Mallicks: Back to the Beginning (Mallick Brothers 5)

I'd never worked a concession stand, but I was pretty sure that if I screwed up on the job, the boss would just scold me or fire me.

In my line of work, the boss might kill me.

Literally.

I had been dodging potential bullets, knife wounds, and strangulation over five years across two states.

I'd tried to align myself with four different bosses, hoping for a little job security, a way to breathe.

The last one, I thought that was a keeper.

Working the docks was long days in all kinds of weather, making sure no one stole or skimmed the products that needed to be carted off to the organizations that paid not only for the product and crew but a hefty dock fee to ensure it all made it where it was meant to.

That was my job.

Enforcing those standards.

Enforcing was what I had been doing since I was eighteen.

The jobs varied, the cities, the men I answered to, but inevitably, it all boiled down to people bleeding at my hands.

It was an ugly job, one I didn't enjoy like some of my colleagues who got off on screams of pain, on the begging, on the red blood caked under their nails.

I'd never been a sadist.

I was a realist, plain and simple.

I didn't have any special education aside from my high school diploma that I had just barely been able to finish while crashing in the spare bedroom of a distant aunt.

She'd cast me out the day I graduated with just fifty bucks in my pocket from a job I had worked for her neighbor helping fix up his kitchen, and the car my father left me when he'd died the year before.

It wasn't much, but it was enough.

The car meant I had somewhere to sleep.

The fifty bucks meant I had gas money to drive me out of that town, and to somewhere that might hire me.

I'd ended up in the city first, getting a job bussing tables at a Russian restaurant, the air always thick with cigar smoke, the carpet always reeking of vodka even after getting them cleaned each week.

Nothing interesting happened the first month.

But then I caught the kid of one of the owner's getting his ass handed to him in the alley behind the restaurant, stepped in, and beat the shit out of the attacker.

It was the next morning that I figured out the men who owned the place weren't just businessmen.

No.

They were the Bratva.

And I had saved their son from a threat on his life by the Italians who had owned the city for decades.

I never bussed a table again.

I was given a suit, a gun, and a job that paid five times as much.

Sure, it meant I had to get good at getting bloodstains out of many different types of fabrics, but it gave me some cash in my wallet, some stability after years of uncertainty following my father's sudden death.

I'd been there six months when the place got shot up when I was on a different job.

I'd driven by, seeing body bags, and hauled my ass right back out of the city, knowing I was too closely connected with the Russians to come out unscathed if the Italians came looking.

I crossed over into Jersey, heading north first, getting a short-lived job chasing down players who tried to stiff the owner of an underground poker game before he got locked up on a drug charge.

I'd gotten another gig in AC. But the jobs were too sporadic, the pay too measly.

I went north again then, ending up in Navesink Bank, working the docks.

It was a solid job, one that involved less bloodshed than the past few.

And then the inevitable happened.

The mob moved in.

The gig was too good to pass up on, the import/export business. The fees you could charge all the other organizations who wanted to bring in product.

They were a tight-knit group, the Cosa Nostra, wary of outsiders, usually cleaning house when they moved in.

This guy - Grassi, he was called - was no older than me, dressed in a suit which cost more than my car, walking around the docks like he owned the place. Because he did.

He kept most of us for a while, letting things run the way they always had as he made connections, as he greased palms in the NBPD, as he figured out how we operated things.

He bought the old, run-down seafood restaurant in town, talking grand plans to turn it into some ritzy Italian place someday.

And then, just when everyone was starting to get comfortable with the idea of getting to keep our jobs, the firing started. I'd say layoffs, but layoffs implied severance packages, or at the very least, the chance to collect unemployment. But none of us were technically employed, so we were all just out on our asses.

"Most of those schmucks don't have two braincells to rub together," Grassi told me after canning me. "But you, you I think could be something."