give you a ride. Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“I know where that is.”
“Of course you do. Don’t suppose you’re gonna tell me how you got my phone number, are you?”
Dante smirked. “I will if you get in the car.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I’ll follow you all the way back to that piece-of-shit bedsit.”
Hot fury lanced Luis’s gut. In prison, he’d often pictured moments like these, when Dante got up in his face and twisted shit around until Luis didn’t know which way was up. In fits of rare optimism, he’d imagined himself driving his knuckles into Dante’s smug face, dropping him to the floor, stepping over him, and walking away for good. But reality had always haunted him. He was getting in that car, and Dante knew it.
Conversations with Dante had always been a dance across a minefield of unknown width. Every time, Luis trod softly, but still it blew up in his face. And he was out of practice, his senses dulled to Dante’s tricks.
“So, you like your job then? Playing straight suits you?”
Luis glowered past the muscle driving for Dante but saw nothing but a hole where his life once was. “I’ve never played straight.”
“Oh, I know. That why you’re busting hours in that greasy spoon? For the Italian man candy?”
Luis clenched his fists. Don’t say his fucking name, or I’ll kill you, I swear to god. “It’s a job. I need it to pay my rent.”
“Crawley Road? Jesus, man. Why do you want to make that skankhole your yard?”
Because it’s mine, not yours. Luis shrugged. “I need to stay out of trouble. Prison ain’t no joke.”
The scar on his head throbbed, but between this meeting, and their first a few weeks back, Dante didn’t seem to notice it. He fished a cigarette box from the car door and pulled out a half-smoked joint. “Want some of this?”
Luis rolled his eyes. “You know I don’t smoke that shit.”
“Maybe you should. Chill you out a bit. You seem tense.”
As if Dante knew Luis was wound so tight, every nerve felt as if it would surely snap. As if he cared. He lit the joint and blew fragrant smoke into Luis’s face.
Luis waved it away. “What are you smoking in the car for anyway? You want a stop and search?”
Dante sneered. “For what? A couple of weed buds? Brother, you’ve been away too long. Police don’t care about that shit anymore. They only pull you for the good stuff, and we save that for the fiends.”
Luis fought another eye-roll. He used to miss the Dante who didn’t talk like he’d eaten the script from a bad TV show, but those days had passed long before Luis had swallowed a six-year stretch. “Whatever. Is there a point to this scenic route home?”
“Does there need to be? You got plans, brother?”
“Nah. I’ve just got no plans to be here with you.”
“Burn.”
Luis said nothing. Just breathed in weed smoke and focussed on the roll of notes digging into his ankle. The money Luis was late delivering.
Dante sighed. “You don’t make nothing easy.”
“I don’t have to make anything hard if you’ll leave me the fuck alone.”
“Can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Cos I need you, my brother.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Why? We’re blood, man.”
“That don’t mean shit,” Luis exploded. “If we’re blood, where the fuck have you been the last six years? And what the fuck have you ever done for me?”
Dante eyed Luis through a haze of smoke. “I done everything for you. Fed you, clothed you, gave you work on the road so you had your own Ps.”
Luis laughed. “You put me to work to line your own pocket. Don’t be telling it like you were doing me right.”
“And don’t you be getting emotional. We haven’t got time for that. We need to talk business.”
“We really don’t.”
Luis’s bedsit, and the last place on earth he wanted to be, came into view. He closed his hand around the door handle.
Dante reached over him and knocked it off. “We do. Unless you want me to keep coming around your workplace, trying to have this conversation again.”
Whether he knew it or not, he’d found Luis’s weak spot. “You don’t need to come to my work. You know where I live.”
“Bro, you don’t ever sleep in your own bed.”
“What do you care about that?”
“Nothing, if you come by the yard tonight and listen properly to what I’ve got to say. I need your help with something, and it could set you up good. Take you out of that dirt box, man, and