It didn’t matter what I said. It was happening.”
“Who did you rob?”
“Attempt to rob. We fucked it up, remember?”
Paolo’s hand hovered over Luis’s rigid shoulders, but he bottled it and let it drop. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I know. You’ve said that already, but . . . I want to. I want you to know who’s visiting your grandparents and sharing your bed at night.”
“So tell me who you were back then. It doesn’t have to be who you are now.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“No. Six years is a long time.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that.”
Of course he didn’t. He didn’t need any of this. He needed a good night’s sleep after working all day for minimum wage, then spending his evening listening to Toni lecture him on how to make perfect cannoli. He didn’t need a trip down memory lane that made him look like he was about to throw up.
But here they were.
Luis leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “We held up a Securitas van, you know the ones that transport cash? Dante thought we’d get away with sixty grand, but it wasn’t even about the money for him. He was trying to be a fucking gangster, a real one, not a council estate slinger.”
Dante Pope was gangster enough for Paolo, but he said nothing. Just rubbed Luis’s back, hoping he’d continue.
“Anyway,” Luis said, “he had this stupid plan to steal a flatbed lorry to ram the van off the road and a fucking tractor—can you believe it?—to get it from behind.”
“A tractor?”
“I know. Trust me, I still don’t get the logic behind that.”
“Did it work?”
“Yeah, to start with. We smashed the back doors in and got to the money.”
“Then what?”
“We ran to the other car. If we’d got in and driven off, we might’ve got away with it, or at least without anyone getting hurt, but Dante wanted more, so we went back.”
Luis’s tone was matter of fact, as if he was reading from a newspaper article about traffic congestion, but his shoulders remained locked, and tiny shivers that Paolo might not have noticed if he wasn’t touching him shuddered beneath his skin.
“What happened when you went back?”
Luis twisted his hands so tight Paolo feared he’d snap his fingers off. “The driver had got out—he thought we’d gone. And he had someone with him too, a driver’s mate we hadn’t accounted for. He was round the back, assessing the damage. We didn’t see him until we were on top of him, and by then, it was too late. He’d used his phone to take pictures of us, and he wouldn’t give it up without a fight.”
Paolo sucked in a quiet breath. “Did you even get the phone from him?”
“Yeah, but it didn’t matter in the end.”
“Why not?”
“Because it was me who gave it to the police.”
Paolo sat back against the headboard, mourning the loss of Luis’s overheated skin against his palm but needing the space for his brain to catch up. “I don’t understand.”
“Some days, neither do I. I’ve had to train myself not to think about it or I go too deep, man, and I can’t come back.”
“You’re here now.”
“I know.” Luis turned to face Paolo. “And that’s why I have to tell you everything. I can’t tell half this story anymore. It fucking kills me, you know? It’s like when you open a fizzy bottle when it’s been shaken up. You twist the cap and your fingers get wet, and you have to take it all the way off to make it stop.”
It made sense, but the analogy didn’t sound like a conclusion Luis would’ve come to on his own. Counselling, perhaps? Do they even do that in prison? Shamefully, Paolo had no idea. “Tell me what happened.”
Luis shrugged. “Dante’s a shit fighter, always has been. People are scared of him because he’s manipulated them into thinking he does his own dirty work. But he doesn’t; he’s got a payroll full of muscle for that now.”
“And before? It was you, right?”
“Some of it. I hadn’t done anyone serious damage until that day, though, because he’d never been there to make me. But this dude . . . fuck, he didn’t want to give that phone up. I fought him hard, and I might’ve won, but Dante threw me a crowbar and told me to hit the dude with it.”
“Then what?”
“I did what I was told.”
“Why?”
“Because I was twenty-one and as sucked into my brother’s rep as everyone else? Because I was a piece-of-shit mash man