‘You won’t find an MBA case study on the Bellinis.’
‘So what do you recommend?’
‘Find out a little more. Why they’ve approached us. Why aren’t they dealing this coke in Florida?’
‘Or take a shortcut,’ Bucks said. ‘Kill them and steal their coke. That’d be one way to sweeten the deal.’ He gave her a crooked, half-mad smile.
Eve stared at him.
‘You ever seen a frijole popped? They lose all command of their English. Blabbering all this Spanish bullshit, begging for their lives. Doesn’t occur to them I don’t speak Spanish, so it’s not helping their cause any.’ Bucks leaned forward, put his elbows on his legs.
‘Killing people on a whim is what got the Bellinis in trouble before.’
‘I might fire your ass on a whim.’ Like the power was his.
‘Honey,’ she said. ‘I’d watch how you talk to me. I’m higher up than you in this family, and I’m telling Paul what you said about killing them.’ She picked up the phone, dialed the extension for the private suite. Bucks yanked the phone away from her, shoved her back onto the floor. Then he was on top of her, his fingers working into her neck. Not closing around her throat but digging into the flesh.
‘I was joking about popping them. I’m not joking now,’ Bucks said. Pain exploded from her neck, coursed along her arms, her chest. ‘See what I got here? This is all the flesh around the carotid. Now. I start to squeeze, the lights go dim. I shut it off and that’s all you wrote. Or I nick it… just so… and we have a mess on Frank’s nice rug.’ He brought his lips close to her ear, the weight of him crushing the breath out of her. ‘You. Don’t. Fuck. With. Me. You understand?’
‘I… understand,’ she said, large black circles dotting her vision.
He got up, helped her to her feet, eased her into a chair. She watched as he went to the bar and poured a glass of water, brought it to her. ‘You’ll have a distinctive bruise tomorrow.’ Like he was proud. ‘Wear a nice scarf. You got one?’
She nodded, stunned. She took the water.
Bucks knelt down before her, put both his hands on her knees. The intimacy of it was worse than hitting her.
‘Now let’s be friends,’ he said.
She nodded, but seething, suddenly more mad than afraid. ‘I understand you and Paul,’ she said. ‘I understand the juice you got in your blood right now. This is exciting. Way more exciting than energy trading, right?’
Bucks gave a slow nod.
‘But these guys, they will kill you and Paul without missing a heartbeat. They won’t grab your neck and play around. They’ll shoot you dead and not think about it again for the rest of their lives.’
‘That’s why I should kill those guys and get their goods. Now.’
‘That would start a war we couldn’t win.’
‘You’ve got to start thinking big, Eve.’
She couldn’t help it. ‘You’ve got to start thinking, period.’
Bucks frowned at her. His hand moved to his back where she knew he wore his pistol under his jacket. ‘You’re not being a team player, Eve, and I can’t support this negativity. It ends now.’
The office door opened, Frank stumbling inside, the Miami wiseguys in tow.
‘Hey,’ Frank said. ‘They want to see that photo of me singing with Donna Summer.’
Bucks stood and smiled, easing his hand away from his holster, folding his arms across his chest. ‘Great. Then you boys ready for a ride back to your condo? Me and Eve are done talking for the night.’ He grinned at her. ‘This is gonna be our best deal ever, isn’t it, Eve?’
She nodded slowly, putting her hand on her throat and hating him.
3
A hundred and seventy miles south of Houston, Whit Mosley couldn’t sleep, and he walked from the guest house he lived in at the back of his father’s property, past the blue quiet of the pool, up to the main house. His father, Babe, sat at the kitchen table, finishing a chocolate milkshake, eating the sweet slurry with a spoon.
‘Hey,’ Babe said. ‘You want one?’
‘No,’ Whit said. ‘You won’t sleep if you eat that.’
‘Sleep is a thief of time.’
Whit sat down across from his father. ‘Irina asleep?’
‘Zonked.’ Irina was his father’s much younger wife, a year or two younger than Whit, wife number five, a Russian girl Babe had met through a marriage-oriented service and brought to Port Leo from Moscow. ‘She’s tired all the time. Tired of me being sick.’ He shrugged. ‘She won’t have that much longer to worry about it.’
‘Daddy.’
‘Whit, it’s okay.’ No self-pity colored Babe’s voice. ‘She’s too young for death, to be a widow.’ He licked chocolate from his spoon, ran a hand over the blondish gray stubble on his head. ‘She’ll go on. And she’ll always love me. But she ain’t gonna go back to Russia, and she don’t have her citizenship yet, so if she remarries kind of quick, don’t hold it against her.’ He clinked his spoon back into the glass.
‘Can we talk about my mother for a minute?’
‘Not with food in my mouth. What brought her up?’
‘I want to know if there’s anything you never told us about her,’ Whit said. ‘For example, did she cheat on you?’
‘What possible difference would any of this make now?’
‘Don’t shield me. There’s no point in it.’
‘I believe she did. She got bored with me, frustrated with having so many kids so quick. I never had proof.’
‘You ever hear the name James Powell?’
Babe shook his head. ‘What you up to, Whitman?’
‘Nothing.’ Whit picked up his father’s ice cream glass, rinsed it out in the sink.
‘Who the hell is James Powell?’
‘Nobody. You ever think about my mother? Wonder if she’s alive?’
‘Rarely.’ Regret in his voice, as though this admission meant weakness.
Whit didn’t look at Babe as he loaded the dishwasher. ‘You ever want to see her again?’
A long silence took hold, the kind that carries a weight with it.
Finally Babe said: ‘This will sound nuts, but Ellen probably thinks about us more than I think about her, shug.’
‘But she left us. She didn’t care about us.’
‘Whit, you won’t remember this, but most of the time she was a real good mother. She held onto you boys tight. Like a life preserver. You all were her chance for normalcy. A life like people are supposed to have. But she liked… excitement. Once, right after we were married, I had to go up to the bank in Rockport. We pull up and she said, out of the blue, Babe, what if we robbed it? She had this glittery look in her eye. Like she was hoping to be Bonnie and I was gonna be Clyde. She gave me this sideways glance I’ll never forget. We went to Vegas on our honeymoon and she’s pregnant, I come back from the bathroom and she’s betting a grand – all our gambling money – on a single blackjack hand. She won and I got her the hell away from the table. It scared me. And the years after that I’m filling her up with babies and I guess that wasn’t excitement enough.’ He shrugged. ‘Finally she left. But you can’t leave a large family and pretend they never happened. I figure she died a long while back, otherwise she would have called you and your brothers.’
‘You said I don’t remember her,’ Whit said. ‘But I remember her scent. I never knew it was gardenia until I was older. I didn’t imagine it, did I?’
Babe nodded, smiled. ‘Yeah. She used a soap that smelled like gardenia.’
‘Why did you marry her?’ Whit realized he had never asked before.
