Page 29 of The Butcher's Wife
Turi still hasn’t gotten back to me, but by now, I know I’m right. Serafina didn’t cook, and she never cried. Annetta thinks I can’t hear her sobbing for exactly thirty minutes through the walls, but it’s become my new, fucked-up morning alarm.
I’m not scared of a woman crying. It’s easy, actually, to manage an upset woman. You sit next to her, silently offer her tissues and sugar, and tell her she was right. But I’m not going anywhere near Annetta until she fesses up to why she’s been lying to me.
Or until Turi rips the truth out for her.
The night is young when I finally get to Plunder, the shitty little bar just south of Humboldt Park. I pass by a man on the street corner openly snorting cocaine, and a couple of women wearing glittery dresses underneath their oversized coats, who all take one look at me and don’t even try to get my attention. I wouldn’t be surprised if they know who I’m with. The whole neighborhood knows us—that’s whyI’m not worried about my car. No one is enough of an idiot to touch a car that nice in a neighborhood like this.
Everyone inside the bar turns to look at me as the bell on the front door jingles.
“The usual?” the bartender calls out to me from behind the bar as he reaches for a whiskey glass.
The rest of the barflies turn back to their conversations.
“I’ll take the IPA tonight, thanks,” I say.
He hesitates for only a second, but he’s smart enough not to ask questions as he fills up my beer in a smudged glass that I bet clean-freak Turi would refuse to drink from. “They’re all here.”
I nod my thanks and head upstairs. I have to crouch to get through the tiny, spiral stairs that lead upstairs, and the wood groans its annoyance at my weight the whole way up.
Upstairs, in a dim glow cast by one overhead light, half a dozen familiar faces turn toward me, first with hostility, then with welcome—fake or otherwise. I grin widely and hold my beer aloft.
As I reach the top step, I purposely bump into the bathroom sign hanging from the ceiling.
“Ah, shit,” I say, gripping my head. “I really gotta watch where I’m going.”
A few men around the table chuckle, easing the tension a little.
I spot Carlo, Serafina’s oldest brother, and his friend Russell at the far end of the table. Judging by his red-rimmed eyes, Carlo’s already high as a kite. Next to him, Russell looks like a pissed-off babysitter.
I’m glad Russell’s here to keep Carlo out of the worst of trouble—and even better, he keeps his mouth shut and brings back the money he’s supposed to. It’s obvious he’s using Carlo to step up in the organization, but Russell keepsan eye on the Barbara heir, so no one gives him any shit. He keeps his nose clean, and he’ll be a made man in no time.
Carlo, on the other hand, is a fuck-up. He likes our lifestyle because it means he can get a bunch of badass tattoos and sexy women, but he’ll jump through a lot of fucking hoops to avoid doing a single job, and more often than not, I’m the asshole who’s gotta drag him back through said hoop. Barbara always took care of my family back when I was a lanky, angry nineteen-year-old with five siblings and shitty parents. So now, I take care of his.
Carlo isn’t so bad, though. He’s got a good sense of humor that reminds me of Turi’s younger brother Matteo, when he was still alive.
“Where you been, Dom?” A dopey smile on his face, Carlo slides his empty glass of whiskey onto the table. “They said you went camping while the rest of us were working like dogs out here.”
These men are all soldiers or wannabes, yet they’re drinking on a Thursday night. I doubt there’s much hard work going on.
I drop into the empty seat next to Russell. “You know me. Had to leave the whole city just to get enough space to air out my balls.”
The men burst into laughter. There’s not a full glass of whiskey at the table, and this is their regular meeting spot. Turi would have a field day if he saw this. When was the last time these idiots swept the room for bugs instead of getting shitfaced and gossiping?
“You know what they say, the bigger the balls, the smaller the dick,” Russell calls out.
I laugh good-naturedly with the rest of the men. It takes guts for him to talk shit to me, I’ll give him that.
A couple of hours later, I’ve gotten to my eighth watered-down beer, and everyone else is on who-knows-what round of whiskey by the time the conversation turns to business.
“All I’m saying is that,” Riccardo says, “I’m hemorrhaging money over here dealing with thesepulotti, and I shouldn’t be. It wasn’t our damn fault things blew up at the warehouses. I don’t see why I gotta pay off every pig that sticks his lard ass where it doesn’t belong. The Irish fucked this up, so Gavin should be paying off the cops. They’re his, anyway!”
His buddy Ettore emphasizes this with a clank of his empty glass on the table. A few of the men around him nod and mumble in agreement.
“It’s bad enough the cops are riding our asses all the time, but now I hear the boys in New York are coming for us too.” Riccardo stares down at his glass angrily. He flicks his gaze up to me. For some men, Riccardo is intimidating. He’s thin and severe-looking—but he also has a full head of straw-like hair that makes him look like a scarecrow with stuffing leaking out, so I’m not too threatened. “We’ve been handling our own business for years, and now some fuckers are gonna waltz in and tell us what to do?”
I know for a fact he wouldn’t challenge Turi’s orders to my face if he weren’t drunk, and if he didn’t think I was too. Not so lucky for him, I had the bartender cut my drinks with seltzer water six beers ago.
I meet his gaze and shrug lazily, letting my beer slosh out. “What’re you gonna do? Them’s the breaks.”
