Deep (Pagano Family #4)(72)

He slept with her that night, as every night now, dressed in his boxer briefs and a t-shirt, holding her in his arms.





17



Nick stared at his office door as it closed behind the most recent hustler to come to Pagano Brothers Shipping with his hat in hand. The men still standing after Church’s collapse had been lined up for weeks now to pay tribute to the men who’d taken him down.

Though he enjoyed their fearful obeisance, he loathed the idea of sitting down with anyone involved with Church. But wiping out all of his contacts would create another vacuum, and that was what had caused all the trouble in the first place.

When, three years before, the Pagano Brothers had taken personal vengeance on a powerful business associate, they had crossed the careful separation between family and business that Nick’s uncle and father had built up over painstaking years. James Auberon had been as influential as Ben in Rhode Island business and politics, in worlds both legitimate and otherwise. Removing him had caused a seismic shift in both worlds—especially the underworld.

Church had exploited the gap created by that shift. He was crude and without finesse, and it had taken him some time to build up the power and associations he needed to become more than a gnat at Ben’s ear.

Ben himself had given him his first in. When he’d accepted as payment on an old debt the sponsorship of two mixed martial arts fighters—when the fighters had essentially been sold to them—he had brought the Pagano Brothers into an unfamiliar world. Then, he’d learned that that world was corrupt in a way he considered dishonorable. Fights were being fixed as a matter of course, and Ben decided that the Paganos would purge the fight world of that plague.

Nick had advised his uncle and father against taking on the fighters—whose contracts had since been sold away—and he had advised against meddling in the way of that world. Ignoring that advice had been one of Ben’s few missteps in half a century. But it had nearly been enough to bring down everything they’d worked for in that time.

They were out of the fights now. Though Nick had often been frustrated, sometimes infuriated, by his uncle’s stalwart adherence to his old ways, an adherence that had only become more impenetrable after the debacle in the fight world, he had to admit that his uncle’s old ways at least had the potent benefit of balance. And as Nick received tribute from the men who’d survived their alliance with Alvin Church, he saw the balance in action.

The Paganos controlled much of the underworld. Yet they were predominantly legitimate. The shipping company ran about eighty-five percent clean. The myriad clean businesses the Paganos owned in whole or in part all ran at a profit. Sometimes, managers and co-owners needed some persuading, but not often. A few businesses straddled the grey line, laundering unclean money. In the dark of their world, the Paganos stayed on the side of a line Ben had drawn long ago. No drugs. No guns. No human trafficking. They had girls, but they were there by choice, paid well and taken care of. Any associate or client who laid a violent hand on a girl working for the Paganos would be lucky to keep that hand.

Ben would have liked to eradicate drugs, guns, and cheap, abused whores from the landscape completely, but he was pragmatic enough to understand that he could not. Turning back the Zapatas had put a damper on trade, but already that hole was being filled.

But Ben’s way had been to refuse to do business with anyone doing those kinds of business. In order to rise to a true level of power in Rhode Island, legitimate or not, one needed to be on Ben’s list. His edict had had the effect of creating two underworlds, one under the other. Church had risen from those grimy depths.

As Nick met man after anxious man handing over a reparation payment to hold the Paganos at bay, as he turned down every request to sit down with the don, he knew that though this way was balanced, its equilibrium continued fragile. Alvin Church wasn’t the first man who wanted to cast off baggy jeans for tailored suits, and he wouldn’t be the last. Ben’s way kept half the underworld blocked from real power. In time, someone else would fight back against the old ways.

And someday, the men who ran the drugs and the guns and the cheap whores might find that their power lay not in taking the place of the Paganos but in making that place obsolete.

Nick knew he would likely be don when that time came. He’d be ready.



oOo



That afternoon, Chief Lumley made an unexpected visit to the warehouse. Paganos did not go to the police station, not even on social calls. Ben took great pride in the minimal incidence of arrests within the organization, and he didn’t want a Pagano or associate to be seen even crossing the threshold of the station.

Nick had been pinched twice, years ago, and his cousin Luca had landed in a holding cell a couple of years back—all events had occurred when new staff were on duty and not yet learned in the way of things in Quiet Cove. Nick, having been young and too careless at the time of both incidents, had called Fred and been released both times without even being processed. Luca, the idiot, had not seen fit to contact the other side of the family, and, once they’d learned of the incident, they’d had to do some backtracking to get him out of the system.

But if Irv was visiting the warehouse—and unscheduled at that—he was not making a social call. So something was up. As Nick stood and shook the chief’s hand, he tried not to sigh.

“Have a seat, Irv.”