Page 23 of Bad Medicine
Staring into the flame as it danced in front of me, I imagined how disappointed Mia would be if she could see me now. She’d cross her arms, her mouth pinching to one side as she studied me like I was a complicated patient in her ER, something to be assessed and treated and then effectively dismissed.
Fuck it. Why was I even allowing that woman space inside my brain? God knew there was easier pussy to be had, so why the hell was I making my life so fuckin’ difficult?
Nodding to myself, I raised the lighter, my jaw tight with determination that I wasn’t going to let a woman make me change my ways. Lighting the smoke, I inhaled deep, letting the burn fill my chest as I reveled in my victory.
Nope. No, sir. Rocco Campanelli was his own man, and no broad, no matter how hot or tough, was gonna tell me nothin’ about how to run my life.
“That shit’ll kill you. You know that, right?”
I looked up to see Francesca, changed out of the clothes she had been wearing earlier and now looking like a cross between a cage fighter and a rock star in her tight jeans and leather jacket, glaring at me and my goddamn cigarette.
Was this some kind of sign?
“You know...” I laughed humorlessly, shaking my head. “I used to not give a shit about that, but lately, I’m thinking you might be right.” Taking one last drag, I tossed the smoke onto the driveway, ground it out with my boot heel, then scooped up the butt and stuffed it in my pocket before climbing behind the wheel.
Well, fuck. I guessed I was a non-smoker now.
I waited—again—while Francesca finished giving instructions to Vinnie, who was staying home with Francesca’s cousin, Robin or Ronda or something, to recover. When she was done, she made her way to the Chevelle and climbed in beside me.
“So,” Francesca said a little while later, her gaze out the passenger window as we drove through the dark of the desert. “Tell me about the mysterious Shed.”
I laughed out loud. “It’s literally a shed.” I paused, considering. “Well, more like what you’d call a hanger, really.” Considering that was where I kept my plane, I figured that was pretty accurate. “You know, your man is a lot of things, but I gotta say, his eye for real estate is fucking incredible.”
It was the truth. Enzo always seemed to find the sweetest deals. Like with his first club,Sin City. That place had been an empty shell of a warehouse in a shitty neighborhood too far off the Strip to really matter, but Enzo had purchased it for peanuts and the next thing I knew, there was a line of hot chicks around the fuckin’ block waitin’ to get in.
It was the same with all his businesses. Find a piece of property no one else seems to want, polish it up real nice, and watch the money roll in.
Gesturing out the window, I drew Francesca’s attention to the empty land on either side of the highway. “Back in the fifties, the government used all the open desert from here to Tucson for nuclear bomb testing. Can you believe that shit? They saw the mess those bombs made in 1945 and thought, what the hell? Let’s give it a try?” I scoffed. “Anyway, between that and the panic of the Cold War, the desert around these parts is full of abandoned military bunkers, missile silos, and other things that make for pretty fantastic hiding places, for the right price.”
“And what was the right price?” Her face gave away her skepticism.
“He scooped it for less than half a million.” I grinned at her, knowing she was probably picturing a rusting torture chamber. I mean, wedidtorture people there, but I had personally and painstakingly sanded and painted over all the rust myself, so I was sure she was gonna be impressed.
I suddenly found myself wondering if Mia would be impressed; what would the good doctor think if she knew that while she spent her days putting the citizens of Las Vegas back together, there had been more than a few occasions when I had spent my night underground in an abandoned missile silo, taking one of them apart.
Then I wondered—again—why the fuck her opinion should matter to me. I’d never worried what a woman thought about me before. They never stuck around long enough to do much talking, if I was being honest. We usually made some small talk, had a drink, then we both got off, and they went on their way. Why should this woman be any different? She was just a piece of ass, wasn’t she?
I clenched my fist on the steering wheel, suddenly feeling pretty shitty about that thought, but not sure what to do about it.
I continued driving, chasing the headlights through the night until we pulled up to the chain-link gate surrounding the property.
“This land is all his?” Francesca asked in awe, her gaze following the fence as it disappeared into the darkness in both directions from where we sat.
“Five acres of formerly government-owned Nevada desert. You have any idea what it costs to fence five acres? That shit took ages to arrange.”
Once we were through the gate and parked next to Enzo’s Audi, I led Francesca through The Shed, past my plane—fuck, she was a pretty sight, sitting there in all her shiny glory—and over to the hatch in the floor.
“How far down does it go?” she asked hesitantly, looking over the railing of the first landing and into the darkness below.
“The stairwell section is about forty feet deep, I think,” I answered, remembering what an ass-pain it had been to haul all the supplies and renovation equipment up and down the stairs when we first purchased it.
I tried to get Enzo to hire a moving company, but he said it did no good to have a secret underground bunker if you were gonna let any fucker inside.
I mean, I guessed that was true, but still.
“There are other sections that go deeper, but we don’t really use those.” There were some areas in this place that were creepy as fuck, and some of the shit we found down in the depths of this place totally blew my mind.
The government had some seriously skewed ideas of what kind of things they should spend their money on back in the day, that was for sure.
