"It's possible," he said in a guarded voice.
"But not likely," I said, interpreting his tone.
"Not likely. So you want answers."
"Yes."
Paine looked away for a long minute, staring out my front window before he turned back. "I can get you answers."
"How?" I asked, thinking he was going to start bashing heads together until he got them.
"Babygirl, I used to run the Third Street gang," he admitted in an empty voice. And damn if it was the absolute last thing I had expected him to say. I would have been more accepting of him telling me he was an alien from Mars who spent his free time training poodles to dance while he dressed in women's clothing.
"I'm sorry... what?"
"That gang... I ran it for years. And the man who is in charge now? He's my brother."
"Brother?" I repeated dumbly. "You said you had sisters," I said, knowing my face was a mask of confusion.
"I do. And we're tight. I also have a half brother. Same father, different mother. His name is Enzo and he is in charge of Third street and the drugs and the whores."
I flinched inwardly at that word, but was too preoccupied trying to reconcile the image of Paine, the drug and whore lord, and the Paine I thought I was beginning to get to know, the one who saved a girl off the street and asked for nothing in return, who loved his sisters, who kissed like no one I had ever come across before, who was willing to be an ear when I needed one and get rid of illicit drugs I had no business having in the first place.
"Are you and Enzo... close?"
To that, Paine let out a humorless snort and shook his head.
"No."EightPaineIf you looked into me, if you pulled up my records, I was as clean as the fresh fallen fucking snow. No arrests, no holds for questioning, not even a damn parking ticket.
That being said, looks could be deceiving.
I grew up in the ghetto with a mom who had enough of the lying, cheating, drug-addicted shithead who sired me and my sisters. I distinctly remember a few days after my fifth birthday walking out into the hall with my mother, one sister on her hip, the other in a cheap umbrella stroller, and almost walking right into a kid who could have been my twin. Tall for his age, solid, same color skin, same color eyes. The baby bag my mother had been trying to get onto her shoulder fell to the ground and the contents flew across the dirty hall as she looked down at the little boy with understanding, then at the kid's mother with horror.
"That mother fucker," the other mother said, shaking her head. I remembered Annie as being too upper class to live in the crummy apartment building. I don't know where my young mind got the idea. Maybe it was her clothes that seemed nicer than my mom's and my aunts'. Maybe it was the way her short cap of blond hair was always perfectly styled and shiny. Something about her screamed 'money' to me. "He's five?" she asked my mother who gave me a tight smile.
"Yep."
"Wow," Annie said.
"Yeah," my mother agreed, shaking her head.
From that day on, those two were as tight as two women could be. I guess it came from sharing a lying, cheating, drug-addicted shithead unwittingly then both dumping him and trying to move on with their lives. Annie, I would learn later, had just divorced from her husband, the couple being an upper-middle-class childless family who just couldn't make it work. She had a nice apartment in a nicer town where she met my father who had been working at a repair shop she brought her car into for a tune up. The rest, as they say, was history. He saw dollar signs; he latched on; he pulled at her heartstrings and sucked her dry. She wisened up and kicked his sorry ass to the curb and about three weeks later found out she was pregnant. So fast forward to her working two jobs to support a kid in a roach-infested apartment.
Because our mothers got tight, Enzo and I became brothers in all the ways that counted. We walked to and from school with each other, we had each other's and my sisters' backs. We raised hell together. We chased girls together when we were old enough.
And, being so close, we grew into similar young men: driven, ambitious, wanting nothing more than to rise up out of our shit beginnings. Living in the slums, that meant one of two things: you got good at a sport and got a college scholarship the hell out of there, or you sought a way to run the streets. Enzo could shoot hoops, but busted a kneecap his senior year, killing his chances of any kind of sports career.