Free Men of Mayhem by Anthology Page B

about this?” I asked, holding up the plastic bag filled with white powder.
    He rubbed his hands up and down his thighs. “Somebody gave it to me at the club. I wasn’t going to touch it.”
    I threw the bag at his face. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.” He glanced at me, then looked away. His eyes were red and dilated. “You’re a soldier. You’re a member of this family, and you’re walking around high as a fucking kite. People see you shoving drugs up your nose. You’re making a fool of yourself, and you’re making the family look incompetent.”
    “I’m not,” he said, shaking his head back and forth.
    “So you’re telling me if I had you pee in a cup, it’d come back clean?”
    “Fuck you.” He jumped to his feet, and the chair fell backward, clacking against the floor. Contempt slithered across his face. “What I do in my free time is none of your business. If I want to do a few lines or get drunk, I’ll do it. The family doesn’t own me. You don’t own me and Dominick sure as hell doesn’t own me.”
    Before I could even reach for my gun, Tony Red had his out. I held up my hand to stop him, but he didn’t even glance in my direction before he shot him.
    Tommy’s body tumbled to the ground with a large thud. His head bounced on the floor like a ball. Blood stained the front of his white shirt. His dark eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling.
    I wiped a splatter of blood on my cheek with the back of my hand. “Tony, what the hell? Do you realize what you just did? We weren’t supposed to kill him.”
    Tony shoved his gun into the holster hidden inside of his suit. “I’ve been patient, but I couldn’t take it anymore. He mentioned him . He disrespected you. He skimmed money, and I was sick of him talking to us like we’re a bunch of jerk-offs. If you get in trouble from the higher ups, you can pin this on me. I don’t care. He deserved to die.”
    I ran my hands through my hair as my mind searched for a way out of this mess. Dominick wouldn’t like that Tommy ended up dead. If we explained the situation, he’d probably think Tony was justified, but it reflected poorly on me that I couldn’t control my soldiers. “Carlo, go out the side door and pull the car around. Tony will carry out the body.”
    “What are we going to do with him?” Carlo asked.
    I threw the plastic bag of cocaine on top of Tommy’s body. “Dump his body along with the drugs on the street in the Bronx. Make the police believe it was a drug deal gone bad.”
    Carlo folded his arms across his chest. “What are you going to do?”
    “Clean up this fucking mess.” I gestured to the door. “Now move, before this blows up in our face.”
     

     
    Evangeline
     
    Exhausted, cold, and beyond pissed off were the only words to describe how I felt when I yanked on the exit door to Gian’s nightclub, and it didn’t budge. I walked to the corner of the building and watched the people laughing, talking, hugging, and stumbling as they left the nightclub.
    Leaning against the brick wall, I brushed strands of my hair away from my face and tipped my head to the sky. Things like this only happened to me. I must have done some seriously bad stuff in my previous life to deserve my non-stop run of back luck, or maybe it meant I needed to suck it up, pack my bags, and move home.
    Resigned to waiting until the full hour expired to go back inside, I closed my eyes. An air conditioning unit thrummed somewhere in the shadows. I shivered. The early summer air had grown damp and clammy since I’d sent the taxi driver away almost an hour ago after exchanging phone numbers. He’d been surprisingly accommodating.
    Less than thirty seconds later, I heard the swish of the side door as someone pushed it open. A dark-haired man in a pinstriped suit kicked a wooden wedge under the bottom of the door and jogged down the street.
    I didn’t waste a second. When he turned the corner, I shimmied through the opening, careful not to