Page 4 of Black Sheep

He chuckles, his eyes a touch colder. “You see, my man, you waste both our time.”

I take a breath and force a deferential nod. “My apologies. Do you have everything you need?”

He stares at me for several seconds. “No, not everything. But it is nothing that a little…negotiation cannot satisfy, eh?”

I’ve been expecting this—the obligatory extortion that happens every few months. Normally, I head it off by stating a few facts and figures, namely that I’m paying almost double market value for the service Petrosyan is providing me. This time, I don’t.

Cleo’s persistent visits are evidence that my plan is working. The fracturing Rutherford kingdom is developing even more cracks. And I’m willing to pay dearly for that.

“What do you want, Petrosyan?”

His expression doesn’t change, but sensing a victory, he immediately turfs the girls off his lap. Once they’ve drifted off, he stands, adjusts his shiny suit, and rises up on the balls of his feet. But nothing can disguise the fact that I’m a foot taller than him.

“I want for you to tell me what you’re doing with all the product you buy from me, for start. It’s not ending up on the street or in clubs, I know that for fact,” he says.

“And like I told you when we started this…partnership, it’s none of your business.” Although I owe him no explanation, I don’t relish the idea of telling the mobster that every ounce of heroin I’ve procured from him for the last two years has been flushed down the toilet. That this isn’t about taking over my father’s business to make money for myself but to ensure the Rutherfords have zero business by the time I’m done with them. And if by doing so, I help take a few hundred kilos of drugs off the street…I mentally shrug.

Petrosyan’s jaw flexes, but he nods. “Okay, then let’s talk our business. Economy is in toilet. I need to raise prices—”

“Two hundred thousand a month. Fifty thousand dollars more for the same deal.”

He looks off to the side, pulls on his cuffs, and then his fish eyes dart back to me. “I am thinking a cool quarter million has nice ring to it, no?”

“Fine. Deal. Are we done?”

Surprise livens his eyes for a few seconds before his gaze turns speculative. “You must really want to…how you say, shank it to my former business partner, hmm?”

“Yes, I must really want to stick it to him.”

The turn of phrase baffles him for a second then he gives up in favor of confirming that I’ve really folded and given him a one-hundred-thousand-dollar price hike after a two-minute negotiation.

Now that he’s satisfied, I turn to leave.

“I would sleep with gun under my pillow if I had someone like you for enemy,” he states.

I look over my shoulder. He’s watching me carefully. Trying to read the unreadable. “Then it’s a good thing we’re friends, isn’t it? And you do sleep with a gun under your pillow.”

He laughs. “Well, for you, I would make it two guns.”

“You keep your end of the bargain, and you will never need to.”

He catches the warning in my voice, and the laughter fades. “You keep up payments, and we won’t have problem.” He clicks his fingers for his girls.

Our battle lines redrawn, I return to the bar in time to spot Cleo raising a nearly empty champagne glass to her lips. My jaw clenches. Added to the two shots of tequila, I’m uncertain what the result will be. So I sharpen my focus with an even more vicious blade. Everything falls away as I saturate myself with her presence.

Every breath. Every blink.

I catch the moment her hips sway, ever so slightly, to the throbbing rock anthem.

The move resonates through me like the cuts of memory’s blade. In an instant, I’m thrown back to the bedroom in the pool house I claimed the day I turned eighteen. It was the single thing I requested when my mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday. The need to distance myself from my father had grown into a visceral, unbearable ache. My mother saw it. She granted my request, despite my father’s firm refusal. It was most likely what earned her the black eye two days later.

I don’t know because I didn’t ask. It would’ve been useless to do so anyway. She would’ve lied. And I was too selfish, too thankful for the mercy of not having to live under the same roof as my father, to rock the boat.

So I claimed my tiny piece of heaven in hell. And it was there that Cleo danced for me for the first time. Where we celebrated a lot of firsts.

That particular memory flames through the charred pits of my mind. I don’t fight it. Like the fleeting moments of pleasure and pain, it will be gone in an instant, devoured by the putrefying cancer that lives within me.

Sure enough, it’s gone from one heartbeat to the next, and I’m left with rotting remnants of what once was.

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