Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

PART I
SPEAKING IN TONGUES

9

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 mezzanine 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? Blondie?”

“Yes,” Trey sighed, knowing there was a lot wrong with this conversation, but not what and no time or energy to figure it out.

“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.” 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 Heyse.”

“Because you like getting your cock sucked,” Trey pointed out, “and none of your female clients will 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 your uncle’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 Woolworth’s and do algebra together—”

“I don’t know algebra.”

“I cannot have her daddy on my ass, you see 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 someone finds me. I don’t have enough cash to do that yet and find a living that does not include killing or fucking.”

“Boss Tom ain’t gonna put up with outsiders in this town. Lazia already told Capone to keep his troublemaking in Chicago, ’cuz his kind ain’t welcome here. The New York families are too preoccupied with killing each other to care what’s happening here.”

“I don’t think you understand how ruthless my uncle is. It was bad enough I botched the job—”

“On purpose.”

“—but then ran instead of facing him like a man.”

“A dead man.”

“I wasn’t going to kill a man with his little girl right there watching, much less screaming at me not to hurt her daddy, which meant I would have to kill her too, to keep her mouth shut.”

“In other words, you are not a dependable assassin.”

“I was.”

Until that little girl had pulled Gio’s humanity from the pit of his belly and showed it to him. And how did the not-dead daddy repay him? It had gotten around New York what a spineless coward Giuseppe “the Clutch Hand” Morello’s hitman nephew was, at which point Morello iced the man himself.

Gio might have gotten killed for genuinely botching a hit, but he might not have. Humiliating Morello carried a death sentence, and the bounty on Gio’s head was high. It would occur to him that Gio would fall in with bootleggers, but it would never occur to him that Gio would take up whoring. Gio didn’t think he was good for much else, but Trey had stopped arguing about what he could be good at if he thought about the future and had a little faith in himself.

“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.”

“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 soda fountain 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 into one of Trey’s cushy chairs.

“Yeah, you know. Look.” He handed Gio the paper on which 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 trousers then I’mma have to make noises about marriage and whatnot. And you know what Vern thinks I should do?”

“Brody and Alice thought it was a good idea too.”

“And?”

“And I said I’d kill anybody who spiked an innocent.”

Trey nodded approvingly. “You’ll have a whole soul in no time, and I betcha Dot could help you pull all those bits and pieces together.”

Gio scowled. “I’m going to hell. Don’t need to drag a nice girl with me.”

With all the bodies under Gio’s belt, he probably was going to go to hell— “Hey, now, wait a minute. Can’t you go to confession? Be absolved of all that?”

“Even if I could, I wouldn’t. My luck, some priest would send it back to New York and then I’d be knocking on Satan’s door without last rites.”

“Isn’t there something where that’s a sin? Reveal what’s said in a confessional?”

“Priests can be bought. Speaking of priests—” Then Gio too suggested Trey work up to a proposal or at least close to one. “Making noises isn’t the same as making promises.”

“To Boss Tom it would be,” Trey said darkly, irritated. “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 might do it.”

“Closing up 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, “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. If he wants to buy it, that’s jake.”

“And what would you do after that?” Gio mocked. “Sell insurance?”

“Yeah,” he drawled. “Sure, why not.”

Gio looked back at the list. “Fairyland. Never been there. Moving pictures. 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. Gentlemen’s clubs. Boxing. Try that.”

So Scarritt’s books on skeet shooting and racing had told Trey exactly what he thought they’d said.

“Aside from the fact that I can’t golf or play tennis—”

“No. Listen. 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 thing, what popular folks have—”

“Charisma.”

“—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. He knows that, only he doesn’t know why.”

“Goddammit,” Trey muttered, his face in his hands and his elbows on his desk.

“Men like Scarritt want a seat at the wealthy man’s table in society.”

“He doesn’t seem like the type to mingle with Pendergast or Lazia, and they’re not accepted in Kansas City high society, anyway.”

“He doesn’t want a seat at the Machine or Mafia table. He doesn’t even want a seat at Nelson’s table. He wants a seat at Rockefeller’s table. He can’t get that, so he built his own table.”

And Gio didn’t think he was good enough to sit at anybody’s table, no matter how lowly.

“Hey, you jake with fuckin’ men?” Trey asked, for once genuinely curious.

Gio shrugged. “That’s where the money is, isn’t it? But that’s like asking me if I’d rather eat solid turds or drink the runs straight out of somebody’s ass.”

“You could just try to go straight again and dig ditches. Disappear into the prairie, settle down with a nice girl.”

Gio said nothing for a moment. “Thought about it,” he muttered. “But, Trey … Here, I have hope I can get out because I got some cash stashed to leave. 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 and Lazia won’t get a whiff of me when they go to Atlantic City.”

The big shindig of all the country’s crime bosses was next month. If Morello got to bitching at either Pendergast or Lazia about his runaway hitman, it might not be long before one of them put the pieces together, provided either of them had ever paid attention to Trey’s employees.

“They ain’t gonna hand you over even if they did know who you were and that you’re here. They’d want you doing what you were doing in New York. 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 want to 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 his inability to offer for 1520 without tipping his hand about where he got the cash. It was longing, soul-deep and painful. Trey had never wanted anything as badly as he wanted this speak and now it was within his grasp.

So Gio wanted a nice girl the same way Trey wanted 1520. He’d never known that.

Gio wasn’t going to 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 and the only other women he knew were here. Nice girls didn’t come here and loose women weren’t here to get married and have babies.

So perhaps it was no wonder Gio was pissed at Trey for introducing him to a nice girl who would never suspect 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. Do somethin’ about your Brooklyn accent ’cuz ‘Gene Luke’ ain’t gonna pass with the way you talk.”

“They did not notice my accent.”

“It was loud as hell to my ears, and it won’t be long before they hear it. Or else they did and were too polite to let on.”

“I’ve done as well as I can by myself.”

Trey grunted.

“And I’m not working. Not in bed, I mean. 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 waste bin. “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 waste bin 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 one hundred percent of my tips, and then I won’t mind working so much. You’ll 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 two months. So take it or leave it.”

Trey’s main male earner was not going to be earning for two months. He was going to take a hit, but he had no reason to pinch pennies anymore, which was why he could afford the brand-new freezer in his kitchen.

“Not a vacation,” Trey finally said. “You maître d’ with Holly, keep an eye on things, flirt with the customers, bounce if you have to. Help watch the place 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 Ida so I can hire another gig.”

Gio thought for two seconds. “I can do that. And you pay for somebody to fix how I talk since you think it’s such a problem.”

First it was a housekeeper and now this. Trey hated the idea of paying somebody to do a job he already had covered, but Gio would be sitting on his ass collecting pay anyway. So he could fucking well work. He also hated having to shell out for diction lessons when Trey managed just fine by ear, but there was no way either girl’s father would let them walk out with a Sicilian. An upper-class Midwestern accent was the only thing he could do to pass as marginally Anglo-Saxon.

It was only for two months, 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.

“Fine.”

9

If you don’t want to wait 2 years to get to the end, you can buy it here.