The Slayer (Untamed Hearts #2)(80)

“You’re a friend of mine,” Tino said as if that alone made it okay. “Nova wouldn’t sink you. Besides, look at where we are.” He held out his hands to the empty gym, because the two of them were working out alone after hours. “Not even the Feds are gonna show up here. I have swept this gym for bugs six times. Nothing. I’ve never been in a place that I didn’t find a bug. It’s like the wastelands for washed-up gangsters.”

“What does sinking mean?” Chuito asked curiously, though he knew he shouldn’t.

“You sink them.” Tino pointed to the ground. “In the water. Concrete.”

“You f*ckers actually do that?” Chuito was shocked. “I thought that was a myth.”

“You wanna stroke out my brother, give him a bloody body to hide. Everything’s gotta be neat with him. Who’s gonna find them at the bottom of the friggin’ ocean?”

“Do you kill them first?”

“Why would we do that? Then you gotta clean it up. I don’t want their DNA all over the place,” Tino said as if it was obvious. “What did you do with the bodies?”

Chuito shrugged. “I just left them there.”

“You didn’t worry about going down for it? You didn’t use chemicals? Nothing? Chemicals will eat a body faster than the ocean will, and you motherf*ckers have the Everglades in Miami. All those f*cking gators. A lotta dead liabilities have been buried in the Everglades.”

“The cops don’t give a shit about another dead gangbanger,” Chuito said with a bitter laugh. “Sell some blow to a few gringos, and you’ll go down for ten years, but they could give a f*ck if we’re taking each other out.”

“Huh?” Tino said as he looked ahead. “What about their crew finding them?”

“Fuck them. Let them come find me.” Chuito snorted. “I wanted them to come find me. It’d give me something to do.”

“Did they find you?”

“At first.”

Tino smirked. “And then what happened?”

“They stopped finding me.” Chuito looked around the empty gym. It really was a wasteland for washed-up gangsters. “Now here I am.”

“You sent a message,” Tino said as if it explained everything. “Old-school. Messages work. They keep motherf*ckers in line. My people learned that a long time ago. How’d you kill them?”

Chuito shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

“I sorta want to know,” Tino argued. “It had to be a pretty strong message if they stopped retaliating.”

“Mostly with my bare hands. I wanted to feel them die,” Chuito admitted as he stared past Tino’s shoulder and remembered it. “They killed my brother, man. He was thirteen. My Tía Camila was the nicest woman you ever met in your life. I lived with her since the day I was born. She was like a second mother to me. I stretched that shit out as long as possible, and then I made sure they weren’t recognizable anymore. That’s how I wanted their crew to find them, with their teeth all over the f*cking pavement.”

“That’s a helluva message.” Tino stared at him for a long moment. “That’s sorta f*cked-up.”

Chuito gave him a look. “And sinking motherf*ckers in the ocean isn’t?”

“I didn’t want to sink him. I gave him a lotta opportunities. Seriously, my brother hates when problems turn into bodies. He tries really hard to avoid that shit.”

“How diplomatic,” Chuito snorted and then pointed out, “he’s still at the bottom of the ocean. Those gangbangers killed my family. They shot at a house they knew had women and children in it. What’s your f*cking excuse, Moretti? Money.”

“I didn’t put out the hit. The old man did that shit.”

“You just carried it out?”

“Yeah.” Tino nodded. “It’s not my fault he screwed the old man. Anyone knows that’s bad for your health.”

“How easy is it for you to believe that off the blow?” Chuito asked curiously.

Tino sighed as he wiped a hand over his face. “I never wanted any part of Cosa Nostra. It just—” He paused as if having a bad memory. “It just turned out like that.”

“What’s Cosa Nostra?” Chuito asked, because he’d heard Tino refer to it before.

Tino gestured to himself. “It’s our thing.”

“Do you like your thing?” Chuito asked, because he got mixed messages from Tino all the f*cking time.

“I’d like it if Nova was running it, but he’s still gotta answer to the old man. Nova has this theory that the underworld, organized crime, it’s all unavoidable. It’ll always be there. The key is to do it as efficiently as possible. Like, if it has to be there, you should have a motherf*cker with class and real intelligence pulling the strings. I like that idea. I think life in general would be better if Nova were running the underworld.”

“What happens when your grandfather bites it?”

“I dunno.” Tino was quiet for a long time but then shook his head. “I suppose shit will get interesting. There’s a lotta motherf*ckers who don’t want my brother in charge. My father included.”

“Why?”

Tino laughed. “Let’s just say my brother’s got a list of people he’s pissed off at, and my father is at the top. I mean, I don’t love my grandfather. I’ve had to kill a lotta motherf*ckers ’cause of the old man’s bad deals, but my father, Madonn’, I hate that *. He really f*cked us over when we were young. He’s still f*cking us over.”