Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 70445 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70445 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
“Two million,” he says.
And it’s like a kick to the jaw. Neither of us speaks for a long minute. He drinks his beer and I hold my whiskey with trembling hands. Two million. Two-fucking-million dollars. For a family like the Arcs or the Stocktons or even like the Leaders, two million is spit in the ocean. But for us, two million is everything. It’s more than everything—it’s an impossibility. An amount of money I can’t even imagine ever having again.
Once, we were wealthy. We had everything. But those days are long gone and now we live on the fumes and the memories of those days, pining after a glory we’ll never find again.
“You know I don’t have that,” I say and sit up straight. “How the fuck do you owe someone two million dollars? Who the hell would extend you that much credit?”
“Don’t start that with me, boy,” he says, and his tone matches mine: brittle and rage-filled and exhausted. “I had an opportunity to finally dig this family out of the hole we find ourselves in. It was a risk, but it was a good risk. Your mother—”
“You took her money?” I whisper, the words coming out strangled. I learned a long time ago that I can’t give my mother a dime without it landing in my father’s lap, and so I worked out a system of different checking accounts to try to keep their income separate. Clearly, it didn’t work.
“She offered it when she heard about the investment opportunity,” he says and nudges his fork across the plate, not looking at me. “It was an arbitrage run by a few Albanian gentlemen.”
“You mean Albanian mobsters.” I want to scream at him. I want to smash his face into the table. “How could you get involved with organized crime? You know better than that.”
His eyes flash up to mine. “How is working for a bunch of spoiled rich fucks any better than what I do? You think your money’s clean? At least I’m out there trying.”
“I least I have money,” I say and stare him down. “At least my money doesn’t disappear the second I get it. What happened? Tell me they’re not going to kill you.”
“Not yet,” he says, deflating. He takes a slow, steady breath, and lets it out. “The Albanians had this thing going. This racket where they were buying cheap pills from Canada, smuggling them into the States, and selling them for a profit. I borrowed some money from your mother, but it wasn’t enough. So I used some contacts and got another loan from some Greeks—”
“More fucking mobsters?” I say, feeling sick. “How do you even know these people?”
“—And I bought in with all that cash, thinking it was a sure thing. The Albanians had been running it for a couple years, everything was going great, but the laws changed, and I guess the drugs came out of patent—”
I groan and rub my face. “You got fucked. You got duped. They tricked you into buying a bunch of pills they knew weren’t going to be worth shit. They passed the bag off to you.”
“It wasn’t like that,” he says but there’s no force behind his words. He knows it’s true, just like I do. “Anyway, the generic came out and the prices plummeted. I managed to recoup less than half of what I borrowed and that wasn’t enough for the Greeks, they wanted more, and so I had some words for the head of their organization—”
“Oh, fuck. You insulted a mafia Don.”
He waves that away. “The Greeks don’t call them Dons.”
“I don’t give a fuck what they say.” I slam my hand flat on the table. “How bad is it?”
“He’s very unhappy. Very, very unhappy. That’s why I’ve been hiding out in—uh, vacationing in Spain. Waiting for him to cool down. But apparently he’s not the cool-down type.”
“What’s his name?”
“Evander Kazan.”
I work my memory, but it’s not familiar. “All right. Okay. And you owe Kazan two million?”
“And some change,” he says with a shrug. “You can help me, can’t you? I know you don’t have it all, but something?”
I close my eyes and think. I have cash in my accounts and can scrape together a million, maybe more, but that’s everything, all my investments, my entire fucking future. I was saving for a house, for retirement, for anything other than this endless string of shitty jobs, of an ugly half-life pretending I’m something that I’m not, and maybe I could even bring my mother with me. Get her a nicer apartment, buy her some decent things. Treat her the way my father never could. Get her out of that lonely townhouse, the last thing she owns, give her something new for once.
That dream’s dead now.
“I’m working on something,” I say, shame and dread filling my guts like poison. I hate my useless bastard of a father but I can’t let him get murdered by the Greek mafia no matter how much I want to pull the trigger myself. “It’s a good job. A hard one, but the potential payout could solve all our problems and then some.” And if it works, I’ll cover your debts and send you packing. You will never, ever fucking do this to me ever again.