Sweet Release (A Bad Boy Mafia Romance) (8 page)

He spoke before I could get it out, though. “We should, ah, probably head home. Early day tomorrow and all. This was nice, though.”

I had to admit, I had kind of been hoping he’d suggest we take this further. But, I supposed that wasn’t in the cards. So I played it cool. “Yeah, I start at nine, and I’ve still got to… wash my hair, so…” Seriously? What was wrong with me? That was like, the least sexy thing I could have
possibly
said.

“Okay,” Mike said, clearly confused by my announcement. “You, ah, want me to walk you home, or…?”

It occurred to me that Mike was both out of practice being a gentleman, what with four years without so much as a glimpse of a woman, probably, and that he took my ability to handle myself seriously. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been a question.

If he’d just said he’d do it, then I’d have accepted. As it was, there was this little stab of pride that I couldn’t entirely ignore. “I’ll manage okay,” I said.

“Right,” Mike said quickly, “of course you will. Sorry; I didn’t mean like you might need my—”

“It’s okay, Mike,” I told him. “I understood you.”

“Did you?” He asked.

Well, now I didn’t know. Had I? “Maybe… not?”

“Sorry,” Mike grunted. “I’m outta practice with all this. And, I’m kind of a wreck right now. I like you, Ella. Just so we’re clear on that.”

“Good,” I said. “I like you too, Mike.”

“Great.”

“Yes; great.”

“So… we do this again?”

“We should.” And also you should come home with me so we can grudge fuck one another. But I didn’t say that part, even though it might have actually worked because Mike looked about ready to crack.

Instead of cracking, though, he stood up from the table with me, and we left the bar. We said polite good byes and see-you-tomorrows, and Mike walked back toward the gym. I went to the nearest bus stop, but I watched him walk away for a minute to see if he’d look back.

Just before he turned the corner, he did, and he waved.

Well… it wasn’t a total loss, anyway. Step six, I decided, was well under way.

In the meantime, there was a six setting vibrator at home with my name on it and I intended to run the batteries down thinking about how I would rather this night have ended.

Michael

“That rat bastard tried to fucking frame me again,” I said when I saw Tony again. I hadn’t planned to see him soon, but Jarome was too much of a pacifist to put up with my bitching, and Ella, well, I just had a hard time getting angry around her. But a little anger is good sometimes, and Tony brought it out of me easy. Plus, Tony knew things.

“Jarome kick him out?” Tony wondered. He put the cartoons on mute to listen to me, but was still watching the screen.

“No,” I said. “He says we gotta play it smart, let it run itself out. Some platitude about waiting and watching for the right moment or something. I don’t know.”

“Well,” Tony said, sighing, “I could put him down if you want. Make it look like a… car accident, or a house fire or something. Circumstantial, you know?” You’d think he was offering to take out the trash. Not that he really wanted to, but he would if I was gonna keep going on about it.

I stared at him, and not for the first time wondered what exactly happened to him to make him this way. Jesus Christ, man… “No, Tony, I don’t want you to kill him. He’s a cop. They’d give you the chair, man; don’t be stupid.”

“Hey,” Tony snapped, finally looking at me, “don’t call me stupid, moron. Look, I got a way of solving problems, you don’t like it, get somebody else. What do you want from me?”

That was a good question. “I don’t know, Tony. But he slips some drugs into my bag, calls my parole officer, then turns up dead—how do you think that looks?”

Tony shrugged. “People die all the time right after they do dumb shit. But I hear you. So, what else?”

“I don’t fucking know. Jarome says he’ll keep an eye on the guy. Ella spotted him before.”

“Who’s Ella?” Tony perked up a little.

Shit. “She’s just this girl.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” He stood up, and actually turned the television set off. A big, stupid grin split his face and he came to where I’d been sipping a beer in his kitchen. Technically a parole violation, but Tony was good for it and I wasn’t driving home. “Every time you say ‘just this girl’ it means ‘just this girl I’m into’. You really gonna keep secrets from your brother?”

It would have been useless to try, now. “Don’t make a big deal about it. Ella is the massage therapist at the gym. We had kind of a… like a date. She’s the one that saw Pembry fuck with my bag, and she told Jarome and kept my from going back to prison. So we had a drink.”

“And?”

“And nothing; we had a drink and then we went home.”

Tony waggled his eyebrows. “Oh yeah? You get some?”

I grunted, and threw my beer cap at him. “You got any class, man? No, of course not. I went home, and she went home.”

“Rusty, huh? Four years of celibacy’ll do that to you. You were celibate, right?” He gave me a faux-concerned look. Dirty minded fucker.

“Except on Sundays, yeah,” I said, voice flat. I stared off passed him and shivered.

Tony’s back straightened. “Shit… you was somebody’s bitch on Sundays? Who was it, Mikey, I’ll—”

I laughed at him, and looked for something else the throw but couldn’t find anything. “You’re so fucking gullible. No, asshole, I wasn’t nobody’s bitch. Christ.”

“Whatever,” Tony muttered. “Anyway so you gonna fuck this girl or what?”

“Our Mother would slap you in your mouth for talking like that,” I told him. “She’s not the kinda girl you just fuck, Tony.”

“Well I didn’t mean fuck her and drop her,” Tony explained, “just, you know… you gotta be hard up.”

I was, sure. And it was starting to feel like my right hand, which had felt like all the woman I’d needed for so long, just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

“I ain’t got laid in four years,” I told him. “I can wait a little while longer. You get used to it.”

“Remind me never to go to jail,” he said. “What, so, she knows you been to prison yet?”

“She knows,” I said.

“She know about the family?” Tony’s tone was a mix of curious and warning. It was one of those unspoken rules of the Family not to talk about the Family with anyone who wasn’t Family.

“Of course not,” I said. “I don’t wanna freak her out.”

“Prison didn’t freak her out?” he wondered. “Maybe she’s got a thing for bad boys. Girls are like that, you know. They love a criminal.”

“I’m not a criminal, Tony,” I reminded him.

“She don’t know that,” He countered.

I shrugged. Fair point, except I thought Ella believed me about getting set up. Now, at least. After all, she’d seen Pembry try it again with her own eyes. “Yeah, well. I could probably fuck her if I wanted to, but I’m gonna wait. See how things play out.”

Tony narrowed his beady eyes. “So you’re thinking like… seeing this girl.”

I shrugged again. “I don’t know yet. Maybe. What’s it to you?”

He held his hands up in surrender. “I just wanna know what my little brother is up to, that’s all. I figured you’d be a bachelor your whole life, like me. Look at you, family man.”

If our mother were still alive, she’d have jumped right to the same conclusion. Sometimes I wondered how much of Tony came from her. Had she been a stone cold killer, too? Is that where he got it? She’d married my father, after all, and knew what his life was like; what it involved. It wasn’t worth thinking about now, though. “Going on a few dates isn’t settling down, Tony. I’m just going slow, getting back into the world. That’s all.”

“Yeah, okay, I hear you. Won’t get far anyway if Pembry sticks you back in the can.” He wandered around the granite topped kitchen island and went to the fridge, where it pulled out and uncapped a beer for himself. He leaned against the fridge while he sipped it thoughtfully. “You know, a crooked cop like that’s probably got lots of dirt to dig up.”

“Tony, I don’t wanna kick that hornet’s—”

“No, listen,” Tony said, his beer and finger up for silence, “I’m not saying we do anything that’ll get you in trouble. Just stack our deck is all. That’s how all this works.” He gestured at the city at large, or maybe even the world. “Information, secrets, the things people want other people not to know—that stuff is how you handle things without anybody having to bite it.”

“Fine,” I said. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I make some polite inquires to some professionals the family has on retainer”—crooked cops, in other words, or those the Family already had something on—“and get everything we can on Pembry. Somebody knows something; somebody always does. They talk, we put our case together, and if Pembry tries anything else we let him know a little of what we got. Just a little. You play this kinda thing close to the chest, let him sweat about what else we know, and you don’t even have to have that much; he’ll worry himself to death about the things he thinks no one knows about.” To Tony, it was just business as usual; he explained it all in simple, almost academic terms.

Already, my pulse pounded, and we hadn’t even started poking around where I didn’t belong. If it got out that I was involved in this… “How are we supposed to be sure nobody knows I’m involved,” I asked. “Hypothetically, I mean. If you did this.”

“Hypothetically,” Tony said, mocking my tone a little, “I’m not doing anything. So, neither are you. We never had this conversation, and you don’t know anything more about the Family or what I really do than you ever did. Just like always.”

I wasn’t stupid, though. This was the sort of thing the Family referred to as a ‘favor’. Family favors were rarely cheap and never free. “I don’t know, Tony. I don’t wanna get tangled up in Family business.”

He sighed, and nodded slowly. “I get that. I don’t agree and I think you’re passing up an opportunity—the Don keeps saying he’d take you if you changed your mind, just so you know—but I can manage this with my own resources. Not a favor,” he insisted, “but as a kind of getting-outta-prison gift.”

Tony was as good as his word. I knew that. He looked out for me, he always had. But black mailing a cop was dangerous business. “I don’t know, Tony…”

“Good,” Tony said. “You got the hang of it. Don’t give it another thought. Just keep doing whatever you’re doing over there. I’ll take care of everything.”

Arguing at this point wouldn’t change anything. So I didn’t; but I didn’t acknowledge it either and didn’t thank Tony for his ‘gift’. He didn’t need me to.

We talked a little more about Ella, and Tony said he wanted to meet her, but I told him I wasn’t gonna introduce him to every girl I thought I might like. “If things get serious,” I said, “maybe you can meet her then. But they probably won’t.”

“What?” Tony asked. “Why? You can’t think like that. You need confidence; girls like that.”

“I’m not worried I can’t close a deal,” I said. “Just, you know—what do I got? A loft I don’t even rent, much less own, a job that barely pays, a conviction, and gym clothes.”

Tony caught my slip. “So that’s where you’re living,” he said. “Over the gym? Man, Mikey—you gotta let me get you a place. You can stay in one of my units downstairs, I’ll kick out some drunk.”

“Jesus, Tony,” I groaned. “No; don’t kick anybody outta their apartment, are you crazy? The loft over the gym is fine.” I tried not to be worried about having told him where I lived.

“Well, you might be right then; girls don’t like scrubs. But, who knows? Maybe this girl is different. If she is, she’s marriage material. A good woman loves you when you’re down on your luck just as much as when you’re flush.”

I rolled my eyes. “Next you’re gonna be asking me how many babies we’re gonna have. You’re worse than Ma.”

Tony clutched hand over his chest. “I hadn’t even thought about little nieces and nephews yet! I’m too old; you gotta have at least six or seven to make up for it.”

I finished my beer and dropped the bottle in the trash.

“Hey, hey!” Tony snapped. He pointed to another bin. “Recycle, asshole. Don’t you know nothing about climate change and shit? The earth is precious, shit head.”

I stared at Tony a moment, but he was serious. So I fished the bottle out, and put it in the recycling. Then I shook my head, incredulous, and said my goodbyes before I left. Tony pressed a wad of twenties into my hand before I did. “Take the girl out,” he said. “And get yourself some real clothes. You’re embarrassing our mother taking a girl out dressed like that.”

You just never could tell what was important to Tony until he told you.

Tony’s man offered me a ride, and this time I took it. It was late, I was tired, and hell—in for a penny, right? Might as well take the other ten pounds, too; plus Tony knew where I lived now. No point in hiding it anymore. I stared out the window at the darkened city blocks as the driver—Sonny was his name, young, an apparently a huge fan of Tony’s; he was ‘honored’ to meet me and to do anything to help Tony out, he made sure to tell me—took me back to the gym.

It wasn’t the worst thing. Better than a dead cop. Tony knew how to make things happen. I hated relying on him like that—on the Family, especially—but if it got Pembry off my back, well; maybe it was worth it.

But Family business had a tendency to make waves. And when they hit the rocks, people got splashed. Last thing I wanted was to get wet. Or worse, Ella; this kind of mess didn’t care who it got dirty. That worry followed me to bed, interrupting the other thoughts I had about the cute little blond badass and when I would see her again.