Shattered Glass(55)
“Cai is my brother. It doesn’t matter that he’s not related by blood,” he huffed. “Same with Darryl. Actually no,” he added. “Cai’s both brother and son, I guess? If you had to label us at all.”
I had a lot more important things to ask. Tons of questions that needed answering. So naturally I picked the one that would abso-fucking-lutely complicate everything. “So you and Darryl…?”
“Sometimes.” Peter nodded. “When we’re lone—”
“I don’t need the details.” My stomach was already moving like a group of otters were playing keep away with it. “Just move on.”
“You asked,” he said hotly.
“And now I’m un-asking.”
“Whatever. Fucking frustrating,” he muttered. Ditto, I thought. “It was weird with Darryl and me at first.” He reached for an apple on the breakfast table, and then somehow expected me to concentrate on his words when he bit into it, causing its juice to glisten on his lips like cheap gloss. Come to think of it, that fucking lip ring was goddamn distracting, too. And he smelled like rain.
“Jesus Fucking Christ. Can you just tell the story?” I lashed out testily and tossed my tea in the sink, replacing it with a beer.
Peter stopped eating, his mouth hanging open in an invitation I didn’t take. He began to chew again, slowly, eyeing me warily. “Okay…”
“You and Darryl and Cai…” I rolled my beer in a ‘move on’ gesture that caused bits of liquid to pop out of the bottle—which only reminded me of how long it had been since I’d gotten laid.
“Look, this isn’t even important, is it? I mean you don’t need to know what happened then, you need to know what happened with Iss.”
“You asked for help and then laid a bombshell on me. I want to know more.” I took a long sip of my beer and watched Peter over the rim of the bottle. Setting my Guinness down, I crossed my arms over my chest. “You’re still assuming I’m going to help. I don’t know that I can, but if I could, why would I? You’re a complete baffling fucking mystery, and you’ve spent every day of our brief history lying to me. Even your name is a lie.”
“I’m Pyotr Nikolaevich Dyachenko, if that’s even the slightest bit important. They call me Petya where I come from. I have Tourette’s. It used to come out as me twitching my nose when I was nervous. I don’t do it so much now. Cai thought it was funny and started calling me bunny—which I changed to Rabbit—for obvious reasons. It was Joe who gave me the last name Cotton to play off of Peter Rabbit and Peter Cottontail. Not really lies. Just…bending things a little. Okay? My name isn’t a lie.”
Pyotr. Peter. Something else caught my attention. “Bending things a little? Telling me that Alvarado didn’t deal more than club party favors?”
“I told you. I did what I had to do. I told him you were interested in me. He threatened Cai if I didn’t lead you off the trail.”
“Threatened him how?”
“The day you came in to question me about him, he said I was to tell you, or do, whatever I had to so you’d back off. Except for the part about him not being ambitious and only dealing weed,” he shrugged, “the rest was true.”
“And he and Joe?”
“Joe wanted to save Iss. Iss didn’t want to be saved. He used Joe and Joe let him. Only time he ever stood up to Iss was when he said to stop hooking up with me.”
I had been right about Alvarado after all. In order to not think about how closely Peter and I resembled Joe and Alvarado, I focused on the other thing that caught my attention. “You’re the son of Nikki the Nail.” I wasn’t clarifying who was who at that point. I was trying to wrap my head around who Peter was asking me to help. I had to have that wrong.
“Yes.”
“The Russian mobster that Cai shot in the head.”
“Yes.”
“Your father?”
“Yes.”
“And you want me to help Cai.”
“Yes,” he breathed with such conviction that my eyes closed, and my breath became a distant memory. “I’m trying to explain it.”
“I’m listening.” Enraptured was a better way to describe what I was—a child at story time, hearing a reading of The Godfather.
“My mom and Cai’s mom were inseparable, even though Rosafa is Muslim and my mom is Catholic. Darryl’s mom was a crack head, and his dad beat the shit out of him. So everyone was always at my house.” He grabbed the beer from my hand and took a pull before I could stop him. I yanked it back, but he appeared unaffected. “The Family started meeting at our house too. There was a lot of talk about a snitch early on before Briansky got arrested.”