I nodded. “I will, I promise,” I told her.
“Good, now won’t you please join me on a walk around the city? I’m not quite ready to head back home yet.” “You aren’t expected back or anything?” I asked
Luisa threw her head back and laughed.
“One thing you’ll come to find is that the Martine men might think they’re in charge, but really it’s the women standing behind them that are. Antony and Romeo? They’d flounder without me. I come and go as I please,” she said.
“Then I think a walk around the city would be nice,” I said.
CHAPTER 17
ROMEO
I knocked on Vincent’s door and waited for him to answer. I needed advice, and I needed it from someone outside of the family. Vinny had been my father’s right-hand man up until he left the business two years before my father died. He said he got tired of looking over his shoulder all the time and wanted to live his life with the money he’d saved from the dirty work he’d done over the years. He’d made guarantees that nothing he knew would ever leave his lips. Not that he’d needed to make those assurances; one of the people he’d hurt the most by talking to anyone was himself. Vinny and I were close. He was like an uncle to me.
And I needed his advice.
“Romeo. What the hell are you doing on your feet?” he asked as he opened the door.
“I found a baby monitor underneath my bed,” I said.
“Sounds like the handiwork of your mother. Did she put Antony on your tail?”
“It wouldn’t shock me. I turned on some music in my room and left it at that. Antony’s probably still playing on his phone like he was when I passed right by the damn car.”
Vinny chuckled as he led me into the house.
“Make yourself at home,” he said.
“I need your advice.”
“I figured that was why you were here,” he said.
“How much do you know about the break-in at my place?”
“I knew you were hurt, but that’s about it. What’s on your mind?”
“I’m close with a cop on the force, and he was there checking out the house,” I said. “He told me that a detective working the case is trying to tie me to those guys that ended up dead on the docks.”
“Uh-huh. And you had nothing to do with that, right?” he asked.
He sighed when I shot him a look.
“I have to admit, you covered it up well,” he said. “I saw it in the paper. Nothing about it screamed ‘Martine.’”
“It isn’t what you think,” I said. “I told them I didn’t want the guns, and they held the family over my head. Said I would pay for the guns, take them, and then keep them in mind for the next shipment that I was going to order.”
Vinny snorted and shook his head.
“I tried talking my way out of it. I even brought a check for twenty thousand to pay them for their troubles and what the boat probably cost them to ship the product. They would’ve had no issue unloading those guns to anyone else for twice the price they were asking.”
“Then it sounds like they backed you into a corner,” he said.
“But when the police started looking around the house, nothing was missing.”
“So it wasn’t a burglary.”
“It doesn’t look like it. I’ve walked that house four times. Checked every safe and turned over every rock. Nothing is missing.”