Huxley hovers over the man. “Spit it out.”
“Mia,” the man sighs deep, “before we moved here, we lived in the city. Do you remember that?”
“Yeah, I— I remember a little.” She answers, rubbing the right side of her face, now red from the slap I gave her. “What does that have to do with this? What’s going on?”
“Well, back then, before your mother passed, I was an accountant for the neighborhood, for an organization.”
The girl looked up at me then to my brother. “What sort of organization?”
“The kind that doesn’t take kindly to thieves,” I spat, hissing at him.
“Please, Mr.—”
The old man looks up at me just as the headlights of a passing car momentarily washes us with light.
“Moretti,” I say, “Antonio Moretti.”
The girl looks onto her father with wet eyes, her head shaking.
“Your daddy, here, stole a lot of money from the family,” I tell her.
“Is that true?” The old man hangs his head, unable to look his daughter in her face.
“I’m afraid so,” I say, “and it’s time to take back what is owed to us”
“Wait, wait—”
That time, I clock the guy myself straight in the nose. The thump it made sounded like one of my grandmother’s bibles being dropped on the floor. Blood starts to gush from his nostrils. “I ain’t waiting for no one!”
The man winces back, “I don’t have that sort of money, not anymore.”
My brother pressed the barrel of his gun to the man’s head. “Well then, tonight’s not going to be your night.”
The girl lets out another shriek at this.
“Shut up!” I shout, reminding her to be quiet like warning a kid to behave, glaring at the old accountant. “You burned through it all?”
The man himself starts to sob now. “I-I was alone, had to raise my daughter. M-My w-wife had just died. Please, please, do what you want to me, but let her go. She’s- she’s all I have.”
“What about that shitty little bookshop of yours?” I growl. “I bet you’ve got some money stashed there.”
“Whatever’s there, you can take it. Please, I can, I can—”
“You can what? Shit out a bag of our money?” Huxley asks, gesticulating his gun along with his words. I can already see it in his face that he just wants to put a bullet in both of them and be done with the job.
I look around the room. The whole place is really simple, nothing fancy. I’m guessing the money went into the house payments, the business. After all these years, I doubt he has much of it left. Yeah, it would be easier to just put a hole in each of them, bury their bodies out in the woods, but that wouldn’t do much in the way of a punishment. That’s too easy. I look at the girl.
“Wait a sec boys,” I tell my brother and Vinnie. “Maybe we can think of something.”
I grab the old man’s daughter by her arm, roughly dragging her as I force her to start climbing the stairs with my revolver pressed into her back.
“No, don’t you touch her! Don’t you—” Another hit from my brother, that time straight to the old man’s gut.
“Go on, keep going,” I say as I follow her to the top of the stairs. “Is this your room?”
She nods, her body shaking with fear.
“Go inside,” I watch her for a moment, how her wet hair drips onto the carpet, her hand clinging to that towel. “Get dressed.”