Page 10 of Mob Knight

“I guess so.” Not at all.

“Did you hear what I said?” He’s getting testy, so he’s said whatever it was more than once.

“Parts.” Not at all. “I can hear you now, so can you give me the gist of it?”

“The gist is what the feck happened today?”

Feck.

Our parents would crucify us if we ever truly swore at each other. It’s the eleventh commandment. No—twelfth. The eleventh is never go a full day without telling everyone you love them.

“I went to collect from Ignacio, and his dumb-arse nephews were there. Rather than being men and staying the feck out of it, they thought their balls dropped today. They thought they could stand up to me.”

“Okay. But how did it get to them shooting at you and some woman pushing you down a flight of steps?”

Fucking city cameras. Our mutual cousins Sean and Finn—who are brothers—are skilled hackers. They keep a running feed of the city cameras in all five boroughs in case we need to track someone down or find out where they’ve been. Word got back to someone, and at least one cousin went to work.

“She’s a social worker and was in the neighborhood. I guess she’s known Ronaldo and Jesus since they were kids. She recognized them and was on my side of the street. What the hell possessed her? I don’t have a clue. But she shoved me out of the way. We wound up losing our balance and falling. She talked the guys into going back into their uncle’s bodega.”

Ronaldo and Jesus are cousins who try to one up each other all the time. They don’t get what my cousins and I understand—you don’t battle each other when you’re at war with everyone else. They wanted to prove who had the bigger pair today, and I didn’t want to shoot a couple dumb-arse kids.

“Why’d she hide when Pablo showed up?”

Something doesn’t feel right about divulging more. It’s not that what Joey—there I go again—told me is some massive state secret, but it doesn’t feel like my place to say. She confided in me, and she trusts me not to tell anyone, in case it gets back to Pablo. I know my family won’t say shite, but it’s the principle.

“She fears him.”

“Smart woman. But why?”

“I didn’t get her entire life story, Dill.”

“But you stood talking to her for quite a while.”

“Yeah. She got hurt when she fell and landed on her elbow. We were arguing about her seeing a doctor. I even offered Meredith if she didn’t want to go to the ER.”

There’s a long pause before he speaks again. I know it doesn’t thrill him I gave Meredith’s name to anyone. She’s been our family’s private physician—private surgeon—since my grandda led the organization. Things got messy when my cousin Shane fell in love with her daughter. That shite was complicated, but the long and the short of it is, she was nearly outed to the NYPD and DEA. They almost found out her connections to us. I should help her keep a low profile, but I trust her nearly as much as I do my mom and aunts. That’s about the highest form of praise from me.

“Do you think she’ll call Meredith?”

“No.”

“Then why’d?—”

“It felt like the right thing to do. She wouldn’t have gotten hurt if she hadn’t protected me. I tried to shield her, but I probably did more harm than good since I’m so much bigger than her.”

“Okay. What’d Pablo have to say?”

“Same shite, different day. He’s pissed we’re encroaching on their territory. Enrique’s embarrassed that we’ve been there fornearly a year, and Ignacio never went to him for protection. Not that he could afford it after paying us to protect him from Enrique.”

Dillan chuckles. We have a few business owners on that street believing we’re keeping Enrique Diaz, the Colombian Carteljefe, away from them. They’re too scared of that old motherfucker to ask many questions. He didn’t give a fuck about them until today. He only gives a fuck because we’re extorting those people, and he didn’t think to do it himself. It makes him look like a pussy to have another syndicate slip into one of his neighborhoods and start collecting money he could be strong-arming from his own people.

Oops. Oh, well. Too bad, so sad.

“Was it Ignacio who called Pablo or one of those dumb-arses?”

“Neither. Ronaldo’s or Jesus’s mother—I don’t remember which since they’re both Ignacio’s sisters—was looking out the window of their apartment across the street and saw the eejits come out and shoot at me. Rather than try to get her son and nephew to stop, she called Pablo.”

“What’s he want in exchange?”

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