Page 83 of Rune
“I did. We can go see him tomorrow.”
“We?”
“You’re not a prisoner here. We can go out. Plus, it would be easier if you come, in case Junior has any questions for you.”
“Can we take my car? I like the bike, but I don’t think that’s going to feel great with my ribs.”
“Yeah, you can’t be on a bike for a while. Depending on how you’re feeling, we could take a trip to the beach if you want. Just to get out of this windowless room for a bit.”
“And you promised me She’s Bean Around coffee.”
“I did.”
“And mafia pizza.”
Apparently, there was a lot about Navesink Bank my little preliminary internet search hadn’t told me when I’d been looking for Rune. Namely, that it was just a hotbed for criminal organizations. You named it, they had it: bikers, the mafia, loan sharks, hackers, mercenaries, and even some crazy paramilitary survivalist camp—which, apparently, was created by Rune’s aunt and currently run by one of his cousins.
It almost felt unreal when he first told me. I’d actually laughed. Because a smallish town full of that much crime… and it wasn’t constantly on the news? And the crime rate wasn’t in the toilet? It seemed unlikely. But he was quick to remind me that there was a difference between petty and street crime and organized crime.
“It’s not like I’m gonna shoot someone on their morning run and leave their body for the cops to find,” he’d said, shrugging it off as we ate Chinese in bed.
And I guess that made a lot of sense. If you wanted to keep running a criminal empire, you couldn’t let the bodies pile up, could you?
“So where do you put the bodies then?”
“Are we talking facts or hypotheticals?”
“Hypotheticals. I don’t want to be implicated,” I teased.
“Hypothetically, for most of the year, it’s relatively easy to dig a grave. If you got some time, it’s hypothetically notthatfar of a drive to the Pine Barrens, where a body might never be found. Hypothetically, you could still sink a body off the ocean or river if you know what you’re doing.”
I’d been full of a million questions then: about the organizations, about his personal connections to them, then, eventually, about his various family members and their involvement either in those crews… or not.
Most of his female cousins (or ‘club princesses,’ as he called them) had relatively normal jobs. But most of the boys ended up in the club at some point. Except one, who was a relatively well-known musician.
I’d been fascinated by it all. The crime, sure. But more so than that, the strange family dynamics of this club and the syndicates in the town. While, technically, I had a large extended family, almost all of them were back in Puerto Rico.
My parents had moved to the States together when they were in their early twenties, but none of the other family had followed. So while I did knowofthem, I didn’t really know many of them personally. I’d met a few when I’d visited after Vicky’s death, but it wasn’t the same as growing up with them. I didn’t have the kind of support system that Rune did.
And while my sister and I worked hard to make it feel like the two of us were more than enough, there was no way she didn’t feel the same longing I did when we watched holiday movies and saw all these big, chaotic, crazy, loving families all together. Some part of me had always craved that. Rune lived it.
“Sure. But you gotta promise not to refer to it as ‘mafia pizza’ when we go there.”
“Is it really a secret?”
“You know, it kind of is. I think some of the people of Navesink Bank are keen to what is really going down. But for the most part, I think everyone is in the dark. We try not to let our business spill into the streets. The mafia, especially. So I think ninety-nine percent of the people who go to one of Lucky’s pizza places, or who frequent Chaz’s bar, or even Redemption, are completely clueless who owns it and what other business they’re involved in.”
“You said the club has been a little more legit lately, though, right?”
“I mean, not necessarily. We still do what we do. But now on top of that, we also have our hands in several legitimate businesses.”
“Like Redemption.”
“And the shooting range. The car repair shop. And a couple others.”
“Have you ever considered opening anything like that?”
“Can’t say there are a lot of things I’m interested enough in to open a business for it. I could get behind a gym, but the town is teeming with them already. The Mallicks own one of them. My aunts own another. Don’t want to rock the boat with that. Would you?”
