The Holy Ghost - M.E. Clayton Page 0,60

Ciro snapped a few pictures on a burner phone as I removed my protective gear and headed for the showers.

Ciro’s funhouse was an old industrial building a mile outside Morgan City. It used to be a testing site for farming chemicals, and it had emergency wash stations and showers that Ciro had converted for our use. There were only four other members of the Benetti family who knew of this place and had permission to use it. They were mine, Ciro, and Luca’s personal guard, and the fourth person was Sal.

Each of us had our own ‘locker room’ where we could shower away the blood and guts and put on a fresh suit. The old suits and any protective gear were burned in an incinerator. If this place ever got raided, we’d be fucked, but the building was locked down tighter than Fort Knox. It was a block building with bars on the windows. Since it had been a chemical facility, it had been designed for safety. A feature we took advantage of the second Ciro procured the building.

I let the hot water beat down on my shoulders and wash away pieces of Randolph Masterson. He was no longer an issue, but I still had a few rounds to go with Frankie, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. The woman hasn’t even been back two weeks and, already, she was driving me crazy.

Was it unfair for me to expect her to acclimate overnight? Maybe. But she’s known what Luca’s been about her entire life. She had to have some inkling of what would be required of her. Or maybe that was our mistake. We tried so hard to shield her from the darkness that was the Benettis when we were younger, maybe she really didn’t have a fucking clue.

Either way, we were going to have to have a come-to-Jesus talk, and I suspected that Luca and Ciro might have to come along for the ride because, just like me, they weren’t the same guys they were when Frankie left. She needed to understand that. She needed to recognize and appreciate the world we lived in now, not the world we lived in when she left.

Then there was the issue of Roberta Regal.

On the drive back from Cedar Creek, Luca had Sal pull up everything he could find about the woman and had forwarded the details to me and Ciro. There hadn’t been anything too exciting, other than she seemed to have terrible taste in men.

She had brown hair, brown eyes, was five-foot-three, and worked as a waitress. Her parents lived in Missouri and owned a hardware store. She had no siblings to speak of, not even a pet. Her address wasn’t in the best of Cedar Creek neighborhoods, but it wasn’t located in the slums, either. She seemed rather boring, but my concern was for the men she dated. While Robbie might be a good person as Frankie insisted, she hung around riffraff. If Frankie were going to insist on keeping Robbie in her life, it looked like Frankie wasn’t going to be the only one who would need a come-to-Jesus talk.

I turned off the water and took a deep breath.

Time to face the spitfire.

Chapter 24

Francesca~

Phoenix came home, his hair wet from a recent shower. Now, most women would automatically think ‘affair’, but I knew it was most likely that he had to wash someone’s blood off his body. There were so many things wrong with that thought, and, therein, laid my problem.

I had plenty of time to think about everything Phoenix said, and has been saying, and I realized I was acting like the six years had never happened. I fell back into the life we lived six years ago, not the life they were leading now.

Time changed them.

Time changed me.

If I read between the lines correctly, Luca was about to go from the Benetti Underboss to the Benetti Boss soon. People were going to revere him. People were going to fear him. People were going to be in awe of him the same way we had been of Giovanni when we were kids. Luca was going to control Morgan City, if not the entire state, and Phoenix and Ciro were going to be standing next to him as he did.

I was going to stand next to him as he did.

I got it.

I finally got it.

I had been sitting on the couch, texting Robbie, when Phoenix had walked in and announced, “Randy’s dead.” No greeting, or anything. Just