Pecan Pie Predicament (Murder in the Mix #27) - Addison Moore Page 0,84
I was born and raised.
He’s brought me here to die. My loving uncle is about to impart what the family refers to as a mercy execution.
“It’s not a gun?” I stagger for a moment. “You mean you’re going to stab me to death? My God, how could you? Is that any way to treat a girl you said you regarded as a daughter when your own brother went to prison?”
He blinks back, stunned. “Stella, look in my hand,” he growls as he rattles the instrument of death my way once again. “It’s a box of hair dye.”
“Oh God, you’re going to poison me?” I bury my face in my hands a moment. “Do you even realize how painful that will be? How much worse do you really think it will be for me at the hand of the Morettis?”
Ten years ago, after my father single-handedly unraveled the entire Fazio family in a mere weekend, the Morettis took over all of New Jersey with an iron fist, and one of their underlings happened to be my ex, Johnny Rizzo.
Johnny is the one that dragged me into that whole let’s screw the Morettis scheme while they screw the government. It involved a car wash, a donut shop, a chop shop, dirty money, and a monster profit that’s kept me in Louis Vuitton bags for the past six months, but the inner workings of Johnny’s idiotic scheme are far too complicated to dig into at the moment, nor do I care to relive them.
But my dad… I’ve spent the last five years reliving everything about that man. How I loved the way things were before everything fell apart.
My father, Angelo Santini, or The Sunday Sinner as he’s since been dubbed, is in prison on RICO charges. Prior to his incarceration, he became an informant for the feds. He wore a wire, the whole nine-weasel yards—and on a Sunday no less, thus his dishonorable new title.
Suffice it to say, he’s as good as dead if he ever gets out—and maybe on the inside, too.
My dad cut a deal. Not a good deal. The feds still managed to seize everything, from our small kitchen appliances to my mother’s minks. Yes, real minks had been sacrificed to create those furry horrors my mother loved to ensconce herself in no matter if the weather dictated their presence or not. Believe me, she is no friend of PETA.
But as soon as the government licked us clean, she was filing for divorce and out on the cougar prowl. Her preference for men younger than her own children is still something I can’t wrap my head around.
In less than twenty-four hours after my father’s incarceration, our first-class world turned into a third-world nightmare.
It turns out, Dad and his buddies were smuggling millions of dollars’ worth of drugs into the country, via Latin America, and the Fazio family distributed it right here in New Jersey.
But since Daddy’s little tap dance with the wire, that nightmare with the Fazios imploding and the Morettis stepping up to take their place led to my own aforementioned nightmare called Johnny Rizzo. And it was his bright idea to steal from the mob, which accidentally tipped off the feds to the Morettis’ felonious misgivings—that led me here, to my very own execution party sponsored by Clairol.
“Stella,” Uncle Vinnie barks my name out as if he were trying to wake me from a very bad dream, and how I wish he were. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m doing you a favor. The Morettis have already decided they want you quiet.” In the mob, quiet is code for dead. “Johnny took off last night or they’d have gotten him first.”
“He took off?” My eyes bulge at the thought. “And he left me here to fry?” Okay, confession: technically, Johnny isn’t my ex quite yet. As of yesterday, we were still together. I haven’t actually had the privilege of slapping him silly and telling him to take a hike just yet, only because we knew our lives were about to implode in far more dramatic ways than any mere breakup could bring on.
But on my way home from that fiasco, I had broken up with him a thousand times in my head. I came this close to texting him with the news but didn’t want to deny myself the pleasure of looking him in the eye when I did it—and I might have been looking forward to shoving my knee into his crotch as well.