Trey was barely able to duck the fist that came at him when he walked out of the bathroom later that night.
"You son of a bitch!" Gio bellowed.
Trey continued to comb his hair without missing a beat. "Cute, ain't she? Told you she was."
"You set me up!"
"No," Trey replied calmly, leading the way downstairs and into his office, trying to figure out how to pronounce Poirot now that he knew how to pronounce motif. Gio slammed the door behind him. "I need you to get that little bitch off my back while I get Marina into bed. I promised you a sweet payday if I won the bet, and you've done worse things to make money."
That brought Gio up short. "Bitch?"
"God, yes. She's got me pegged sideways an' her soft little puppy teeth been diggin' inna my heels. The last thing I need is for her fangs to get any longer or sharper and start diggin' inna my ass."
Gio curled his lip in confusion. "Uh ... are we talking about the same girl? Dot? Albright? The blonde?"
"Yes," Trey sighed, knowing there was a lot wrong with this conversation, but not what and no time or energy to figure it out.
"Dunham, she was climbing the wall to get away from me."
"And you were hanging off the edge of the booth to get away from her." The music started up and Trey was done with this conversation. "You've got a new client who asked for you by name. Mrs. Cohasset. She'll be here around nine, so go get your glad rags on."
"Another one," Gio groaned, turning. "I'd rather fuck that cocksucker Moore."
"Because you like getting your cock sucked," Trey pointed out, "and none of your women'll pay to do it when their husbands make 'em do it at home. So I guess," he continued slyly, "the real question is how badly do you wanna get outta this racket and out of the Cosa Nostra's reach? Enough to keep a very pretty, cynical, and vicious Mormon girl occupied while I seduce her best gal? I'm not even askin' you to kiss her, much less seduce her. Just distract her. Shit, take her to a different malt shop and do algebra together. I cannot have her daddy on my ass, you know what I'm sayin'?"
Gio took a deep breath and released it slowly. "I want out of here completely, Trey. Out of the racket, out of this town, out of the country if I must, but alive and well and gone because it's only a matter of time before Luciano finds me."
"Boss Tom ain't gonna put up with Cosa Nostra in this town. That's why you came here, 'member? An' right now the New York gangs're fightin' amongst themselves an' don't have time to hunt down a stray."
"A stray who knows where the bodies are buried."
"Clear that brat outta my path to Marina long enough for me to get her knocked up and I will set you up with enough money to go wherever it is you wanna go." When Gio didn't move and the glower on his face hadn't faded, Trey said, "What."
"That's not enough."
"Whattaya mean, that's not enough? It's a fair trade. More than, stacked up against each other."
Gio leaned over the desk and got in Trey's face. "Do you plan to conduct this courtship entirely at a malt shop after school over homework and Wednesday nights speaking in tongues?"
"No," Trey said archly, putting his hand on Gio's face and shoving him back. "I have activities planned because unlike you, I am used to dating nice girls."
"Activities," Gio said flatly, flopping onto Trey's mangled divan. He really needed to get a new one but he didn't want to spend the money, not even on a used one. He was also unaccountably attached to the one he had, no matter how sad.
"Yeah, you know. Look." He handed Gio the paper he'd made lists and lines and arrows and boxes.
Gio's expression faded into confusion. "The library?"
"Girl's a reader," Trey said, his excitement burgeoning for a completely different reason.
Gio curled his lip. "No wonder you like her. They both stink of bluestocking. Baseball?"
"She needs to have some real fun else she's gonna get tired of me before I can get in her pants then I'mma have to make noises about marriage and whatnot."
"Making noises isn't the same as making promises."
"To Boss Tom it would be," Trey said darkly. "I said one thing to her once that could be taken that way just to bait the hook, but if he thinks he can welsh on a technicality after I'd done what he wanted, he'll do it."
"Closing up the loopholes," Gio murmured absently, looking at the list.
"Yeah, I gotta play this straight, otherwise I'd have a ring on that girl's finger right now, plan the wedding for a coupla years from now and then poof. One baby, no groom."
Gio's mouth pursed, then he looked at Trey. "Does Lazia know about this?"
"That's Boss Tom's problem, not mine."
"It will be if Lazia suddenly wants a nice speakeasy."
"Lucarelli," Trey burst out, "if he ain't poisoned my well by now, he can't."
"You must have something on him."
"No, I don't!" Trey protested. "He runs the North side. I run this little bitty bit right here. All I want's to own this little bitty bit right here so I can sell the fucker."
"And do what?" Gio mocked. "Sell insurance?
"Yeah," he drawled. "Sure, why not."
Gio looked back at the list. "Fairyland. Never been there. Picnics. Fishing. Preachers' girls go fishing?"
"Not them," Trey said. "Marina ain't the only one I gotta seduce. Albright lets Dot run half wild an' obviously he has good reason to trust her, although I wouldn't if I were her daddy, looker like 'at. Scarritt's the one with the stick up his ass. The way to get to him is baseball, fishin', and huntin', which I swore I'd never do again, but here I am."
"That is not what will get his attention. Baseball, probably, but fishing and hunting, no. Golf. Tennis. Gentleman's clubs. Boxing. Horse racing."
So Scarritt's books on skeet shooting and racing had told Trey exactly what he thought they'd said.
"Aside from the fact that—"
"No. What I mean is, men like that don't want to do things regular folks do. They want to be somebody, feel important. Look how he's built his congregation. At least five hundred people raising Cain every Sunday, like he's the new messiah. He's got that charm down pat and his tent revival's popular enough for us to take a hit. He's Jesus's version of a mob boss and he's got something you want so you're dancing on his strings. Only he doesn't know why."
"Goddammit," Trey muttered, his face in his hands and his elbows on his desk.
"A lot of the guys in the Cosa Nostra are like that, always wanting more. Little things. A foot in the door. A seat at the table."
And Gio was on the Maranzano family blacklist because he didn't even want to be in the same house with the table. Gio had heard of a boss in Kansas City who wasn't bound to any crime families of any nationality, ran things his own way, and had mafiosi working for him. Boss Tom had never met Gio, and although it took three years before Gio told Trey who he was, why he was in Kansas City, and who he was running from, Trey had had a pretty good idea. The only thing that surprised him was Gio's real name. He'd landed back in organized crime because he didn't know how to function in a world where a man with only one job skill—assassinating people—had no place.
"He doesn't seem like the type to mingle with Pendergast or Lazia," Trey finally said.
"He doesn't want a seat at the Machine or Mafia table. He wants a seat at Rockefeller's table."
Naw, Gio couldn't go home again even if he wanted to. He'd committed the cardinal sin of every Sicilian from Vegas to New York and if his family ever found out—
"Hey, you like fuckin' men?" Trey asked, for once genuinely curious but only because he was tired of thinking about his scheme.
Gio shrugged. "No, but that's where the money is." Boy, was it. "But that's like asking me if I'd rather eat solid turds or drink the runs directly out of somebody's ass."
"You could just go straight and dig ditches. Disappear into the prairie, settle down with a nice girl."
Gio said nothing for a moment. "I've thought about it," he muttered. "But, Trey ... Here, I have hope I can get out because I've got some cash stashed. I'd never be able to pay for more than my next meal digging ditches and forget about feeding a family."
"The moral of the story is that crime does pay."
That made Gio laugh in spite of himself. "And hopefully Boss Tom won't get a whiff of me when he goes to Atlantic City."
The big shindig of all the country's crime bosses was next month. If Maranzano got to bitching to Boss Tom about his runaway hitman, it wouldn't be long before Boss Tom put the pieces together. He wouldn't rat Gio out but he would press Gio into service with the threat that he could. Trey wanted to go to that conference, but not because he wanted a seat at the table. Trey didn't want a seat at that table any more than Gio did.
"He ain't gonna hand you over even if he did know who you were and that you're here. He don't operate that way. So, Dot? You gonna help me or not? Enough cash so you can run all the way out to California if you need to."
Gio sighed. "Man, I just wanna find a nice girl to settle down with who won't know anything about this—"
Trey caught something in Gio's voice. Trey felt that way every time he thought about the times he'd met his goal to buy 1520 Main, only to have Boss Tom refuse the price he'd set. It was longing, soul-deep and painful. Trey had never wanted anything as badly as he wanted this bar and right when he thought he had it ...
So Gio wanted a nice girl the same way Trey wanted 1520. He'd never known that.
Gio wasn't gonna get what he wanted. Not in this town, at least. Not in Chicago or New York, certainly. Not when the only nice girls he knew were the Catholic ones in his family's sphere—from which he'd run—and the only other women he knew were here. Nice girls didn't come here and loose women didn't wanna make love and spoon.
So perhaps it was no wonder Gio was pissed at Trey for introducing him to a nice girl who had no idea who he was, where he came from, or what he did now. And if a sweet Mormon girl with some worldly savvy ever found out, it would crush Gio in ways his family and whoring hadn't managed to do.
"All right," Trey grumbled. "I get your point about Dot. I'll pay you and give you a bonus on the back end."
"You're going to give me a paid vacation, is what you're going to do. I'm not working. At least, not in bed. Not as long as I have to be around this girl."
"What?!" Trey roared.
"She's clean. Pure, you know? I don't want my filth to rub off on her."
"She's unclean enough to know we're not on the up'n'up."
Gio shrugged nonchalantly. "Knowing and participating are two different things and that girl's too stubborn to be seduced. I like that. I can practice on being respectable—just like you—with a girl I don't want, but is the kind of girl I want. And I don't want to have to come back here and fuck three people after every innocent little outing we just went to." He crumpled Trey's list into a ball and shot it into the wastebin. "Peanuts and Crackerjacks in the afternoon with two sweet girls, sticking my dick into some old, fat broad or her husband that night. No. No fucking way."
"If she don't know," Trey said testily, reaching into the wastebin and digging his list out, "then what difference does it make?"
"Yes or no. I keep Dot off your back, I keep my room and board, and I get a paid vacation. I'll go back to work when you win. If you win. And if you do, I will also get a cut and then I won't mind working so much. You have the dough whether you win or not because Tom's not going sell and if you win, you don't have to fork it over."
Trey was flabbergasted. "You just said it yourself! You don't know how to do anything else and make this much cash!"
"Exactly. I make too much money for you to fire me if I'm going back to work in a year. So take it or leave it."
Trey's main earner was not going to be earning for one year. He was going to take a hit, but he had no reason to pinch pennies anymore, which was why he could afford a freezer for the kitchen.
"Not a vacation," Trey finally said. "You run this bar and free up my evenings so I can go be with Marina like the regular nine-to-five cat I told her I am. Especially Wednesday nights. And you move up to the bunk room with Nadia so I can hire another gig."
Gio thought for two seconds. "I can do that."
Trey hated the idea of paying somebody to do his job, but he couldn't be in two places at once and Gio would be sitting on his ass collecting pay anyway. So he could fucking well work. It was only for one year, a short-term investment for a long-term gain. Trey could be patient when he had to be, but he didn't have to like it.
"But now I have no reason to depend on my dick for my living. I am your permanent manager."
Gio had Trey over a barrel and he snarled. "Fine."