Carney’s goon reaches a hand back to the heavy-set man he addressed as P.J.
“Normally I let P.J. do this part, but as a courtesy to your youth and your gender I’ll be handling it tonight.”
What the fuck?
P.J. chuckles again, handing an object to his boss.
A breeze blows off the Mystic River and I shiver. The smell is atrocious.
“I’ll knock you out first,” the man says.
“Please,” I manage, finally. “Don’t do this.”
The man sighs, and I see he’s holding a metal baton. “I’m sorry, Miss Saunders. I wish there was another way. Like I said, it’s just business.”
Before I can say anything else, he smashes the baton into my temple. My head snaps against the fence with a sickening crack.
The strike doesn’t knock me out. Instead, I’m unable to react as pain explodes into a thousand embers of misery with each blow that rains down on me. Again and again, the pipe crashes into my flesh, bruising, smashing, and wrecking what’s beneath.
The intensity of the pain rips the breath from my lungs, and my mouth is frozen in a silent scream. I dangle from that awful fence, paralyzed as my body is beaten from top to bottom. When the bone snaps in my shin, a scream finally tears its way out of my lungs.
“Shit. We gotta go, boss.” P.J. says, panic lacing his voice. “They probably heard that all the way back at the casino.”
“I thought she was out. Goddamnit.” My assailant smashes the baton into my head again.
I welcome the darkness.
2
Finn
Six Months Later – January
“Patrick, I’ve had quite the night. You got a minute?”
The look on my brother’s face tells me that he does not.
“Is there a place we can talk in private? I’ve got news.”
I’ve run into my brother while en route to my father’s office at our family’s casino. I’d closed out some important business for him.
Patrick’s my Irish twin—twelve months older than I am, nearly to the day. Not enough distance to engender any kind of big brother protectiveness.
He sighs and motions to the security office. We tell the man monitoring the cameras to take a walk.
“Did you just wake up?” Patrick asks. “It’s fucking two in the afternoon, Finn.”
“I got the liquor licenses sorted.”
Patrick drops like a sack of bricks into the chair and lets out a sigh.
“How the fuck did you manage that? I thought we’d have to bankrupt ourselves with bribes or some shit.”
Massachusetts does not give out liquor licenses easily. The puritanical roots of the state go deep, and it was only very recently that you could buy alcohol on Sundays. You still can’t buy it in most grocery stores. Restaurants regularly go out of business even in Boston due to fights over licensing, and every city or town only has a limited number available.
Our father thought he bribed the right people to get his in order for the bars and restaurants in the casino, but it turns out he’d been granted limited licenses for beer and wine, but nothing harder.
And we’ve been selling the hard stuff since we opened.
We could be shut down for something like this.
I grin at Patrick and sit in the chair next to him.
“I made the acquaintance of the head of the Alcoholic Licensing Commission.”
“Did you now?”
“I did. He’s a middle-aged gentleman in what I’d say is a sexless marriage, and I thought the neighborly thing to do would be to invite him out.”
Patrick shakes his head. “You’re something else, Finn. Only you could manage to get the ALC head out to party.”
“I’m a people person,” I say, smirking. “Anyway, it turns out he has quite the appetite for working girls and blow, and I got him to sign our licenses. I also have this for insurance.” I show him my phone: Picture after picture of the Commission official snorting cocaine off of the naked breasts of strippers.
Patrick laughs. “Oh Christ. I’ll never be able to unsee that.”
“No, and neither will his wife or the governor if he tries to renege on our deal.”
“Impressive,” Patrick says. “Horrible but impressive.”
He sighs. “Anyway, I’m glad you took care of that. Dad wants to see you.”
My stomach drops. Aside from our, let’s say “precocious” younger sister Catriona, I’m easily my father’s least favorite child. I was hoping this victory would ease that tension.
“Oh?” I say. “Did he mention why?”
“No. He just said ‘tell your lazy fucking brother to come to my office when he manages to drag his sorry ass here’.” He shakes his head to give the effect of jowls he doesn’t have.
Patrick does probably the best imitation of our father, though he’s known him the longest and has a distinct advantage.
Also, I’m not lazy. I just have different goals than my father and more efficient, fun ways of achieving them.
We’re quiet for a minute. I watch the security footage. It’s quiet this time of day, and even if I saw something, I wouldn’t do anything about it.
If someone is clever enough to steal from a casino, they probably deserve to keep what they’ve acquired.
Not good for business, though, and we’ve got a bottom line to maintain—at least that’s always what James Carney says.
My father leveraged nearly all of our family’s personal and business assets to get the casino license and build this place from the ground up. The cost of realizing his dream makes his mood even more foul. The payoff will be worth it, pushing our family from wealthy and powerful to obscenely wealthy and powerful.
But if things don’t go right? Well, it’ll be impossible to recover from. There are far too many people who’d love to see my father fail and lose everything. He’s certainly left a trail of enemies in his wake over the years.
And personally, I don’t really care about him losing everything, except for one devious reason. My brother Callan and I have done some business of our own that relies on the success of the casino, at least over the next five years. It’s in our best interests to keep our father happy and distracted until that goal is met.
“Well, I have to give him this anyway.” I hold up the red folder with the full bar liquor licenses.
“Good luck,” Patrick says. “I’ll wait here for you.”
For the gruesome details of what I’ve done wrong. I’d do the same, though.
I push out of the chair and head up to my father’s office.
The casino itself is two sprawling floors that include slots, table games, dining, and an events venue. The attached hotel is much grander—twenty stories, and, according to the local newspaper, a blight on the historic Charlestown skyline.
I don’t disagree.
My father’s opulent office is on the second floor of the casino, and I take the stairs, two at a time, not from excitement but from habit. Some people might look at the grandiose space my father carved out for himself and say he was compensating for some kind of lack, or maybe some kind of smallness. But I’d never say that, of course.