An Offer You Can't Refuse by Sal Bianchi (best beach reads .txt) 📕

to follow him, but I still had to finish this interrogation. I’d have to wait to check on him until later.

“Who was the woman who killed Alexis Rothschild?” I asked. Out of everything else, this was the more pressing piece of information we still needed.

“Oh, her?” Lorenzo muttered. “What was her name… Oh, right. Hannah Styles. She was the one assigned to kill that senator. Completely screwed it up too. She got caught by the client’s son.”

“You mean Josh Rothschild?” I clarified. “You weren’t worried that he’d say something and sink your entire operation?”

“Of course I was,” Lorenzo scoffed. “Stupid girl. She had one job to do, and she couldn’t manage it. She even had a key and the security code for the front door. She called me crying in the middle of the night, whining about how the little boy had seen her. I asked her what she did about it, and she said she just left him there! Can you believe that?”

“What were you expecting her to do?” I glowered at him.

“Whatever she had to in order to make sure she didn’t go down and drag the rest of us with her,” Lorenzo spat. “I told her she should go back and get rid of the kid too.”

“Get rid of--” I gasped. “You told her she should kill a kid? Are you insane?”

Lorenzo leveled a dismissive glare at Jase before responding.

“What’s insane,” he smirked, “is bludgeoning someone to death and then leaving behind a witness. It’s nothing personal to the kid. It’s just business.”

“You’re a monster,” I sneered at him, unable to hide the revulsion I felt.

“I’m a businessman,” he retorted. “You’ll never make it anywhere in life if you aren’t willing to get your hands dirty. Take that little moron, Hannah. She started whining about how there was no way she was going to kill some little baby boy.”

He pitched his voice up as he mocked Hannah’s words, and I had to clench my jaw to maintain my composure.

“So what did happen?” I asked as calmly as I could manage.

“I called Ryan to let him know that his kid had seen it all go down,” Lorenzo responded. “In the end, I decided that it might not be a good idea to kill the kid after all. Ryan might have squealed to the police then. He wanted to talk to Hannah about what exactly his son had seen. Normally, I wouldn’t have allowed two different clients to interact like that, but I needed to get this under control fast, so I asked them both to come and see me that same night.”

“How did Ryan react when he heard you wanted to kill off his son?” I asked.

“He was outraged, of course,” Lorenzo replied calmly, as though he was completely unaffected by the topic of killing a kindergartener. “It’s not like he could do much, though. If he talked, he’d be exposing his own part in his ex-wife’s death. I told them both to just keep their mouths shut and lie low.”

He grimaced and shook his head before continuing.

“I should have just killed them both right then. It would have saved me a lot of trouble.”

My blood ran cold at the casual way he spoke about taking people’s lives, even an innocent child’s. Then again, he had taken a little boy hostage during his confrontation with Nick at the motel, so maybe I shouldn’t have been all that shocked.

“Who did Hannah want killed?” I asked, getting back to the main point of my question.

“Her own mom,” Lorenzo grunted. “Pretty cold-blooded, but you’d be surprised how many people take hits out on their own family.”

“Do you remember the mother’s address?” I pressed him.

“Yeah.” Lorenzo nodded. “I can’t remember the number off the top of my head, but I remember the street.”

“Write it down,” I commanded as I pulled a small notepad from my work bag and slammed it on the table in front of him. He took the pen tucked into the notepad’s rings and wrote down the woman’s name and the parts of the address that he could remember. I was certain that Stein could figure out her exact address in no time.

“There you go,” he grunted as he pushed the pen and notepad back toward me. “The guy assigned to kill her is Emmet Mayfield. I dunno if he’s done it yet.”

I took the pen and notepad back and hastily left the room. It had been several days already since Alexis Rothschild was killed, so it was certainly possible that Mayfield may have already carried out the hit on her mother. We didn’t have any time to waste in trying to find her before she was killed.

38

Nick

My mind was reeling as I sat on one of the overstuffed chairs in the SDCT break room. I wasn’t under any illusions that my brother didn’t do bad things. He was a mafia boss, after all. It was a given that he would be involved in crime. I’d made the conscious effort to just not think about it without even realizing it. Everything had come crashing to the surface with Lorenzo’s words, though.

It was hard for me to accept that Alessandro had not only been aware of what was going on but actively profiting off of it. In hindsight, it made more sense now why he and Franco had made such a strong effort to get me to stop investigating. I still sometimes thought of Alessandro as the twelve-year-old boy who’d once assaulted a cop in order to defend me when the two of us were on our own, but it was time to face reality. We weren’t kids anymore, and it seemed that Alessandro had turned into someone I didn’t even recognize anymore.

I got back up and stretched. I felt a little embarrassed at how I’d just bolted from the interrogation room. I could tell I was just a few seconds away from losing my temper, though, and I thought it would be better to just leave before