DAVOR “SMITT” SCHMIDT
“Do you want to die? Because it seems like you really want to die.”
“Go to hell, Smitt,” Marco growled at me from a leather club chair in the corner of my office.
I’d been waiting for that. The last I’m a tough guy moment before he caved like a crying baby. Happened every time. In fact, it was so predictable it was boring.
Maybe I needed a new job.
But not today.
I ignored my business partner Leo, his itchy fingers my only distraction from the tense moment, where he was running his rough hands back and forth—scrape-scrape-scrape—over the expensive wool of his bespoke trousers. I knew what his itchy fingers meant.
That’s how it was when you’d known someone all your life.
His identical twin brother, Luca, was a different story. Quiet, contemplative, never giving anything away until boom—the jig was up for whatever poor bastard was on the receiving end of his quiet rage. Luca sat in another corner of my office, motionless, expressionless, and nearly lifeless—the polar opposite of a brother he looked so much like that even their mother had a hard time telling them apart.
Either way, they were both badass killers.
Like me.
But only of the deserving. Of course.
I leaned toward Marco, who, aside from his confrontational words, was as relaxed as if he were ordering bottle service at some private Vegas nightclub. Smugness was his fatal flaw, and it oozed out of him as he sat with his legs crossed and an arm draped over the back of his chair.
So Luca and Leo stood and with crossed arms, approached him. They were too tense to do anything else.
I would be, too, if my dad had disappeared one night when I was young, leaving me to spend the rest of my life tortured by thoughts of what had become of him.
Closure. People talk about it for a reason.
And right now, the smug fuck spreading out on my expensive chair could provide just that.
Something Leo and Luca had been waiting for half their lives.
Marco glanced toward my office door, most likely wondering why we hadn’t tied him up or otherwise restrained him. That was how he did business, and I had half a mind to tell him that was the old way of doing things. Those of us working in the Vegas organized syndicate did things differently than in the days of the generation before us. Put simply, if Marco ran for the door or reached for his firearm, we’d shoot him dead.
Lights out for old Marco.
The downside was that the story of what had happened to Federico Borroni, father to Luca and Leo, would die with him.
And Marco knew that.
The bastard knew he had information that Luca and Leo—and I, if you wanted to be honest—would give our right hands for.
So Marco’s knowledge was a valuable currency. Unfortunately, he wasn’t feeling too generous.
“You bastards should have thought twice before murdering my father,” he spat. “He was good to you. The man took you under his wing, brought you up in the business after your own dad… took off.”
Luca took a long, slow, breath. “I’m sorry, Marco, but your father got what he deserved.”
From my window, I watched a descending plane head for McCarran International Airport, with several others circling in the sky just behind it, waiting their turn at the runway. They just kept coming—the gamblers, the conventioneers, the partiers, and the dreamers.
There was something for everyone in the cacophony that was Vegas.
But I’d grown up there alongside the twin brothers. I knew only too well that what Vegas giveth, it taketh back just as goddamn fast.
Without mercy.
It was like a two-faced friend, always smiling on the surface but ready to steal your soul the moment you let your guard down. I supposed that’s why most people only came for a few days and then got the fuck out.
Have you ever heard of someone going to Vegas for a two-week long vacation?
Neither have I.
It was tolerable for only so long.
Like Marco. We’d been patient with him, but if he didn’t talk, his brief life would be coming to an unceremonious conclusion.
And he knew it. For all his bluster and cocky demeanor, in my periphery I saw the twitch of his forefinger. It was subtle, and I might not have noticed if he weren’t trying so hard to look cool. He knew he was poking a tiger. And he was worried.
As he should have been.
“Don’t you think it’s been long enough, that we’ve been wondering if our father was dead or alive?” Leo demanded.
Apparently, Marco wasn’t worried about digging himself in deeper.
“If you two weren’t such losers, and your mom such a slut, he might not have bailed on you to begin with.” He dropped his head back on the sofa and laughed.
Yeah, this guy wasn’t going to be around much longer.
Leo started to lunge forward, but Luca pulled him back. They knew to let me do my job.
I glanced out the window at another goddamn plane landing. They just never stopped. Irritated, I gripped the arms of my chair.
For the first time, I realized we might never know what happened to Federico “Fred” Borroni. I had no doubt Luca and Leo were thinking the same thing.
I’d grown up in a shithole of a family situation, and Mr. Borroni had taken me in at the appeal of his sons, treating me like one of his own. And like the idiot kid I was, I’d dropped out of high school against his advice—it just wasn’t for me—and he kindly gave me a job at one of his pawn shops. After a few months of mooching off my adoptive family—staying at their place was like vacationing at a fucking resort—my pride got the better of me and I took the little apartment over the shop where I worked. It was a dump, but it was mine, and I didn’t have to feel like I was taking advantage of the only people who’d ever been kind to me.
The last time I’d seen him, Mr. Borroni stopped by the pawn shop to collect the day’s cash receipts. He thanked me for doing a good job and went on his way. I remember watching him back his Mercedes out of his parking spot and drive away, thinking how lucky I was to benefit from his largesse.
Seriously. Who knew what the fuck would have happened to me if the Borronis hadn’t stepped up.
I finished my day at the pawnshop, put the valuables in the safe, and locked up. I went upstairs to my apartment to eat leftover Chinese and watch porn before I went to bed and then got up the next day to do exactly the same thing.
It might not sound like much, but I felt like I’d won the fucking lottery. I’d never been happier.
That next day, Luca screeched into the parking lot in the massive pickup truck he drove.
“Smitt, have you seen my father?” he asked breathlessly.
“What? No. I mean, he stopped by late yesterday for the deposit. What’s going on?”
Luca looked around the shop with its odd mishmash of shit that people either no longer wanted or at least had been willing to part with long enough in the hopes of winning a big jackpot to buy it back.
“He didn’t come home last night.”
And thus was the beginning of a new phase of our lives.
“Marco, I'm gonna ask you one more time. What do you know about the disappearance of Federico Borroni? We know your father was behind it.”
How long did this prick think he could fuck with us—
Something wet hit my face. I looked up at the ceiling to see if there was a leak. But our penthouse suite in Vegas’s most luxurious high-rise office building didn’t leak.
Marco had spit.
Bad move, my man.
Before the brothers could stop me—not that they would—I lunged at him, cracking him in the cheek with the butt end of my gun. I could have gone for his temple and taken him out, but I preferred delivering the lingering discomfort of several broken teeth and a dislocated jaw.
I could be a fucker that way.
I pulled out a hankie with my initials on it—DS—and wiped myself.
Tears ran down Marco’s face from the pain as he cradled his jaw.
“Marco, I’ll tell you what. The Borronis and I will step out of the office for a few minutes. We’ll give you some time to think while we have a little chat about what it might look like, instead of taking you out, to kill your pretty wife and maybe even your lovely children.”
His eyes widened in horror. Finally, a reaction.
Well, aside from the excruciating pain he displayed.
We closed the office door behind us.
“Coffee?” our receptionist asked brightly.
The peaceful sanity she brought was the epitome of irony, given how I’d just beaten the shit out of someone.
“That’d be great, Heather. Can you bring it to us?” Leo asked, leading the way to his own corner office.
I settled into one of Leo’s chairs, his office nearly identical to mine.
“I hope you weren’t serious about taking out Marco’s family, Smitt,” Luca said. “You know we don’t do shit like that.”
Nico and Dom, our other two business partners, joined us.
“Don’t do shit like what?” Dom asked, helping himself to a seat.
I sighed. “I threatened Marco’s family to see if we could shake some info out of him. And no, we’d never involve family members. But he doesn’t know that,” I said.
Nico poured himself some of Leo’s scotch.
“Well, his father didn’t hesitate to take out Mrs. Borroni when it suited him, so if you ask me, all bets are off,” Dom said.
He had a point. Marco’s father, the duplicitous Sal Matteo, had murdered Luca and Leo’s mother, and we were pretty sure he was responsible for their father, as well. It was hard to live by the syndicate’s rules when shit like that happened.
Heather appeared in my doorway.
“Um, gentlemen, I just heard a funny sound coming from your office. You might want to make sure your guest is okay.”
She was so goddamn diplomatic.
I ran to my office, pressing a ear to the door.
Silence.
“Heather, bring up my office on your cameras.”
With a couple clicks of her keyboard, she presented a grainy black and white view of each of our offices.
“Zoom in on mine.”
I wasn’t interested in walking into a trap, should Marco think something like that would get him out alive.
But there was nothing. My office was not only undisturbed, but there was no sign of Marco.
“What the…?” I said.
Drawing my gun, the guys behind me did the same. Heather made herself scarce as we trained our weapons on the door. In one violent movement, I flung it open, only to find it hindered by some sort of weight.
The next thing I noticed, in a quick scan of the room, was that one of my office chairs was missing. But when I pushed the door open further, I knew why.
Marco had secured his belt to the top of the wood door frame.
And placed it around his neck. The chair was just under him, having been used as a sort of step stool.
Marco was dead.
* * *
