Devil May Care: Boxed Set (61 page)

Dominic

I fumbled for a moment before I found my voice again. “Frank’s…dead?”

“Yep,” Jawbone nodded.

“You’re telling me that Frank Capparelli is dead. Frank, the boss of the Capparelli crime family. Dead?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Damn.” That’s all I could think of to say.
Damn.
The man had built an empire from nothing. Until the Broken Bones came along, he ran this city with an iron fist. With the notable exception of the members of this club, everyone who had ever challenged him was either buried in an unmarked grave or sleeping forever at the bottom of the lake. He was a Chicago institution, an immovable object. Frank Capparelli was God.

But, apparently, God was dead.

Something occurred to me. Why stop now? Why hold back? “Jaw, how the fuck could you be talking about negotiating a peace treaty?” I said hungrily. “Now’s the time to take them down! That rat fuck son of his doesn’t have half the balls his old man did. Let’s strike. Let’s burn that fucking mansion of theirs to the ground.”

“Try not to break my shit, Dom,” Jawbone said.

I looked down and realized I’d snapped off a piece of the desk in my bare hands. The wooden splinters stuck out. I set the chunk of wood carefully on top and settled back into my seat, folding my hands across my lap and mostly succeeding in keeping my breath calm and even.

“Now is the time, prez,” I repeated. “We won’t get another chance this good.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“You can’t just tell me, ‘No.’”

“I can, I will, and I just did,” he retorted. “I’m your president, and as long as I’m still here, you’re listening to what I say. Got that?”

I exploded. “Fuck that and fuck you. You know why I joined this club. I came because I wanted every Capparelli to bleed for what they did to me. If you’re telling me to stand down just because you’re too scared to fight, then fuck this whole joint. I’m out. I’ll go fight them myself.” I stood and spun angrily on one heel, headed for the exit.

“Sit down, Dom,” he called tiredly just as my hand closed around the doorknob. I paused for a moment, curious what he would say. “There’s more to it.”

I turned back to face him. My eyes were narrowed suspiciously. Jawbone was a tricky, manipulative motherfucker when he wanted to be. There was a reason he was the Broken Bones president, the same reason he’d survived so long in this bloody turf war. He knew how to play the game.

“Start talking,” I said.

“First, you sit.” He pointed at the empty chair. I eyed it for a moment, then decided that I owed him at least the benefit of a few more minutes’ worth of attention. But I wouldn’t sit for long. Who knew how long this window of opportunity was going to last?

“I’m sitting,” I growled once I had settled back down.

“Now, before I tell you what’s happening, I want you to answer one more question for me.”

“I told you before, I’m done playing games. If you don’t tell me the plan, I’m leaving right this fucking second.”

“Just one question. It’ll be quick, I promise.”

“Fine.”

“How much do you hate them?”

I let the question sink in.
How much do I hate them?
The first thing I thought of was that night I’d spent in the chair in the basement, the same one that every Broken Bone had sat through on his first night with the club. The ghost memory of the pain still haunted my body. The pain was almost like an old friend, lingering around in my veins and nerve endings just to remind me of what I’d gone through.

Why had I stayed? Why did I suffer through the pain? I’d held that vial in my hand the entire night. I must have looked at it and decided to drink it a thousand times. But a thousand times I’d stopped myself right on the brink of giving in. Why go through all that?

Because of Slim.

I drifted back into the memory of his dying body cradled in my lap. The motherfuckers had beat him senseless, just to inflict pain. He didn’t make a difference to their war one way or another. We were small-time, he and I. One more stolen car would hardly make a dent in either side’s coffers.

They killed him to make a point. They wanted the city to think that the Capparellis were invincible, and they were out to prove that idea, one dead, innocent body at a time. Slim was a pawn. He deserved better than that.

The pain of my wrist was nothing compared to the hatred I felt towards the motherfuckers who’d robbed me of a friend. Hell, Slim was more than that. If there were such things as guardian angels, he was the closest thing to it. The man had literally plucked me from the gutter, brought me back from death’s doorstep. He fixed me up, brushed me off, made me into a man. A man with hate in his heart and a gun in each hand.

“I want to strangle every one of them to death with my own two hands,” I told Jawbone.

He nodded, satisfied with my answer. “Good,” he said. “You’ll need that.”

I waited with bated breath for him to continue.

“Now, I’m going to explain everything, and I want you to listen closely. It’s complicated, and there’s a lot of ways this shit could blow up in our faces. But if it goes right, then you’ll get everything you wanted.”

I folded my arms and listened as he explained.

# # #

Jesus, what a mindfuck,
I thought to myself as I rode home on my motorcycle. Jawbone’s words played in my head over and over again. Each time, the plan seemed more fucked up and convoluted than the last. It was reckless, downright implausible…and yet, if we found a way to pull it off, it’d be the greatest coup in the history of the club. A strike that the Capparellis would never recover from. We’d have our enemies at our feet and the city in our hands, all in one fell swoop. But goddamn, the stakes were high.

“Antonio Capparelli is the new boss of the family,” Jawbone had begun. “He’s an opportunistic son of a bitch, and we know that he’s had illegitimate side businesses growing under his daddy’s nose for years. He’s desperate to be successful. But, most importantly for us, he doesn’t know how to fight a war, and he doesn’t want to. All the bastard wants is money. We’re gonna let him have that—for now.”

“How so?” I’d replied, a growing sense of thrill building in my stomach.

“We negotiate a peace. Let him think it’s favorable to them. On paper, it will be. We back off any contested areas, agree not to strike at any of their business operations, and pull back everything into our own core territory.”

“So what’s the point of all that?”

“We’re putting him to sleep. If all that motherfucker cares about is dollar signs, then by all means, he’s welcome to them. He can have the prostitution rings, the drug running, whatever the hell he wants. While he’s focused on that, though, we finish pulling off the biggest deal we’ve ever done.”

I knew what he was talking about right away. The Japanese. A Chicago contact for the Yakuza in Japan had reached out to us a few months back with interest in us helping them broker a deal for high-powered chemical weaponry. The fee they were willing to pay was astronomical, enough to give us a mountain of cash to spend at our leisure. But talks had been slow as the violence with the Capparellis ramped up again for the umpteenth time. We weren’t sure whether we’d be able to secure the site of the deal, and we weren’t willing to expose ourselves to a Capparelli ambush with that much firepower and cash getting ready to change hands. It would end badly for everyone involved.

“The Yakuza,” I’d said.

Jawbone had nodded, confirming my suspicions. “If that goes through, we have enough money to buy whatever we want. We’ll fund a massive campaign to hunt down every last rat Capparelli out there.”

I worked through the scenario in my head, playing out all the possible angles. There was a window, sure. But even if Antonio was being lulled to sleep, I still didn’t see how Jawbone would be confident enough to pull the trigger on the arms swap. Antonio might be smart enough to maintain the surveillance and espionage systems his dad had put into place. There was no way to be certain, and I told Jawbone as much.

“That’s where you come in,” he’d replied.

“Me?”

“We need an inside man.”

The air had practically rushed out of the room, taking every bit of sound with it. My pulse thundered in my ears. Hate, confusion, and adrenaline were rushing through me in equal measures. An inside man. Me. How the fuck would that play out?

Jawbone had seen my hesitation and pressed forward. “We need someone to infiltrate their organization and keep their finger on the pulse. Let us know what’s happening, run interference, and make doubly sure that we can pull off this Yakuza deal without a hitch. Then, once you’ve worked your way inside, you’re in prime position to lead the counterstrike after we’ve got the cash flow.”

“You want me to play nice with Antonio Capparelli,” I’d said quietly. “You want me to be his friend.”

“I want you to get close enough that he thinks you’re about to hug him, right before you stab him in the back.”

I took the long way home as I replayed our conversation. I wanted to suss out some wrinkle that would throw the whole thing in jeopardy, so we could start over from square one. This shit was patently ridiculous. I wasn’t James fucking Bond. Spying, sneaking, pretending, that was shit for the comic books, not for real life. And this was as real as it got. There were millions of dollars and hundreds of lives at stake. It would all be dependent on me to keep it safe. There had to be another way.

I’d tried a dozen different arguments to sway Jawbone from his plan, but he wasn’t going to be convinced. “This is the only way,” he’d said. “And it’s the best way.” Throwing the full extent of our current resources into the war would end in a bloody stalemate with no guarantee of any degree of success. But once we had that money, our options would be limitless. We could buy out lower ranking family members, sway local businesses and smaller gangs to our banner, or even hire mercenaries to beef up our ranks before attacking the Capparellis head on. There were a million ways to play it once we got to that point. But it all hinged on executing the deal. That was the corner we had to turn.

Well, fuck. If that was the way things had to be, then so be it. I was going behind enemy lines. I just hoped I would live long enough to have my revenge.

# # #

When I awoke the next morning, I was calm and steady. “You’re going to have to scrub everything,” Jawbone had warned me, “your whole life needs to disappear. They can’t know who you are or where you’ve been. The second they find out you’re affiliated with us, it’s over.” Prospects had come by the apartment to take away all my things. Jawbone had arranged with a few local cops we had on payroll to fake arrest me, so there was a plausible reason for my disappearance just in case the Capparellis happened to have eyes on my neighborhood. I buzzed my hair short and traded my leather cut with the Broken Bones patch for a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that would blend in anywhere. I was disappearing, one piece of me at a time.

I looked around my apartment. Except for the bare mattress I was sleeping on, it was empty. Dust had begun to colonize in the corners. The closets yawned, wide and bereft of anything but a few loose hangers. There was no trace that I’d ever lived here.

I got up and strode to the bathroom to splash some water on my face. Blue eyes gazed back at me from the mirror. I ran a hand through my air, marveling at how unfamiliar it felt to be cropped so short. I could have been anybody.

I locked the door behind me as I left the apartment. Jawbone and Gordo were waiting out front in a small, unmarked sedan. I remembered that car; I’d boosted it a few years prior. We used it on random errands for the club from time to time when we wanted to go around without drawing too much attention.