“You know a lot about this. What were you back then, like seven or eight?”
“Ten, when my dad started grooming me. Eleven, when the organization went to shit.” He gazed at my beer. “Can I have one of those?”
“Did you turn twenty-one in the last week?" For spite, I took a long drink. Peter rolled his eyes.
“Darryl—”
“Real name?”
“Daniel,” Peter answered. “Daniel Corozzo. Son of Tony Corozzo.” He twitched a smile. “Tony the Pipe. Lowest of the low in The Family. And probably the only one not in jail or dead by now.”
I rubbed my temple trying to process the information. “Interesting combination: Nikki the Nail’s son, Kaja Strakosha’s and Tony the Pipe’s?”
“Catholic and Muslim. Albanian and Russian. Very weird. But we were more than friends. We were all family.” Peter nodded. “Darryl—Danny, I mean—was like a pariah. He wore pink shirts and painted his eyes with glitter. Sometimes he curled his hair in ringlets. You can imagine how that went over with the Family.” I didn’t stop him when he retrieved a beer. It seemed to me that Nikki the Nail’s son earned at least the right to one beer. “He was older but so fragile. One day I let him paint my toe nails pink, and that was it for him. We were bonded for life.” He laughed. “And Cai by proxy.”
“Why did Cai kill Nikki?”
“To get that, you have to know how things went to shit and how we three kids were involved,” he explained. “My dad and Kaja mostly did enforcement. Things that had me puking when I got home. Darryl and Cai just sat with me while I…well, I didn’t even have to tell them. They just knew. And Cai, he’s four years younger than me, nearly six years younger than Darryl, but he’s smarter than us and the combined IQ of the whole household, ya know? So when things started to fall apart in the organization, the three of us knew the score.”
I jerked a nod for him to continue when he squinted at me. My detachment was all pretense. I didn’t relate or understand. How could I grasp a ten-year-old being primed as an assassin or “enforcer”.
“Anyhow, my dad was a good guy outside of all that. Which sounds weird, but he was. To all of us. Even Darryl. Which is why we never suspected he’d hurt Kaja or Cai.”
He took a sip of his beer and set his jaw tight. I wanted to reach out to him but there was this canyon of distrust between us. While he continued to dwell on past memories, I waited, picking the label off my beer with a thumbnail and watching the shadows of his past relived in his face: a frown, a tremble of his jaw, a hard swallow.
“Months after my grooming started, Briansky gets arrested, along with most of the high-level men. Fingers get pointed, and everyone blames Kaja—the Muslim Albanian. He’s not Russian—not one of us. There’s a split between my dad and Cai’s, everyone sure that Cai’s dad snitched on Briansky. My dad gets put in charge. And Cai gets a permanent place in our home. As a ‘guest’.”
“Why wasn’t Kaja in protective custody?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“He wasn’t the informant,” I said.
“Nope. But my dad had me shoot him anyway.”
Jesus. “So, you killed Cai’s father, and he killed yours.”
He chewed his lip so hard, I half expected blood to dribble out. He bowed his head and settled his eyes somewhere off in the corner. “My hands shook too badly. I shot Kaja—Uncle Kaja,” Peter emphasized with a chatter of teeth that wasn’t, I knew, a result of the rain and my A/C. “I hit him in the knee. Which was funny to everyone in the room. Big joke. Ha, ha. ‘Your son needs practice, Nikki’, and, ’He needs a smaller gun’. They ruffled my fucking hair, like it was so cute I missed. While Uncle Kaja is screaming and crying through a gag.”
The shuddering breath Peter took at this point tugged my heart hard enough to pull me to him, wrapping my arms around his waist. Turned out he wasn’t as affectionate as I. He pushed me away.
“You want to hear this or not?” Peter glared. I stepped back, hands raised. “I had to tell Cai this story, and it was a lot fucking harder to do that. I’ll manage, okay?”
“Okay,” I acquiesced, estimating how brutal he really was. Impenetrable? Or was there something inherently good about him? How did someone come back from that with any kind of empathy for the world?
He set his beer down. “Three nights later I find Cai sitting on the sofa, gun in his lap and my father in his favorite lounger, a bullet through his brain. I remember the playoffs on the TV so clearly. My dad’s team—the Dolphins vs. the Ravens. Dolphins were losing. Why isn’t dad yelling? Oh, might be that missing part of his head and face…”