Page 95 of The Slayer
“And?”
“Look, man, give me five minutes to admire the car.” He ran his hands over the leather on either side of his ass. If he was going to babysit so Jules could get laid, he deserved a moment with this Ferrari. “I want to drive it.” His eyes rolled back of their own accord. “Pleasetell me I can drive it.”
Tino shifted gears on the wide-open roads of Garnet and pushed it to seventy, obviously to tease Chuito. “Car thief.”
Chuito took a deep breath, just soaking in the smell of it. “God. One Ferrari. That’s it. I had to chop it. I almost cried when my cousin took the engine out.”
“Do I have to worry about this vehicle?” Tino asked him in concern. “’Cause my brotherdidsay he’d bury me if anything happened to it.”
“It’s fine. I’m a retired car thief,” Chuito admitted, and he couldn’t help but feel sad about it. “Unfortunately.”
“Man, I never got into stealing cars,” Tino said with a laugh. “I have other specialties.”
“Yeah, I bet.” Chuito looked over at Tino, seeing himself so clearly in him and having nothing but remorse for Tino as he said it. He picked up the energy drink Tino had in the cup holder and looked at it for a long moment before he decided to ask, “Did you deal?”
“Hasn’t everyone?” Tino laughed. “But no, not since I was a kid.”
Chuito scowled at that, hearing the catch in his voice he knew so well. This wasn’t an ordinary gangster he was sitting next to. This motherfucker was mafia. Everyone knew Romeo Wellings was connected, and his connection was sitting right next to Chuito.
Jules was fucking crazy to be shopping for a good time inside this family. Chuito tried to tell her that too, in his own way, but she wasn’t listening, and it wasn’t like it was in him to rat them out.
Shewasa cop.
At the end of the day, no matter how much he cared about her, Chuito couldn’t sell out his own. If she wanted to fuck Romeo Wellings, Chuito supposed she would just have to figure it out.
“Is Romeo involved?”
“No,” Tino assured him, as if understanding the real question. “We keep him pretty far out of the loop. He’s our half brother, not the connected half. The only thing he’s guilty of is being related to me and Nova.”
“Your other brother?”
Tino nodded, looking miserable all of a sudden. “We had to leave him in New York. Someone’s gotta take care of business.”
“There’s no blow. There is an underground scene here, but it’s more heroin and crank. Coke is a city drug,” Chuito whispered, feeling genuinely bad to tell him. He knew there was crack if Tino really looked, but he didn’t feel like revealing it to him. “How much did you bring?”
Tino gave him a harsh look. “What makes you think I do blow?”
“Give me a fucking break,” Chuito snorted in disbelief as he held up the energy drink. “I used to use this trick with my mamá. Your brother thinks you’re riding off the caffeine. He doesn’t know?”
“Fuck off,” Tino said rather than admit it.
“I’m not fucking judging you. Do the blow. Go home and do enough for both of us,” Chuito told him with a pained laugh. “I mean, you’re mafia. You fuckers never go down. If I was mafia, I’d still be living hard.”
“We go down.” Tino sighed. “We go down all the fucking time. One way or the other.”
“You want out?” Chuito asked him curiously, because he had a hard time imagining that. The mafia was the elite of the elite. Their people owned the underworld; being in meant you were untouchable. “How deep are you?”
Tino gave him another sidelong glance before he admitted, “I’m made.”
“Holy shit.” Chuito looked around the car again, admiring what being a made man got you without having to fight for it. “What are you? Twenty-one?”
“Twenty-two.”
“How the hell did you manage that?”
“My father fucked my mother, that’s how,” Tino said bitterly. “Then she died, and he decided to give a fuck by making me deal for him when I was twelve. Lucky me.”
Chuito considered that, hearing the pain in Tino’s voice. Chuito had chosen to be a gangster, but Tino was born into it. That was clearly a very different set of circumstances.
