Page 25 of Mob Knight

I still don’t know how ajefe’snephew ever got a job on the NYPD, but corrupter things have happened. I know he died a few years ago after fucking around and finding out with one syndicate. I’ve studiously avoided finding out the details, but it was inevitable that I learned at least a bit of what happened. He’d gone after a Russian bratva member’s wife—the guy who’s equivalent to ajefe. I guess Juan and Pablo grew up next door to this woman, and there were some unrequited feelings. Juan overstepped, and now he’s not around anymore.

That’s as specific as anybody’s ever gotten when they’ve discussed that with me. I don’t need any more details from somebody else to fill in the blanks. I guarantee my imagination, which is active and descriptive, probably didn’t do the situation justice.

I’m getting ready for work when my phone buzzes. I glance down and see it’s a text from my brother, Santiago. This is the last thing I need right now. I gird my loins before opening it. I’m certain I won’t like whatever it is.

Santiago

JoJo where you at? You haven’t been home for Sunday dinner in more than a month. It’s been awfully quiet without you here. We all miss you so much.

To anybody who doesn’t know him, that sounds like a sweet and sincere, brotherly text. It’s anything but. I avoid family dinners whenever I can because it’s my brother and his reprobate friends. Most of our family still lives in Mexico. There are very few of us in the U.S., and no one else in New York. Both of us moved here after college. I came for grad school, and he came for work.

I don’t enjoy his friends’ company. They’re too loud and too gross. They always expect me to cook dinner and clean up. But I refuse, which usually winds up with all of us in an argument and me leaving before the meal even starts. Sometimes Santiago orders in, and that diffuses the situation for a couple of hours.

Without fail, I usually leave fucking pissed off with his friends laughing as I walk out the door. I’m close to my brother in some ways, and in others, Santiago’s a man I don’t recognize from the boy I once knew. But isn’t that the case with so many adults? We grow into the person we are partly by nature but a lot by nurture, whether it’s for better or for worse.

The environment we grow up in and the circumstances surrounding it contribute to who we become as adults. That means he and I don’t always like each other as much as we did as kids. It’s unfortunate since I have no other family here in New York.

There’re some extended relatives on the East Coast, but I don’t know them, never even met them. I just know they exist, but that hardly narrows it down when you don’t know names,and they’re not people whose doors I’ll be knocking on for Christmas.

I debate how to respond to the text. I decide I’ll wait until later.

If Santiago pushes the issue, I’ll say I was busy getting ready, or that I was on the subway and didn’t get reception when his message came in. Chances are he won’t text me again for a few hours. He knows I’ll be formulating a response. Sometimes in the past, he’d text right away and try to badger me into a quick answer. He soon discovered that was the surest way for me to say no. It’s faster to type two letters than three.

Nowadays, he lets me think about it, as he says, for a few hours before he presses. I really don’t want to go, but after seeing that fight on the street yesterday and then nearly being in a shootout three days ago, part of me misses him more than usual. It would be reassuring to see some family. Our dysfunction is our normalcy. When you face danger and unpredictable experiences, even predictably bad is better than nothing.

I don’t have any school visits or home visits today, so I’ll be at my office most of the day. It’ll be quiet and uneventful. Hopefully.

So much for quiet and uneventful, and so much for staying at my office. Today was one of those days that proves why the career expectancy of a social worker is so short. It was one of the hardest I’ve had in the six years I’ve been a social worker. It’s never easy walking into a situation where you know the child or children are likely to be removed from the home. But today was worse than usual. If I shut my eyes for too long, I can see theinside of the abandoned shed. If I leave my eyes open for too long, it’s like I’m there again, except I’m not.

I text three of my girlfriends to see what they’re up to tonight.

Me

Any of you want to go out and grab drinks?

While I wait for their response, I do a little internet research. I don’t know why I’m thinking about Cormac again since what happened yesterday scared me. Today was way worse, and for reasons I can’t explain, thinking about being near him makes me feel safe in a way I didn’t today.

I search his name, but not much comes up except for some court cases where he’s the attorney of record. There are some family photos from various high society events. And there are some articles about family members from a few years back. Two of them are obituaries. One’s for Donovan O’Rourke, and one’s for Declan O’Rourke. The names are vaguely familiar, but I know nothing more about them than I did Cormac when I met him.

The obituaries are so full of bullshit. I don’t believe any of it because if these were O’Rourke men, then they were mobsters, too. My digging goes back a little further to a man named Liam O’Rourke who must have been Cormac’s grandfather. Apparently, he died in an airplane crash under suspicious circumstances. The articles suggest it might have resulted from someone from one of the other main syndicate families sabotaging the airplane.

I feel a moment of pity for Cormac and the other people in his family because no matter what role his grandfather played in the mob—and it turns out he was the mob boss—it was still his grandfather. Old photos from social events show Cormac and five other guys and an absolutely gorgeous red-headed woman laughing with the men.

But beyond that, there isn’t a ton of information about them individually. It’s mostly things about mergers and acquisitions or criminal cases where Cormac’s brother Seamus represented defendants invariably linked to the mob somehow.

As I search a little more, I come across the name of a bar owned by a Finn O’Rourke. I tap the back button twice on my phone browser and notice Finn is one of Cormac’s cousins. Just as I put those two things together, my friends respond to the group text. It’s been a shit day, and I really don’t want to go home to a whole lot of nothing.

There’s a ripple of responses that ping one after the other from my three friends all saying yes and a couple asking where. My thumbs hover over my phone screen for a moment before I go ahead and type McGinty’s as my response. I’m an idiot for doing this, but maybe there’s a chance I’ll run into Cormac while I’m there.

Who knows whether he will be, and for all I know, he could have a girlfriend or even have a wife. He said he doesn’t, but mobsters lie for a living. Nonetheless, something draws me to him after such a fucked-up day. Even if we don’t talk, I feel like just seeing him would help me feel reassured. I don’t know if it’s his size and how solid he is or if it’s his personality as well. But just thinking about him makes me feel protected. It’s something I crave right now.

That sounds good.

We haven’t been there in ages.

I’ve celebrated St. Patrick’s Day there a couple of times, but it’s been a long time since then. Plus, the previous times I’ve been there, I didn’t know an O’Rourke owned the bar.

I run home to shower and change. It’s ridiculous, but I take a couple extra minutes to consider what I’m going to wear. I take extra time with my makeup, applying a bit more than usual. I never wear a lot, but this time around I actually put some foundation on and do a little eyeshadow contouring. My hair’s still wet when I leave my place and get into the Uber I ordered.

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