Old Flame: Dante’s Story by Sam Mariano
22
Dante
“We need to talk.”
I look at Mateo, surprised to see him at the warehouse today. He knew I had a meeting with a Castellanos informant who hasn’t shown up yet, but I didn’t expect my brother to make an appearance.
“I thought we decided you should spend as much time as possible at home or safely guarded until this Castellanos business is handled,” I remind him, taking in the strangeness of his posture. His hands are tucked into the pockets of his slacks so he’s not standing tall like he usually does when he wants to command respect. His posture is more familiar, almost like he wants to talk to me as a brother, not an inferior. That’s not something we do a whole lot, so I’m not sure what to make of it. “Something else happen?” I ask, more warily.
“A lot has happened,” he says soberly, nodding his head. “It’s been a busy week.”
“Damn sure has,” I agree, shaking my head a little. Despite the headaches it has caused, I wasn’t reluctant to go to war with Antonio Castellanos. I want their territory to be ours, personally, and war is the only way that happens. Mateo hasn’t wanted to go for it, though. He’s more interested in growing our legitimate income than the illegal shit.
I don’t think it’s a choice that has to be made and I have locked horns with him over it before, but now that significant others are getting shot, things have gone too far. It used to be people in our line of work had enough fucking respect to leave the women and children out of shit like this, but it seems Antonio’s disdain for my brother taking the reins of leadership from our dad has finally tipped the scales in the wrong direction. Traditional as they are, Antonio doesn’t respect Mateo or his commandeered authority in our family, so he’s not treating him with the respect a boss should command. He’s rejecting Mateo, and he’s not being subtle about it, either. This is too far, though. If Mateo’s woman can be shot at in public by a rival family, no one among us is safe.
“I’ll be glad when this is all over,” I admit.
“Yeah, so will I.” He makes me even more uneasy because rather than being direct, he’s stalling and wasting his time. I have the distinct impression bad news is coming.
Since he’s making me drag it out of him, I ask again. “So, what is it? What’s going on?”
“Do you know what Joey’s been up to lately?”
Our youngest brother. There’s quite an age gap from us to him, so we’re not as close. He’s closer to Vince in age and maturity level, so it’s no surprise they’re such good friends. “Nah, what’d he do now?”
Little asshole is also the only Morelli of our generation who has seen the inside of a jail cell. He didn’t get our father’s cleverness. His mom’s dead and none of us ever met her, so I can’t say what traits he might have got from her. Whatever the reason, bad genes or maybe because he’s the baby of the family, Joey is the closest thing we have to a fuck-up.
Mateo clears his throat, then looks me dead in the eye. “Joey’s dead.”
I rear back a little, hearing his words, but not making sense of them. “What? How?”
“Adrian,” he answers, nodding his head to the metal folding chair in the corner of the room we’re standing in right now. The chair where Adrian executes people who need killing—but not our fucking family members.
It takes me a few seconds to hide my shock, but I don’t know what the fuck he’s saying. I don’t know what to focus on first. That Adrian killed one of his own men, or that my youngest brother is dead. “I don’t… what does this mean? Did Adrian turn on us? Did Castellanos get to him?”
“No, of course not,” Mateo says quickly, firmly, shaking his head to cut me off before I can get carried away. “Adrian discovered that Joey was colluding with Castellanos. Apparently he’s the one who told them where to find me the night Meg was shot.”
My brow furrows and I shake my head. “That doesn’t make any fucking sense. Did Joey even know where you were that night? Why would Joey try to get you killed? Joey may not be close to you, but to turn on you like that? Why? It doesn’t make sense.”
I hear a thread of irritation in his voice. “I know it doesn’t make sense.”
There’s only one way it does make sense that Joey might get dragged into a plan to turn on Mateo. “Was Vince involved?”
I search my brother’s face as I ask the question, look for bursts of reaction as the words land, but he gives me absolutely nothing. His face is carefully guarded, his expression serious but noncommunicative. “No,” he finally answers.
“That makes no sense. If anyone in this family has cause to want to see you dead, it’s Vince, not Joey. Did Adrian question Vince?”
Mateo holds up a hand to stop me. “I’m handling it. I’m not telling you about this because I need your input; I just thought you should know… Joey’s dead. I figured you should hear it from me.”
Reeling a bit from the surprise of this news, I pull back the folding chair I hung my jacket on the back of and sit down by the table. “I can’t fucking believe this.”
Mateo nods solemnly. “I know.”
Glancing back up at him, I ask again, “You’re sure it was Joey?”
“I’m sure he betrayed me. Adrian was sure. He wouldn’t execute without solid evidence, you know that.”
I do, I just don’t understand. I sit there for a minute trying to process what he told me. Trying to process the death of a family member. Joey and I were never real close, but he was still my brother. I guess he didn’t handle the burden of our family’s legacy as well as he could have, but he was young. Mateo and I have had a lot longer to adjust, plus we had to. Mateo was the eldest so a lot fell on his shoulders. Then when he took over the family, a lot fell on mine.
Being so much younger, Joey never really got a heap of family responsibility dropped on him like that. Maybe we gave him too much time to fuck around, maybe we should’ve taken him in hand and made him get serious by now, but it doesn’t make sense that it led to this. To betraying Mateo? Why?
“There’s more,” he tells me.
Pulling myself from my skeptical thoughts, I look back at him. “What do you mean, there’s more?”
“Not related to Joey. I don’t have all the relevant details right now, but one of my guys on the force tipped me off. Someone saw something at Rob’s house. One of the girls. Someone noticed something off and reported it.”
Now I shove back the chair as I stand up, scowling. “What the fuck do you mean, they noticed something? Reported what to who?”
“You know what to who, Dante,” he states. “They reported suspicious activity to the fucking cops.”
“What—Was it one of our guys, at least?”
“No,” he answers, his face solemn. “It wasn’t one of our guys.”
I don’t immediately know how to respond to a thing like that. After a moment of heavy, dread-soaked silence, I ask, “What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means they’re going to investigate. They haven’t had time to get to it yet, I know that much. That just means despite all this Castellanos shit we have going on, there’s one more task on your to-do list. You’ve gotta shut down Rob’s house, and you need to do it now before they get someone to investigate.”
Raking a hand through my hair, I mutter, “Jesus Christ. Okay. I don’t know where we’re gonna put all those fucking girls. I guess Ivan has some room, but Luca’s full. Maybe we can get Rob in a different house—”
“No,” Mateo interrupts. “You’re not understanding me. This isn’t a temporary measure. We’re not redirecting and redistributing. I want Rob’s house shut down. I want his arm of the operation shut down. It won’t be coming back, the other two houses won’t be taking on extra girls. Get rid of whatever inventory he has now and that’s it.”
I stare at my brother for the longest fucking minute. “Are you serious? You want to permanently shut down an entire house because of one fucking hiccup? What are we paying all that money to our guys on the force for if they can’t even handle one fucking hiccup—”
Raising his voice, Mateo says, “This isn’t a hiccup, Dante, it’s a fucking catastrophe. What good does it do?” he echoes, in disbelief. “All the fucking good. The reason I have a heads-up and we can get ahead of this instead of getting taken down in some fucking sting operation and going to prison? That’s what we pay all the money for.”
“Rob’s not sloppy,” I argue, as if I can somehow change the reality of this situation if I fight it hard enough. “There’s no way in hell he’d let anyone in the neighborhood see anything suspicious. Rob is fucking careful, that’s why he runs the house to begin with.”
Not nearly as upset as I am, Mateo states, “No matter how good, no one is perfect. He fucked up and someone saw.” He shrugs, but manages to make the gesture decisive. “It is what it is. All we can do now is handle it.”
Of the three houses, Rob’s house is the least profitable, but it still turns out a good chunk of change every year. Ivan’s house brings in the second highest profit, and Luca is the master—he doubles what Ivan makes because he doesn’t have a soul or a life outside of work, and he has no problem pulling double duty. Luca’s effectiveness is unmatched, and though I told Mateo he couldn’t take on more girls, he probably can if he has to.
“All right,” I mutter, running another hand though my hair in irritation. “I guess I’ll figure it out.”
“There’s nothing to figure out,” Mateo says simply, carefully, like he doesn’t quite trust me to follow orders. “It’s done. Collapse the house quickly and get the girls out of there. Reassign Rob to something else.”
“And what about the shipment of girls he was expecting? I have 3 coming in this week.”
That news shouldn’t displease him, but his irritation increases. “Goddammit. I guess you’ll have to redirect those three to Ivan or Luca, wherever there’s room. But the turnaround needs to be quick.”
I nod my understanding. “I’ll send them to Luca then.”
“Do whatever you have to do. Just wrap this shit up and no more new acquisitions. None. We need to clear out what we have and see where this investigation goes. I know this is usually your wheelhouse, but if I find out so much as one new girl has been brought in after these three, someone will be sorry.”
Sighing, I scratch my forehead. “This probably isn’t a good time to tell you Luca knocked up one of his girls.”
Dead-eyed, Mateo agrees flatly, “No, it probably isn’t.”
“I just figured with your insistence about no new acquisitions, I should probably explain that one. The Russian girl he knocked up is ready to pop, but this new one… she can’t be more than a month along.”
Squeezing the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes briefly, he says, “We’ll figure it out. Just pass along the order that no new girls are to be brought in, and for Christ’s sake, buy Delmonico a box of condoms.”
“It’d probably be easier if you looped me into the conversation with your guy on the force so he can keep me up to date on the investigation. Like you said, this is more my area of expertise than yours. If they do turn up anything, it’d be better if he could just tell me so I could handle it more efficiently.”
Mateo shakes his head. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll make sure any relevant information makes it back to you.”
“We’re wasting valuable time with a middleman, Mateo. It makes more sense to let me—”
Cutting me off, he looks me in the eye and informs me, “I am not a middleman. I’m the boss of this fucking family. I tell you what you need to know. That a problem?”
I stiffen, the muscles in my shoulders tensing as I stare back at him. Mateo doesn’t usually pull rank on me like that, especially when it comes to trafficking. I don’t think he gives half a fuck about this arm of operations, it’s just another cog in the machine to him. It’s my baby. Together with Luca, I have personally expanded the operation, turned it into what it is today. Mateo doesn’t do shit in this arena, and now here he is shutting it down and cutting me out of the conversation.
It is his call at the end of the day, but hearing it still pisses me off.
I shake my head once, stiffly. “No problem. Just trying to minimize the damage, that’s all. Shutting down Rob’s house is going to cost us. If the investigation dies or one of our guys can get it shut down quick, it’d be nice to know that. It’s entirely possible we could get the house back up and running—”
“No,” Mateo tells me, shaking his head. “Under no circumstances will the house resume operations. I need to see exactly how much it costs us, you need to see where you can redirect the people who worked at that house, but put the idea of re-opening it right out of your head. That’s not an option, regardless of what happens with the investigation.”
Scowling at him, I demand, “Why?”
“Because that’s the decision I’ve made,” he states, his tone making it clear he’s done discussing this. Reaching into his pocket, he draws out his keys and looks down at them. I take it to mean he’s ready to leave, but since Mateo doesn’t normally drive himself, I’m not familiar enough with the gesture to be sure. “There’s one more thing,” he tells me.
I scoff, looking down at the ground and then back up at him. “That’s not enough?”
“Like I said, it’s been a busy few days.”
“Well, what else is there?” I ask impatiently, still aggravated that he’s being so unreasonable about Rob’s house.
Without so much as a trace of sadness or displeasure, Mateo looks at me. That’s not what I expected. I suppose it’s possible he saved some good news to follow all the bad, but I don’t think that’s what’s coming. Despite the calm, misleading look on his face, I sense a sliver of malice in him now, and that wouldn’t accompany good news. I don’t know what he could tell me that would be worse than what he’s already said, though, let alone something he would derive any kind of sadistic pleasure out of.
That is, until he opens his mouth.
“Dad’s dead.”
