MOB BOSS 6: THE HEART OF RENO GABRINI (Mob Boss Series) (9 page)

“I’m
not worried about it.
 
But I do feel I
have a right to know why the fuck he needs to be involved in some ladies
boutique at all.
 
Technical or
otherwise.”

Trina
wanted to laugh.
 
This was getting
ridiculous.
 
“Because he’s a friend of
mine who offered his assistance.
 
Because
he’s Gemma’s cousin and she wanted to utilize his business acumen.
 
Because we gladly accepted his offer to help.
 
That’s why he’s involved.”

“But
a ladies boutique?”

“So?”

Reno
thought about it.
 
Then he shook his
head.
 
“You’re right.
 
I’m being overprotective again.”

“Yes,
you are.
 
Very.”

Reno
sat on the edge of his desk.
 
“I guess
I’m still antsy after you wasn’t here when I got back in town a couple of days
ago.
 
I don’t want any joker thinking the
fact that I’m out of town a lot lately is an invitation for him to fill the
void.”

Trina
looked at Reno and shook her head.
 
“You’re something else, you know that?
 
You think just because you’re away for a week that somebody else can
possibly fill your void?”

She
moved between his legs and placed her arms around his neck.
 
“You foolish boy,” she said.
 
“Somebody filling your void would be like
somebody filling Niagara Falls.
 
And Lee
Jones?
 
Please.
 
He’s fine, I’ll give him that, but he’s not
you, Reno.
 
He would have to be you for
me to want him.”
 

Reno
wrapped his arms around her waist.
 
“Well
I’m home free then.
 
Because you can rest
assured, baby, that he can’t be me.”
 
Trina laughed.
 
“You can rest
assured,” he continued, “that there’s only one Reno on the face of this earth.”

“Yes,”
Trina said.
 
“Thank God.”

Reno
started to kiss her neck, then thought about what she had just said.
 
He looked at her.
 
She laughed, hit him on the chest, and
shimmied out of his arms.
 
“I’ve got work
to do and so do you,” she said as she left.

Reno
smiled.
 
But that still didn’t mean he
wasn’t going to have that conversation with Lee.
 
Because he was.

One
week later and Jimmy Mack’s souped-up Mustang drove onto the driveway of Ashley
Cooper’s small house on Rondo Road.
 
He
jumped out and hurried across the front lawn in his jeans and
Miami Heat
t-shirt.
 

Ashley
opened the door as soon as he made it onto her front porch, and ran into his
arms as soon as he crossed her threshold.

“What
happened?” he asked as he entered.
 
“What’s the matter, babe?”

She
moved out of his arms and closed the door.
 
Her once-pretty face looked ghostly.
 

“Tell
me what’s wrong, girl,” Jimmy was insisting.
 
He was playing a pickup game of basketball with Mikey, another friend, when
she phoned him sounding as if she was about to lose it.
 
She begged him to drop everything and rush
over, but she refused to tell him why.
 
Now that he had arrived, and saw her distressed state for himself, he
had to know.

But
she folded her arms instead, as if what had happened was unspeakable.
 
Tears began to appear in her soft, blue
eyes.
 

“Ash,
what is it?” Jimmy asked her.

She
began to shake her head.
 
“What are we
going to do, Jimmy?” she finally spoke.
 
“I don’t know what to do, I don’t . . . I don’t . . . What are we going
to do?”

“Come
sit down,” Jimmy said, helping her to the sofa, “and tell me what’s going on.”

She
sat down, but she was still mumbling incoherently.
 

“Ash,
what is it?”

“It’s
not his fault,” she finally said.

“It’s
not whose fault?
 
What are you talking
about, Ash?”

“It’s
not Riley’s fault.”

Jimmy
hesitated.
 
Riley Cooper was his best
friend and her younger brother.
 
“What’s
not his fault?
 
Where’s Coop anyway?
 
Is he here?”

She
nodded her head.

“Where
is he?”

She
pointed toward the back.
 
This was
strange behavior for talkative Ashley to say the least.
 
But Jimmy stood up anyway and headed for the
back.
 
Her bedroom in the two-bedroom house,
he knew, was across from the bathroom.
 
Coop’s room was closer up.

The
door was wide open, and as soon as Jimmy entered the bedroom and turned the
quick corner, he stopped in his tracks.
 
Cooper was in the room, all right, but so was a man, on the floor,
covered in what appeared to be his own vomit and blood.
 
Jimmy couldn’t believe it.
 
He almost puked himself.

He
looked at Cooper.
 
Coop was just standing
there, staring at the man.

“What
happened?” Jimmy asked him.

“I
said weed,” Coop said.

Jimmy
frowned.
 
“What?”

“I
told him to bring over a little weed.
 
That’s all I told him to bring.
 
But he brought smack.”
 
Cooper
looked at Jimmy.
 
“I don’t do that shit.”

The
fact that Cooper was unhinged concerned Jimmy even more than Ashley’s
distress.
 
Cooper never behaved this way.
 
“Tell me what happened,” he said to his
friend just as Ashley entered the room behind him.

“We
were supposed to be kickin it,” Cooper said, hitting one hand with the other
hand as if he was some street thug from way back when he was a red-haired,
freckled-face white boy who never spent a day in the hood.
 

“We were
supposed to be hanging out,” he continued.
 
“We were supposed to see what girls we could pick up later, what fun we
could get into.
 
Nothing special.
 
I went to the kitchen to grab a couple of
beers.
 
Ash was in her room and was
bitching about how I had to pay my share of the rent on time this month and how
she didn’t appreciate all these strange dudes I had in and out of her
house.
 
I told her everybody I invite up
in here are friends of mine, not strangers.
 
So we got into it a little about that.
 
You know, like we’re always getting into it.
 
But it was nothing different.
 
Until I came back in here.
 
When I came back in the room, he was already
shooting up.”

It
was only then did Jimmy see the hypodermic syringe and other paraphernalia
around the room, and what looked like a spilled bag of a powdered substance.

Jimmy
looked at the substance and then looked at Cooper.
 
“Cocaine?” he asked him.

“Smack,
man.
 
Smack.
 
The big H.
 
But he was already shooting up,” Cooper said.
 
“I slapped it out of his hand as soon as I
saw it, but he was already acting like he was geeking or something.
 
Then his eyes started rolling in the back of
his head.
 
And then he started having a
fit like he was having a seizure or something.
 
He started foaming at the mouth and then was throwing up blood.”
 

Jimmy
was still staring at the man on the floor as if he was re-living the first time
he saw him in that state.
 
“And then he
was dead.”

“But
are you sure?” Jimmy asked.
 
“Are you
sure he’s dead?”

“Yes,”
Ashley said, walking around Jimmy to stand at her brother’s side.
 
She, too, was staring at the body on the
floor.
 
“We’re sure.
 
He’s dead.”

Jimmy
ran his hand through his hair the way he’d seen his father do a thousand times,
but only he wasn’t nowhere near as calm as he knew his father would have been.
 
“Did y’all call 911?” he asked.

 
“911?” Ashley asked.
 
“We can’t!”

Jimmy
looked at her.
 
“What do you mean you
can’t?”

“Look
at him, Jimmy!
 
Look at all of this
heroin in our house!
 
They’re gonna say
we did this to him!
 
They’re gonna say we
gave him drugs and did this to him!
 
They’ll put me and Riley both in prison!”

Jimmy
felt as if he was on an alternate universe.
 
“But you’ve got to call for help, what are you talking?
 
There’s no two ways about this, Ash.
 
We’ve got a dead body up in here!”

“I
know that.
 
But it’s not our fault!”

“I
didn’t say it was your fault.
 
You can
tell the cops exactly what happened.
 
Coop can tell them.”

Cooper
looked at Jimmy.
 
“And you think they’ll
believe me?
 
You think all I have to do is
walk up in that police station and say I’m innocent and they’ll believe
me?
 
They’ll say I gave those drugs to
him, Jimmy.
 
They’ll say I killed him.
 
I could spend the rest of my life in
prison.
 
And Ash can too, because she was
in the house too.”

Jimmy’s
heart was pounding at the thought of Ashley involved in this.
 
“You’ll tell them she had nothing to do with
it, Coop.
 
You’ll have to convince them.”

“They
won’t believe us!” Ashley yelled out as if to get it through his thick
skull.
 
“Especially when they find out.”

Jimmy
didn’t understand.
 
“When they find out
what?”

Ashley
looked at Cooper and then folded her arms.
 
She shook her head.

“What?”
Jimmy asked, his heart pounding.
 
“Find
out what?”

“That
she’s on probation,” Cooper said.
 
“That
she’s on probation for drugs.”

Jimmy
looked at Ashley.
 
He couldn’t believe
it.
 
“Drugs?”

“I had
just turned eighteen when it happened, and was hanging out with the wrong
crowd.
 
I was driving this dude’s car and
he had drugs in them.
 
I didn’t even know
they were in the car.
 
But the cops
wouldn’t believe me when I told’em they didn’t belong to me.
 
They gave me a suspended sentence and put me
on probation, but I can’t violate my terms, Jimmy, or they promised I would do
some serious years.”

Cooper
finally looked at Jimmy.
 
“Now you see,
Mack?” he said.
 
“We can’t call no
cops.
 
At least not with this body still
in our house.”

Jimmy
felt as if he was on information overload.
 
His girl, the woman he loved, was on probation for drugs and he didn’t
even know about it.
 
And now this.
 
A dead man right at his feet.
 
And they didn’t want to call the authorities.
 
Which was crazy.
 
They had to call the authorities!
 
What else could they do?

Now
Jimmy felt as if he was grasping at straws.
 
“Maybe you can say Ash wasn’t here,” he said to Cooper.
 
Given the severity of the body situation they
had on their hands, her drug arrest had to take a backseat.
 

“That
won’t work either,” Cooper said.

“Why
not?” Jimmy asked.
 
“You can say she
showed up after you called 911.”

“And
all it will take is one neighbor saying they saw her outside in the yard
earlier today, or opening the door for you, or whatever.
 
And then we’d get an additional charge of
lying to police.”

Jimmy
shook his head.
 
This was like a
nightmare.
 
“So what are you gonna do,
Coop?
 
What can you do?”