Page 16 of The Woman on the Jury

“Times are hard, man,” he said, shrugging.

“And when times are hard, crimes increase. This means we have to work more to make good on our promises of protection. They want protection without paying? Get fucking real. Lean on them.”

“I’ve been—“

“Then lean harder,” I cut him off. “You don’t want me having to go out there and do your job for you, Leon,” I warned, watching as redness spread up his neck and into his face.

You didn’t have to give guys in this world explicit threats.

He knew exactly what I meant.

And the fact that I’d recently gotten off on a murder charge made the threat even more believable.

“I got this, Cos, I got it,” he assured me, nodding so quickly that his jowls shook a bit.

“You better,” I said, and with a flick of a wrist, excused him. “What are you looking for?” I asked when one of my cousins moved forward now that Leon was gone, looking down at the floor as he walked.

“A trail of piss,” he admitted with a smirk.

Gavino was one of Cesare’s many brothers, and the one with the surliest personality. Which was probably why I got on with him so well.

Like Cesare, he was tall, wide-shouldered, with black hair. Unlike Cesare, he didn’t have ink, and he’d gotten his dark blue eyes from his ma.

“Told you they were fucking up,” he said, taking the seat across from me, and nodding to the waitress who gestured toward my glass, silently requesting his own.

“Yeah, it’s worse than you said,” I admitted. “Thought my house could run without me around, cracking the fucking whip.”

“You know how it is,” he said, shaking his head. “Everyone needs motivation to do their part. I’m surprised Leon isn’t having one of his associates challenge him and his weak leadership.”

“I’d invite it at this point,” I admitted. When it came to the men under you, you wanted them all to be hungry. For the cash, sure, but also to prove themselves. When someone was in a position as long as Leon had been in his, they got lazy. “Fucking ridiculous that he thinks ‘I don’t have the money’ is an acceptable answer. Especially with the holidays coming up. All those tourists. All the crime that comes with that. And we’re supposed to track them down and show ‘em not to fuck with the local businesses for nothing? I don’t fucking think so.”

“Better not let the boss hear you talking about allowing dissent in your ranks,” Gav said, taking his glass from the waitress.

“Allowing shitty men to stay in power indefinitely is the reason Lorenzo’s father’s reign was such an unstable one.”

“Well, that and the fact that his father was a complete dickhead. Yours too, for that matter,” he added, toasting me with his glass before taking a drink.

Gav, Cesare, their brothers, and their sister, Lore, had been lucky as fuck to have one of the very few dads of that generation who wasn’t a sonofabitch. Who didn’t beat the ever-loving shit out of them just for fun.

Hell, Gav’s dad was even head-over for his ma before she died relatively young, leaving him to raise all those kids on his own.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

But wired how I was wired, I was always going to look for flaws in the work, in the organization, not in interpersonal relationships. That just wasn’t my forte. I wouldn’t pretend to try to link my father’s treatment of me to the instability of the Family at that time.

“How was Vega during the trial?” Gav asked a moment later as he stared at the TV over the bar.

I conducted close Family business at my apartment. But when I was dealing with soldiers and associates and shit like that, I preferred hanging out at the bar I really broke my teeth on as a baby wiseguy.

Back then, the owners hadn’t been paying for protection. And word got out that the owner’s daughter got druggedinher father’s bar, then taken outside and raped.

I tracked him down, cut off his balls, and gave ‘em to her father as a present. From that day on, he paid me for protection. It was my first racket independent of my father. And it was what I built up into a thriving business.

It also allowed me to use the place for business whenever I wanted.

It wasn’t a huge place. Little brick-walled bar that mostly catered to blue-collar workers with several TVs playing all the games, and nothing even resembling a stage or dance floor.

“She’s got a better feel for people, I think, than our guy. The jury consultants even said so. She also said that if I wasn’t such a prick, she would climb me like a tree,” I added, smirking as I took a sip of my drink.

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