It had to be her dad. Al’s right about that part for sure—no one else would dare touch her.
When we knock on the door, a woman answers. Two little kids peer around her wide hips. She gasps and steps back when she sees us, tries to shut the door.
I wedge my shoe in before she can slam the door in our faces. My chest knots up when I see the scared eyes of those little kids, so I tear my gaze away. “We’re here to talk to Luigi.”
“H-he’s not here,” she says.
I glance at Little Al, wondering if we should come back later. I don’t want to hurt a guy in front of his family.
Al nods, telling me to go ahead.
“Mind if we come in and confirm that?” I ask.
I hear a noise in the background, the squeak of a door or an old window opening. Without waiting for the lady to answer, Little Al shoves past her and charges in. The window is open, and a guy is silhouetted inside the frame like a picture as he gets ready to go down the fire escape.
I push past the lady, too, racing to grab the guy and help Little Al wrestle him back inside. He twists like an eel, wrenching free of our grip only to lose his balance and go sprawling on the floor on his back.
“Where’s the money?” Little Al barks, his voice deeper and fiercer than when he’s ribbing me. He grabs the guy by the collar and pulls back to punch him. The guy does the usual groveling and begging, making excuses. The first time, I had to convince myself that I could stomach it even while thinking, what would it hurt to wait one more day for the payment?
Now, I barely hear him. I know what it would hurt. Our reputation, for one. If we give one guy a day, he’d be asking for a week, a month, a year. If we did it for one guy, we’d have to do it for the next. They all have the same story, some sob story. Our job isn’t to listen to their sob stories. It’s to collect. That’s it.
But when I look up, I see three pairs of terrified eyes watching. I put a hand over Little Al’s fist, stopping him.
“Tell your family to wait in the bedroom,” I say to Luigi.
“No,” he sobs. “They need to see what you monsters do.”
“You don’t like the business, don’t be in it,” I say. “Now tell them.”
“No,” he howls, probably thinking we’ll go easy on him in front of his wife and kids.
I turn to the wife. “Go in the bedroom and don’t come out until you hear the front door close,” I tell her. “You don’t want your kids seeing what’s about to happen.”
The little boy is already crying and clinging to her leg. The girl is just staring with big, silent brown eyes that remind me too much of my sister’s. Maybe she needs to see this. Maybe protecting her from it will turn out as well as protecting Crystal turned out for my family. Her family is in this, and at some point, she’ll have to face the hard truth.
But I can’t do it, and not just because she’s only a child, and there are things no child should have to see or know. Maybe that’s why I shielded Crystal for so long, too. I didn’t want her to have to know the truth about our family, but more than that, I didn’t want her to know that I was capable of something like this. That I was the bad guy.
“Go,” I bark at the woman when she looks uncertain. Luigi keeps telling them not to move, but the woman is smart enough to want to protect her kids, and after a last, longing glance at her husband, she hustles her kids into a bedroom down the hall.
I grab Luigi by the front of his shirt, and when I look into his face, I don’t see him. I see Anthony Pomponio, who might have ruined my wife. I see that guy on the beach she was snuggling with on our wedding night. I see Devlin Darling, who my sister fell in love with and died with. I see my father, selling the services of his unborn son to a crime lord. I see the face that looks back at me from the mirror each morning, so ordinary you’d never know it belonged to a man whose job is to make other men suffer.
I pull back and punch him in the face. I can feel his nose give way, and he howls in pain, flopping around and trying to hit back. I don’t feel his blows that rain down on my shoulders, my head. I don’t even feel my own fist connecting with the bones in his face. Little Al helps pin him while I hit him again and again and again, until blood splatters the floor and my arms, my hands, my face.
After a while, Little Al pulls me off. “A dead man can’t pay his debt,” he says, a phrase he used on my first job. “We made our point. Let’s go.”
I stand up, stumbling back. Blood drips from my battered fist. My skin is peeled back from my knuckles, already swelling and turning dark beneath the red. Luigi lies motionless in a pool of blood on the floor. Not Anthony. Not the man responsible for my sister’s death. Not my father.
Not me.
“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s go. I have a plane to catch.”
*
As I predicted, our honeymoon is anything but romantic. That’s fine with me. I’d rather be at home working with Little Al than going through with this empty tradition. Still, I try to engage Eliza in conversation a few times, only to have my questions met with resentful silence or hostile glares. Apparently, sex is not the only thing we won’t be having.
I suppose that’s fine, too. I told her she only had to be my wife in public. Conversations aren’t part of that.
Still, it’s hard to spend a week in a room in all-inclusive resort without getting to know someone a little. Despite her sullen attitude toward me, Eliza isn’t unhappy. She participates in the activities at the resort and excursions with excitement. She’s got a big personality that can’t be dampened by my presence. She makes friends with the boatmen, the dive guides, the waitresses.