of guy who will know everything about me, the same way he knows everything about every single member of organized crime syndicates in America, just so he has the drop on everyone. No surprises that way.
 

“You’d be a contractor. My father would give you free rein to handle the job however you pleased. You’d be here for a couple of days, do the work and then you’d be flying home again. Simple.”

“The kind of jobs your father hires men like me for are never simple. I’m west coast these days, Theo. And I don’t kill people for money anymore. Tell your father thanks but no thanks. Don’t call this number again.”

The line goes dead. I can feel Sal’s eyes searing into the side of my head, burning into me. “Well, that went well,” he says, his voice flat. “At least the old bastard can’t say we didn’t do as we were told.”

It occurs to me that our father told us to get the motherfucker on side, not call him and have him tell us no. That’s semantics, though. I’ll worry about Mayfair and Roberto’s massive score later, after we’ve dealt with this girl and gotten the old man’s birthday celebrations out of the way tonight.
 

I shift up a gear, swerving the innocuous Lincoln town car I’m driving through a maze of yellow taxicabs and other Lincoln town cars. This is how everyone travels in the city. If you have money, you don’t take the subway. You don’t ride the bus. You have a driver and a sleek five-door sedan that will take you anywhere you want to go.

That’s what Kaitlin McLaughlin is expecting to collect her from the MacKinnon Commercial Airfield, an hour’s drive out of New York Proper: a nameless driver, who will transport her back to her father’s bar in Hell’s Kitchen.

Instead, she’s getting my brother and me: two very pissed-off Italian boys, both with severe attitude problems and a distinct dislike for anything even faintly Irish. You can’t really escape hating the people your father hates, especially when your father is Roberto Barbieri. The guy’s not just old school. He has a medieval mentality and can hold a fucking grudge like no one else on earth. You piss him off and you can expect some serious Old Testament justice: an eye for an eye, motherfucker. And that’s you getting off light.

“What time they due to land?” Sal asks. He loops a tie, pre-knotted and ready to go, over his head.

“Twenty minutes.” With traffic the way it is, we’ll be there in ten.

Sal tightens the tie around his neck, placing the ridiculous fucking chauffeur’s hat on his head. He tucks his hair back behind his ears. He needs to cut it, but will the bastard listen? Hell, no. He never listens to a word I say. “Are you ready?” he asks.

I take my eyes off the road, arching an eyebrow at him. Who the hell does he think he’s talking to? I’ve been doing this job longer than him, after all. I’ve never blinked. Never
not
been ready. He gets the point pretty damn quickly.

“All right, man, I’m sorry.”

When we arrive at the airfield, we’re directed to hangar twelve, no questions asked. Paddy McLaughlin’s own men would have arrived around now—if we hadn’t already beaten the shit out of them and handcuffed them to a pillar inside an old cardboard factory down on the wharf—so we’re expected. Kaitlin McLaughlin’s plane is delayed. I’m already bored and itching to go by the time the private jet touches down. Sal climbs out of the car and leans against the front passenger door, waiting for the prissy Irish princess and her entourage to exit the plane. When she does, we’re in luck.

Normally, Paddy doesn’t send his little girl anywhere without two personal bodyguards. Today, she’s only accompanied by one. Sal taps the hood of the car as he goes out to take her bags. I have the engine purring in anticipation as he opens the back passenger side door for her and she climbs inside.

Huge sunglasses cover her eyes. That full mouth of hers is perfectly visible in the rearview, though. “Where the fuck is Ray?” she asks. Her father may be first generation Irish, but Kaitlin was born and raised in the States—she sounds like a spoiled little Yank bitch.

“Mr. McLaughlin needed him for something else. He sent us instead.”

She slides the sunglasses down the bridge of her nose, peering at me over the car’s half-raised privacy screen. “And who are you?”

I give her a tight-lipped smile, doing my best to keep my tongue in my head. We need the bodyguard to get in the car, and then we’re golden. Until then, I’m Jerry, the friendly town car driver. “Jerry. My buddy there, that’s Gareth. We’re new.”

“I can see that.” She makes a low, humming sound at the back of her throat. She sounds like she approves.
Sorry, sweetheart. I don’t touch crazy pussy. But I
will
introduce you to my old man, all the same. He just can’t wait to fucking meet
you
.

The door behind me opens and I feel the car dip as someone gets in—I didn’t notice before, but the lone bodyguard with Kaitlin is a woman. Must be the chick Roberto was talking about. I get a good look at her in the rearview and find myself taking a second one for good measure. She’s blisteringly hot. Maybe in her mid-twenties? Long dark hair, tied back into a braid. High cheekbones. A mouth to rival Kaitlin’s. Her tits strain against her tight black shirt as she twists to put on her seatbelt. You can tell she works out; her clothes fit her far too well for her not to know she looks good in them, too.

Just like Kaitlin, she asks, “Where’s Ray?”

“Busy doing something for Daddy,” Kaitlin informs her, which saves me from spinning the lie again.
 

“Okay. Straight to the bar, then.” The body guard’s head doesn’t even lift, but she’s a professional. She assesses me in the mirror just as I’ve assessed her. I pretend not to notice as Sal folds himself into the passenger seat.

“Of course.” I press the button for the privacy screen, raising it the rest of the way, blocking out all sound from the back of the car. Sal turns and gives me one of his wicked, crazy-ass grins. He’s enjoying this already. “All right, then, big brother. Let’s do this.” He leans forward and hits a button on the dash—and every single door on the town car automatically locks. “No backing out now.”

I burn out of the hangar to the sounds of muffled thuds from the back of the car. The bodyguard’s not stupid. She’s heard the doors locking and knows something isn’t right.
“Motherfucker! Open this up right now!”

Normally there’s an intercom in these cars, but this one’s different. Sal and I smashed the shit out of
this
car’s intercom with two lump hammers and ripped out the wiring. We also lined the roof with lead. The girls in the back aren’t striking up a conversation with us any time soon. And they aren’t making any phone calls to dear old Papa McLaughlin, either.

As I head back toward the city, the shouting from the back gets louder. It’s accompanied by the dull thudding of feet trying to smash out the privacy screen. Sal raps his knuckles against the glass, grinning again. “Bitch sounds crazy back there. I don’t think she likes the modifications we’ve made.”

I allow myself a small smile as we hit the George Washington Bridge, heading back toward North Manhattan. So far
Operation: Kidnap Kaitlin
has been a roaring success. Sal pulls out his cell and starts tapping into it with quick fingers. “Telling the old man we’re on our way?”

He nods. “Bastard better give us credit where credit’s due. He’s probably still organising his own fucking birthday party. Meanwhile,
we
have just successfully taken our mark hostage. We’re on the homeward stretch.”

The fucking homeward stretch.

The thing about saying you’re on the homeward stretch is that often it’s like waving a red flag at a bull. Fate must hear that phrase and decide to fuck over the poor schmuck who was dumb enough to utter it every single fucking time. It’s only seconds after Sal’s parted with those words that the electric window behind me—the bodyguard’s side window—shatters. We knew the bodyguard would be armed, but we didn’t expect anyone to be shooting out the damn
side
windows. An eruption of fragmented diamonds explodes sideways, spraying a bright yellow smart car with a million shards of glass. The sound of the firing gun is almost deafening.

“
What the fuck?”

The smart car veers sideways, smashing into us; I press my foot to the floor, grinding my teeth at the sound of screeching metal and more hammering from the back as I swerve through the traffic. Sal twists in his seat, pulling his gun and pressing it to the glass of the privacy screen. His finger’s on the trigger. “She’s going fucking crazy. I’m gonna shoot the bitch.”

“Which one?”

Sal lifts one shoulder, scowling into the back. “I don’t know. Both of them. I need to shoot both of them.”

I careen over in the left hand lane, trying to find a clear path. We need to get back to the fucking restaurant.
Now.
This is really not fucking good. Risking a glance in the mirror behind me, I see my brother is right. Kaitlin appears to be crying, thick black streaks of makeup running down her face, her arrogance completely gone now. The bodyguard, on the other hand, is only half visible. She’s …
she’s leaning out of the fucking window
. I glance in the side mirror just in time to see her aiming her gun. She fires. The side mirror reports the muzzle flash, and then the whole thing is just …
gone.

“Fuck!”

“That’s it. I’m shooting them.”

“DO NOT FUCKING SHOOT ANYONE, SAL!”
If I can’t pull this car over or get the hell out of this traffic, my brother is gonna get trigger happy on these bitches and we’ll be carting two bodies back into our father’s kitchen. Sal gives me a frustrated look, his eyebrows spiking. A look of surprise washes over him.

“She’s gonna fucking shoot—” He doesn’t get to finish the sentence. An ear-splitting
crack
rips through the air. Suddenly glass is raining down on me. Glass everywhere. The bitch in the back fires a second shot; this time the round travels straight through my broken window and shatters the windshield from the inside.

I can’t see a fucking thing.

Kaitlin starts screaming even louder.

I don’t have the car anymore. I don’t have this situation. I don’t have my fucking brother, either. I think he’s about to murder our collateral. My thoughts as the car hits the guardrail, as the car begins to flip:
We’d better just fucking die. Because if we don’t fucking die … what the
fuck
are we gonna tell Roberto?

TWO

SCARLETT

I stare at the broken air-conditioning unit in my tiny walk-up—a room that’s really just a broom cupboard with a refrigerator and a mattress—and sigh inwardly. It’s easily ninety degrees outside, and it’s only eight-fifteen in the morning. New York City is excruciating on days like this, days and weeks that melt into each other, a constant barrage of humidity and steam and loose wisps of hair that stick to the back of your neck. It’s hotter than hell in this damn city, and all I want to do is
get out.
The problem is, to get out you kind of need somewhere to go.

The air conditioner hasn’t worked since I’ve had the place—seven months now, seven months since I’ve been ousted from L.A. Seven months. How is that even possible? It feels like it happened yesterday, the image of his little tricycle rolling backwards behind the car the same thing that haunts me in my nightmares. Seven months since I took a plea deal, a suspended sentence. Which means it’s been—I have to stop and count back. Nine? Yeah. Nine months since the night when I completely ruined my fucking life and ended someone else’s.

As I slam my door and take the nine flights of stairs down to the lobby, I realize roughly halfway down that I didn’t even try the elevator to see if it’s working yet. For three weeks, I’ve been hauling my ass up and down these stairs, because the building super refuses to do anything about it. And it’s not like I’m about to knock on his door and ask again after the way he creeped me the fuck out last week, standing in his doorway and not letting me out of his apartment for almost an hour. Jimmy. You know what? I’ve never met a Jimmy who wasn’t a dick, now that I think about it. This one is a total creeper, though. The guy is a date rape waiting to happen.

Thick, muggy air hits me square in the face as I leave my building, sucking the air out of my lungs as my feet hit the sidewalk. I’m still not used to this damp, oppressive kind of heat after growing up on the west coast, still forget to ready myself for the onslaught every time I go outside in this goddamn city since summer has begun.