An Offer You Can't Refuse, Sal Bianchi [free ebook reader .TXT] 📗

me around with stars in his eyes, and he’d secretly been supportive of me when I’d left the Family. He was a good kid, and he was also the one who supplied me with some of the things I used during my investigations, like my lock-picking set and my frequency jammer.

“He’s working at the garage down by the marina.” She smiled proudly. “My boy’s got skills like no other. He’s always tinkering around and coming up with new ways to do things.”

“Yeah, he was always good at that.” I grinned. It was the truth, after all.

“All right,” Colletta sighed. “I can see that you’re busy. Go on and get to work, then. And don’t forget to put those in the freezer!”

“Got it,” I called over my shoulder as I turned around to step off the barstool.

I left the bar with my load of goods. I felt immediately less anxious upon walking through the doors and back out into the humid Miami heat. The atmosphere inside the bar had been so tense it was nearly suffocating. It was sad to think back and remember how loving and warm the place had once seemed. When I was young, I hadn’t seen them as a mafia family, just my family. Even brutes like Domenico were kind and protective of me. It was jarring how everything changed so fast and so dramatically once I became an outsider.

I shook the thought away and walked down the street. That life was behind me now, and I needed to focus on building something better for myself.

5

Nick

I stepped into my apartment and flipped on the light switch before kicking the door closed behind me. It wasn’t an impressive place by any means, just a small ground-floor studio, but it suited my needs just fine.

I walked the few steps over to the kitchenette tucked into the corner of the apartment and opened my fridge door. A half-empty case of beer and an assortment of condiments stared back at me. I was out so often that I tended to just eat out while I was on the job. Honestly, I preferred that anyway. I could manage cooking for myself just fine, but there was such a wide selection of options available in Miami that I could have eaten out every day for a week without having the same thing twice.

Still, I was grateful for the meals Colletta had prepared for me. Sometimes it was nice being able to come home and sit down with a nice home-cooked meal.

After I’d finished putting all the containers away, I walked over to my bedroom to grab a fresh set of clothes. After walking home in the hot sun wearing the same clothes I’d had on since yesterday, I was eager to have a shower and get cleaned up.

Once I finished washing up, I changed into a clean t-shirt and a pair of jeans. I tended to dress more professionally when I consulted on a case with the SDCT, but when I was just working on my own cases, I preferred to keep it casual. It was more comfortable, and it helped me blend in and maintain a lower profile, which was imperative when one of my main tasks was to follow people around covertly.

I plopped onto my couch to check my phone for any new emails or missed calls. I frowned with dismay when I discovered that I had zero of either.

After leaving the mafia, I’d opened up a private investigation agency. Unfortunately, business was painfully slow. I was lucky to get a single new client per week, and I wasn’t established enough to charge more than the bare minimum. It definitely didn’t help that certain members of the Family were actively working to sabotage me.

I didn’t have any concrete evidence that it was the mafia, but several weeks ago, negative reviews for my business started popping up all over every major business review site on the internet. I’d been shocked at the time, since I hadn’t even had that many clients. It quickly became obvious that this was most likely just another ploy to get me to fold and come back.

I had a small office in an industrial park near Downtown where I would meet clients when I was fortunate enough to get them, but lately, it seemed like I was going there less and less.

In a way, it was lucky that I lived near the coast in Hallendale Beach, because it meant I could make money via gambling. There weren’t a lot of casinos in Miami, but the massive one in Hallendale Beach was big enough that I could easily finesse a few hundred a night out of the endless stream of tourists that frequented it. It wasn’t the most stable means of making a living, but I was good enough at reading people that I could usually make enough to pay the month’s rent after a few rounds of poker.

After double-checking one more time for any new messages, I decided to just focus on the two clients I already had.

One was suspected infidelity, which was, unfortunately, one of the most common reasons clients hired me. The other was a young woman who was attempting to find her birth mother. Apparently, the mother had gotten pregnant as a teenager and had the baby taken away against her will. The client didn’t have any details aside from this.

I frowned sadly as I read through the facts of the case again. I could sympathize all too well with how the young woman was feeling. I’d lost my mother when I was very young, and even though I’d had Colletta, there was just no filling the void that such a loss left behind, even now.

Since I didn’t have a lot to go on yet for that case, I decided to focus on the infidelity case instead. The woman who contacted me suspected her husband was cheating when he started staying late after work and would conveniently “forget” his phone in his car when