Son of the Mob (5 page)

We ransom the car out of the garage and head home. At Alex's house, I take a shower while we wash my shirt and jeans. It's late, but the vending-machine business never closes, and Dad could easily be up with some of the uncles. My father has zero tolerance for drinking and driving, possibly because it's the only vice he doesn't get a cut of. Of course, I haven't
really
been drinking, but Dad doesn't know that, and with my hair and clothes soaked with beer, it's not worth the hassle.

I finally roll into the driveway around one. Turns out Dad's up, but not for business reasons. He's waiting for me in the living room, sanding a lopsided salad bowl over a wastebasket.

“Tommy called. He told me about his little surprise for you. I want to make sure you're all right with what happened.”

“I
thought
he was taking me out to dinner,” I say feelingly.

He's patient. “He was only trying to get square. You bust somebody's TV, it's on you to find him a new one.”

“Nobody busted my—” It all comes together in my head. The Jimmy Rat incident cost me a chance with Angela O'Bannon, so Cece was there to supply me with what Angela hadn't. Unbelievable. Sex is no different from a television set in my father's business. A commodity—something to be traded, bought, sold.

“In your world, maybe,” I say sharply. “Not mine.”

Dad nods understandingly. “You're right, Vince. Your brother—sometimes I wonder whether he's got brains or coleslaw in there. But his heart—that's pure gold. You should have heard him on the phone. In his mind, he gave you the greatest present in the world. A lot of kids your age would have jumped at it.”

“I was almost one of them,” I admit.

Dad laughs. “But you weren't. You always have to do things your own way. I love that about you, Vince. A little crazy, but it's a sure sign that you'll succeed in business.”

I shoot him a harsh look.

“In
any
business.” He adds, “You're thinking about what you want to do, right?”

“Even in my sleep,” I reply sarcastically.

He shakes his head. “You've got some mouth on you.” He inspects the bowl. He's sanded a dime-sized hole in the bottom.

“Nice funnel.”

“Smart guy.” He drops bowl and sandpaper into the basket and turns to the lamp. “We're going to bed if that's okay with you, Agent Bite-Me.” And he kills the light.

It's a good thing too, because I'm pretty sure I've just gone white to the ears.

Bite-Me—Bightly. Kendra Bightly, whose father works for the FBI.

“Vince, you coming?”

“Yeah, Dad.” My heart is racing. Kendra's father isn't just
an
FBI agent; he's
our
FBI agent.

I just made out with the daughter of the man whose goal in life is to send my father to prison.

 

CHAPTER SIX

“Y
OU'VE GOT TO
ask her out.”

Alex has already said it seven times, and it isn't even lunch yet.

“Come on,” he persists. “She's
into
you.”

“It was a frat party,” I reply between clenched teeth. “People do strange things—and I include myself in that.”

We're in the library to research our Web sites for New Media. At least that's what we're supposed to be doing.

“Look, you blew it with Angela. You blew it with Cece. You've got to make something happen with Kendra. You owe it to me!”

“Even if she liked me—which she doesn't,” I begin, “what am I supposed to do, invite her over? Her father has the place bugged, remember? I'm sure he'll be thrilled to hear his own daughter over his surveillance operation.”

Alex shrugs. “She has a house.”

“He
lives
there!” I explode.

“Not all day,” Alex reasons. “Those guys put in big hours. It's a lot of work investigating a major underworld kingpin.”

I let that last comment pass. “Can we do this? We have to pick our topic today.”

“Oh, I'm done,” he informs me. “I've even registered my domain name.”

He swivels his monitor to face me.

I stare at it: www.misterferraridriver.com.

“Ferrari driver? A Web site about Ferraris?”

“Chicks dig sports cars.”

“But you drive a Ford Escort—when you can con your mom into lending it to you.”

He's unfazed. “On the Internet I have a Ferrari. No,
two
Ferraris—a red one and a black one.”

“You're going to flunk,” I warn him. “Guys with Ferraris have better things to do than to sit in front of a computer downloading pictures of what's parked right outside in the driveway. If you want a successful Web site, you've got to appeal to the get-a-life crowd.”

“Like who?”

“How about guys who go to Star Trek conventions?”

“
I
went to a Star Trek convention once!”

“And you're online a lot,” I reason. “So are those people in the soap-opera chat rooms and the country-music fan pages. I'm not trying to insult you. I'm just saying that to have a successful Web site, you have to appeal to the kind of person who's on the Web. Think about what's going to attract the interest of old ladies who live alone with nineteen cats.”

“You're delusional,” he says accusingly, but I know I'm on to something.

I start checking domain names.
Cat
is taken, along with
catlover
,
mycat
,
catperson
,
lovemycat
, and
ilovemycat. Iluvmycat.com
isn't available either, but I start to fiddle around with the ending and pretty soon I've registered my new site: www.iluvmycat.usa.

If it's traffic Mr. Mullinicks wants, this should be rush hour in Manhattan. Not only are there zillions of cat owners out there, but judging by the number of cat sites, most of them like nothing better than talking about their pets.

Alex is unimpressed. “This is stupid, Vince. At least I
like
Ferraris. You can't stand cats.”

“For one semester,” I assure him, “I can fake it.” Just to get his goat, I add, “And think how many girls out there must be cat lovers.”

He's miffed that my idea is better than his. He looks at my head. “Hey, Vince, you know you've got dandruff?”

“Oops, sorry. I hope I don't get flakes all over the black leather upholstery in your Ferraris.”

“No, seriously,” he insists, brushing at my hair. “Get some Head and Shoulders, will you?”

Normally, I wouldn't give it a second thought. But for the last couple of days my head has been feeling kind of itchy. So when class is over, I find an out-of-the-way bathroom.

The light is terrible and the mirror is smeared with the kind of generic grime that only collects in public restrooms. I find a clear spot and sift through my 'do, separating the thick hair so I can see down to my scalp. He's right! Flakes!

And then a tiny piece of dandruff moves.

Nurse Jacinin switches off the light on the magnifying scope and swivels it back to the examining chair. “Head lice.”

I'm blown away. “But I shower twice a day!”

She shrugs. “That doesn't do anything.”

“It's impossible!” I persist. “My mother is a clean freak! I don't have any younger brothers or sisters! I never put on strange hats!”

I make her prove it to me. Big mistake. She finds an infested hair, yanks it out, and holds it under the scope. The sight turns my legs to jelly. My head is inhabited by a family of miniature white tarantulas. I am no longer aware of any itch. Now I feel pounding dinosaur tracks complete with clawed feet digging into my head.

“Oh, you can't feel lice,” she says airily. “They're far too tiny. The discomfort you're experiencing is an allergic reaction on your scalp to the insects' feces.”

Well, that makes me feel
so
much better. Not only has my cranium been colonized by tiny bugs, but they're also using me as an outdoor toilet.

Schools handle head lice the way people in the middle ages used to treat the Black Death. I'm banished for a minimum of twenty-four hours. During that time, I have to shampoo with this special lice-killing gunk. Even then I'm still banned until the nurse has inspected my head. And—get this—she has to do it
outside the building
before I'm allowed back in. Why don't they just spray-paint the word
UNCLEAN
across my chest?

“Touch no one as you exit the school,” she orders, escorting me out of the examining room. “That goes for furniture as well. Lice and their larvae can live up to fifty-five hours on clothing and upholstery.” The last part she belts out so that anyone within three football fields knows I've got cooties.

I'm still protesting. “But, Nurse Jacinin, I just don't understand how it's possible that I
got
the lice in the first—”

I fall silent. There, dead center in the row of sickos waiting to get in to see the nurse, sits Kendra Bightly. Her shoulder-length hair is tucked up inside a Yankees cap.

Well, that explains a lot. If butterflies can migrate all the way from Brazil, then I guess it's not too hard to accept that a truly motivated louse could walk down a strand of Kendra's hair and hop onto a strand of mine during a brief but memorable make-out session at a frat party.

Dad must have said it a million times: “Lousy FBI agents!” I never realized he was talking about their families' personal hygiene.

She ignores me, so I pretend I don't see her as I exit the nurse's office. But later, as I'm pulling out of the school parking lot—keeping my infested hair a few inches off the headrest; it's all I need to have to fumigate the Mazda on top of everything else—who do I see trudging to the local bus stop but Kendra.

My first thoughts are sympathetic. She's probably on her way to the pharmacy to pick up the same anti-lice treatment I have to get. With no car, it's going to take her three different buses to get to CVS.

A flush of anger. She's the one who gave me lice in the first place! And it's not like we have a long-term relationship. We made out—just once—in the middle of a drunken frat party. Afterward she wouldn't even acknowledge that I was alive. For all I know, this Miss Innocent FBI Agent's Daughter stuff is just an act. Maybe she hops from guy to guy, spreading cooties like some head-lice Typhoid Mary.

I pull over in front of the bus stop and roll down the window. “Hi.”

She looks as miserable as I feel. “Hi.”

I take a deep breath. “I think we're going to the same place. Hop in.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she says stubbornly.

In the vending-machine business, I believe the appropriate line here would be:
You can either ride in the car or at the end of a rope behind it. Take your pick.

Fortunately, I'm a civilian. “The drugstore,” I explain patiently. “You know—to buy the special shampoo.”

Avoiding my eyes, she gets in the car. The silence as we drive along is pretty uncomfortable. After all, what is there to say?
I'm infested; how about you?

And finally, just as I'm parking outside CVS, she blurts, “I work in a day-care center.”

“Oh—uh—that's nice—”

“That's where the lice are from,” she explains. “There's an outbreak in the toddler room. I got it from the kids. And you got it when we…” Her voice trails off.

“Don't worry about it,” I say gallantly. “It's not like it's incurable or anything like that.”

Well, maybe it's curable, but the cure sure doesn't come cheap. We need permethrin lice-eradicating hair treatment, a gel to loosen the eggs from the follicles, a fine-tooth LiceMeister nit comb, special shampoo made from tea tree oil, and even a spray insecticide for our clothes and pillows. The permethrin alone costs thirty bucks.

Kendra rummages around her pocketbook. “Oh, no.”

I check my wallet. Forty-three dollars—not enough for all this stuff, and definitely not enough to help her out. I've got a credit card for emergencies, but it's from my dad, and monetary instruments from him are not always one-hundred-percent legitimate. The name of the issuing bank doesn't exactly inspire confidence: Banco Commerciale de Tijuana. I don't know how much they'd appreciate their hard-earned pesos going to pay for my delousing.

“Maybe we can split it,” she suggests shyly. “You know, buy just one set. I think we've got enough money for that.”

“But—” A dozen logistical problems come to mind.

“My parents both work,” she explains. “We'll be finished by the time they get home.”

It comes to $61.40; we spring for an extra LiceMeister so we can each have one. We're supposed to comb for nits for two weeks.

Kendra lives in a subdivision of small neat split-level homes at the far end of the attendance district for Jefferson. It's a nice neighborhood, but it's pretty obvious that FBI agents make a lot less money than the people they investigate. Le Château Luca has eight thousand square feet and a four-car garage, even though, according to DMV records, I am the only family member who actually owns a car.

It feels pretty weird to be in Agent Bite-Me's house. So this is where the guy hangs out when he's not at work, listening to my family pass gas.

Upstairs, Kendra changes into an old jogging suit and tosses me a faded sweatshirt. “This is my dad's. See if it fits.”

I pull it over my head and examine myself in the mirror. Across my chest it says FBI. Me, Vince Luca. This is like Captain Ahab in a S
AVE THE
W
HALES
T-shirt.

The process begins. We go down to the laundry room and take turns rubbing permethrin into each other's hair. I figure this has to make me some kind of man of the world. I mean, I still have no love life, but I'll bet not even Casanova ever spent an afternoon massaging insecticide into a woman's scalp.

I won't try to build the suspense. The stuff is disgusting. It smells like embalming fluid, and it burns. I'm sure the poor lice suffer as they go, but not half as much as the owner of the head they're infesting.

That stays in for thirty minutes—already a longer stretch than I've ever spent with Kendra. It's kind of awkward. We have nothing in common except head lice. So we pass the time by spraying our clothes with the anti-egg stuff. Then we go upstairs and do her pillow, blanket, and sheets.

We're just about to head back to the basement to rinse the stuff out in the laundry sink when the front door opens and a voice calls, “Anybody home?”

Kendra's surprised. “Uh-oh, my dad. I didn't want him to know about this.”

She
doesn't want him to know about this? That goes quadruple for me! I mean, doesn't every FBI agent dream of the day that he gets home early and walks in on his daughter washing her hair in the company of a mobster's son?

“I've got to get out of here!”

“Don't I wish,” Kendra agrees.

“No, really!” I look around. The window is the only way out, but the backyard is sloped, so there's a ten-foot drop to the ground.

I'm weighing the idea of two broken ankles when I spot it. The bedroom next door—the master—is located above a screened-in porch. I can get out onto the porch roof and climb down from there. I run into her parents' room.

Kendra follows me. “I was kidding. It's not the end of the world.”

But I'm already climbing up on the night table to get to the window. My foot knocks over a tube of Preparation H, and I have an insane desire to laugh. It seems only fair that I know something embarrassing about Agent Bite-Me after he's been spying on my family all this time.

Footsteps on the stairs set my mind back to business. I jump the four-foot drop to the flat roof.

Kendra sticks her head out the window. “But we're not finished yet!”

“Save my half of the stuff,” I call up to her. I roll to the edge, grab hold of the drainpipe, and heave myself over the side. The gutter comes away from the wall, and I crash painfully to the ground. And here I thought this kind of thing only happens in Adam Sandler movies.

The drainpipe now hangs away from the porch like a grotesquely reaching metal sculpture.

I consider trying to fix it, but then I hear Kendra's voice: “You're home early, Daddy.”

I just run. With any luck, the guy isn't a very good FBI agent and won't lift my sneaker prints off his tube of Preparation H.

My racing heartbeat is back to normal by the time I turn into the driveway at home. I park and sneak in the side door. I have no desire to explain what's in my hair. Wouldn't you know it? Dad notices me just as I make for the stairs. But it isn't my hair that catches his eye.