“Stay,” he said.
“No way.” I got out and followed him. “I’m curious about your business.”
He gave me a look but didn’t fight. The front stoop was crumbling, and the neighborhood seemed empty. There was one other car, and it was missing a tire, and the doors were rusted out. As far as I could tell, all the houses were boarded up and abandoned.
He knocked on the door, waited, and knocked again. I smiled a little to myself and he shot me a look. It was like a secret spy thing, the sort of shit little kids did.
The door opened a crack. “You him?” the voice asked.
“Valentino sent me,” Ewan said.
The door slammed shut.
“That wasn’t very polite,” I said.
He looked back at me and wasn’t smiling. “Stop it.”
“I’m just saying.” I stretched my arms up and looked around. “Where are we, anyway?”
“Kensington,” he said. “North Kensington.”
“Huh.” I chewed my lip. “Near Temple, right?”
“Sort of,” he said. “Now be quiet.”
I paced away a little while we waited. A few city cats slinked past, hiding near the rusted-out car. I bet they stayed hidden during the day and went hunting for rats at night.
The door opened again and a black duffel appeared. It looked absolutely stuffed, the material stretched tight.
“This is all of it?” Ewan asked.
“What the Don ordered,” the man said. I moved to the side to get a better look. He had dark skin and sallow eyes, and wore a freshly pressed checkered shirt.
“He’ll weigh it, and if you’re short, it’ll be a problem.” Ewan slung the bag on his shoulder.
“It’s not short,” the man said, and glanced down at me. “You brought a friend?”
“Ignore her,” Ewan said. “I’ll pass this along. I’ll be seeing you.”
“Yeah, I bet.” The guy shut the door gain, and Ewan walked back to the car. He tossed the duffel in the back and got in behind the wheel. I hesitated before climbing into the passenger seat.
“What was all that?” I asked. “It seemed pretty dramatic.”
“He just gave me fifty pounds of pure, uncut Columbian heroin,” he said as he drifted down the block again.
I turned around and gaped at the bag.
Ewan laughed and I flinched at the sound. I’d never seen heroin before in my life, and I was tempted to look inside, but kept my hands to myself. I didn’t know how much heroin went for on the street, but I guessed fifty pounds would be worth an astronomically large number.
I faced forward again as Ewan began to drift around the city. “Do you do this a lot?” I asked. “Buy drugs and cart them off?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “I do whatever the Don asks.”
“You answer directly to him?”
He shrugged. “It’s an unusual arrangement. Most guys in my position have a Capo, you know, like a leader. Capos are like middle management. But I get my orders straight from the Don, and sometimes from Dean.”
“That makes you special, right?” It was interesting, the way he talked about the family. He had a strange note of pride in his voice, like he wanted to brag about how he was important in his gang full of criminal and thieves.
“I don’t think I’d say special,” Ewan said, tilting his head. “But it means my life’s both simpler and more complicated.”
“How’s that work?”
He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “If a guy fucks up, he answers to the Capo. That’s how it goes. But if I fuck up, I answer directly to the Don, and he’s not a kind of forgiving man.”
“Poor baby,” I said, pouting. “Little killer man might get smacked around by the big bad old guy.”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t play around,” he said. “You met the Don. You know what he’s like.”
I shivered a little and looked out the window. That was true, I met the Don, and I saw those cold, lizard eyes. He was right about that—I wouldn’t want to be punished by that man, and I certainly wouldn’t want to work for him.
“Why are you doing this, if you’re angry with him right now?” I asked.
“Because orders are orders,” he said.
“Except for when those orders are to marry me.”
His lips flattened as he glared ahead. “More or less,” he said.
“I still don’t get why you care so much about them,” I pressed, unable to help myself. I was starting to get comfortable with Ewan, and that meant I was starting to ask stupid questions that might piss him off. I had to be careful, because although he hadn’t hurt me yet, that didn’t mean he never would.
“The Valentino family took me in when I had nowhere else to go,” he said, his eyes scanning the street ahead like he was waiting for an explosion. “My mother died when I was twelve. My dad took off two years later, and I was left alone in that fucking house. I was fourteen years old, and didn’t have a clue what I was going to do with myself.”