After placing the pizza order, I called Freddy Russo, my contact with the Sartini Family. The guy who’d dropped this fucked-up job right in my lap.
We were going to have a few words.
“Yeah, who’s this?” Freddy answered on the third ring.
My phone was a burner phone with a throwaway number, so he was wise to be wary. I had his phone number—and his face—memorized in case it came to that. “It’s Leon.”
“Leon! How’s business? All finished? You were supposed to call sooner than this. I was getting worried, you know?”
“Why would you be worried, Freddy?” I kept my voice liquid-nitrogen cold. “Unless you knew how fucked up that job was gonna be.”
“Careful, buddy, careful. Don’t get your Irish up.”
“That’s goddamn hilarious. Mind answering me, though? Did you know what that job was? Because you sure as fuck didn’t tell me.”
“Listen, be careful what you say on this line, you get me?”
I held the phone to my ear in a death grip. Years of working for this guy and I had never trusted him. But only a fool trusted anyone in the life. I could count on one hand the number of people I trusted. I was related to most of them.
“I want answers,” I said. “Did you know who would be there tonight?”
“You think they tell me that kind of thing?” He laughed. It sounded forced. “Did you get it done?”
He was really hung up on whether or not I’d pulled off the job. I could hear it in his voice. He didn’t dare come out and explicitly ask if I’d killed Sofia Accardo over the phone—and because he’d just lied to me about it—but hereallywanted to know it had been done.
“Who ordered the job, Freddy? I want to know before I give my progress report.”
“Jesus, kid. Aren’t you swaggering around like you got the biggest cock on the block? Look, I got the word handed down to me. I had an address and time and was told to find somebody good for the job. Now, is itdone?”
I had a bad feeling about all of this, and talking to him was only making it worse. No one killed the daughter of a mob boss unless they meant to send a message. And that message would lead to war. The only things an outsider like me knew about the current state of politics between the New York Italian mafia families was the gossip and tidbits I heard here and there. Even made men in those families wouldn’t know if the big dogs were about to start a war. But mafia families didn’t like going to war. War was bad for business and bad for profits. The Commission was designed to stop the families from continually attacking each other. Usually, they kept things civil. At least on the surface.
So why had I been sent to kill the woman I had tied up in a cheap motel? It had to be because someone thought I would kill a woman for the money. Or at least kill Sofia Accardo because of who her father was. They dangled her in front of me like meat, hoping their dog would bite.
I didn’t appreciate that.
“Yeah, Freddy,” I lied. “It’s fucking done.”
“No problems?”
“I don’t like to be second-guessed. I told you it was done.”
The line went quiet for almost too long. But when Freddy spoke again, he sounded perfectly jovial. All good times and “we go way back” in his tone that I didn’t trust for an instant.
“Good, good. Give me a way to reach you, Leon. We’ve got to get you the rest of what you earned and all that. Pay off the invoice, am I right?”
My blood ran cold. Freddy was setting me up to be killed. I knew it instinctively and without a doubt. A guy in the life developed certain instincts. He either listened to them or he died early. I’d been paid a third up front, with two-thirds due on completion of the contract. That was standard for me, but I’d never met a Mafioso eager to pay off a debt. Most of them were cheap bastards unless they were spending money on themselves.
The scenario was obvious and an old standard. Freddy wanted to lure me somewhere isolated using the rest of the payoff as bait. Then he’d have some guy looking to make his bones put two rounds in my head. They’d keep the cash and dump my body in the river or leave me where I fell. With a bullet in the head, I would never talk about how I’d murdered Giovanni Accardo’s daughter. I wasn’t Italian and wasn’t a made man, so they wouldn’t give a shit about erasing me from the board. In fact, after a dicey job like this, it was expected.
I gritted my teeth and cursed silently. This was an absolute fucking disaster. Sofia Accardo was going to get my ass killed one way or another.
“Don’t worry about it,” I replied to Freddy, keeping my tone neutral as if this bastard didn’t intend to ventilate my skull. “I’ll call you when I’m ready to pick it up.”
“Of course I fucking worry about it, kid. You deserve to be paid. Take a girl out to dinner. Get a little pussy. Am I right?”
Why did my mind immediately jump to Sofia when this two-faced bastard started talking about taking a girl out for dinner? Was it because I had a pizza delivery on the way? It certainly wasn’t because I wanted to fuck her. She was beautiful and sexy as sin in that smart-girl-who-doesn’t-know-she’s-sexy way. Those were a few of the reasons I hated her.
“Right,” I said smoothly, wishing Freddy was here in front of me so I could break a few of his teeth. Just to start. “But it’s been a busy night. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
