The garage Dante worked at was located in an upscale part of the city, so I wasn’t surprised at how proud Colletta had sounded. Of course, it was owned by the Family, so it was likely that his position had a lot to do with nepotism. Still, it would be unfair not to give Dante the credit he deserved. After all, he’d been the one who had given me the device that allowed me to eavesdrop on people from long distances.
Unlike the Taverna, I had no anxieties about just waltzing into the garage. Although it was owned by the mafia, all the employees were friends of Dante’s, and like him, none of them seemed to really care that I’d left the mafia. In my experience, it was only the older, hardened, more experienced members who were strict about rules and traditions, while the younger generation really only cared about money.
As I approached the garage, I could see from a distance that they had a long line of cars waiting to be serviced. I stepped right past the main office building where clients would usually go and headed toward the actual work area in the back.
“All right,” I heard Dante bellow as soon as I stepped into the concrete-floored work area. “Make sure there’s not a single bolt out of place. If I get any complaints, I’m taking it out of your paycheck, Ollie!”
“Okay,” someone yelled from beneath a car that was suspended on an auto lift.
“Switching out people’s rims again?” I smirked as I snuck up behind him.
“Ah!” Dante yelled as he jumped in the air and spun around to face me. Honestly, with how easy it was to sneak up on him, I seriously hoped he never got on the Family’s bad side. It would be a breeze to take him out. “Nick, don’t do that!”
“Sorry,” I chuckled at the frown on his face. He was eighteen now, but I still saw him as the doe-eyed little kid that used to follow me around, begging me to play with him after school. He still had the same baby face and big eyes, but he’d grown almost as tall as I was, and he’d recently started styling his hair into something that resembled a thick mohawk.
“You should have told me you were coming,” he remarked. “I’m working on this new kind of smoke bomb. It’s laced with a quickly metabolizing drug that’ll knock people out but be undetectable by the time the cops show up.”
“That’s… pretty cool, actually,” I replied honestly. He grinned proudly at my praise. “Maybe don’t go around talking about that stuff so loudly, though.”
“Eh.” He shrugged dismissively. “It’s just the famiglia here. And you, but you technically still count.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but he cut suddenly cut me off with a shout
“Whoa, hey, no! Not that one!”
I jumped at his sudden scream and turned to see who he was yelling at. A man in a pair of oil-stained coveralls was in the middle of removing the rims from one of the cars mounted on the lift.
“Leave that one alone,” Dante called from across the garage. “Take the ones from the yellow Porsche.”
“Got it, boss,” the man yelled back before he started to re-bolt the rims into place.
“Wait,” I snorted. “You really are stealing the rims? I was joking. I didn’t think you’d still be doing such small jobs.”
Like most mafia members, Dante had started off as a low-level soldati, in charge of carrying out petty crimes and small jobs, like stealing the rims off cars. Unlike other members, he had risen in the ranks quickly due to his sharp mind and his ability to work with his hands.
“Not just rims.” He grinned impishly. “And I’m not stealing. I’m replacing the parts with ones of… comparable value.”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” I laughed. I probably shouldn’t have found it funny. It was still a crime, after all. Compared to some of the other things the mafia did, though, such as murder and human trafficking, swiping car parts didn’t seem nearly as bad.
“And I don’t do it to everyone.” Dante shrugged. “Just the ones with a lot of money like Mr. Drives-A-Yellow-Porsche. Then I split the profits among everyone equally. Unlike you, we’re not mafia royalty. We still have to work for our money.”
“You don’t have to justify yourself to me,” I replied. I’d done a lot worse in my time with the mafia than ripping off some rich Porsche owner. “And I’m not a part of the mafia anymore, remember? You have a higher status in the Family than I do.”
“Nah.” Dante grinned. “You just keep running into the wrong people. There are a lot of us who don’t care about ‘blood in, blood out’ or about the old traditions or anything. A lot of people still respect you, in spite of what you did. Heck, because of what you did.”
“They respect me because I ditched the Family?” I deadpanned. Somehow, I didn't buy it.
“Because you defied the boss,” he smirked conspiratorially.
“That’s just not done, you know? Unless you want to end up at the bottom of the ocean or buried out in a shallow grave on the side of the highway.”
“Yeah, well, I think a lot of that had to do with who the boss is,” I retorted. “Had the leader of our Family been anyone other than my brother, I probably wouldn’t have gotten out alive.”
“Just think about it, all right?” Dante smiled. “About coming back into the fold, I mean. Not for them, but for us.”
“Not gonna happen,” I scoffed without hesitation. “But thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Yeah, all right.” Dante sighed with disappointment. “Oh, how’d that new recorder work for you? Have you gotten a chance to test it out yet?”
“Yeah, just this morning, actually,” I replied. “Worked like a charm.”
“I knew it would.” Dante grinned smugly. “So what did you need it for? Some big government case?”
“No,” I chuckled. “Just some scumbag who I’m pretty
