“Shuddup and hand me the spatula,” I said.

“Which one’s that?”

I was in the kitchen at Tomás and Elena’s house cooking what I hoped would be a nice Sunday afternoon lunch for the three of us: roasted artichoke salad, salmon with fennel and mashed yellow turnips with crispy shallots. Recipes from my chef crush, Ina Garten.

Of course, I had an ulterior motive: gauging Tomás’s appetite for helping me out of my upcoming Bojing jam. Since Elena was holding a late morning coffee confab with Councilwoman Rosado in an effort to convince her to run for the recently decapitated Lincoln Quinn’s vacated position as council president, I had a better chance of recruiting Tomás to whatever lethal counterassault I might need to undertake.

Dishonest, yes.

I was fairly sure Elena had granted me 98.5 percent unconditional forgiveness for having contributed to getting Tomás shot a month earlier.

Still . . .

“I always knew you could cook,” Tomás said, immersing his head in the roiling clouds of steam coming from the mashed yellow turnips, “but damn, jefe! You know that’s mostly your momma, right?”

“I do.”

“But your poppa?” Tomás said. “Oh, now, that man could throw down, too! He could make chicken-fried steak, collard greens with a ham bone or pepper bacon and rice and beans like nobody’s damned business! And he did this thing with baked beans—”

“With ground beef, bacon, ham, pinto beans and maple syrup—”

“Oh, my God!” Tomás laughed.

He let me work for a minute before he said, “So what do you want?”

“How ’bout a little more sea salt?”

“No,” Tomás said. “What. Do. You. Want.”

I stopped seasoning, stirring and sampling. “I need help.”

“What kind of help?”

“The lethal kind.”

Tomás nodded thoughtfully, then said, “You finished cooking?”

I covered the roasted artichoke salad with plastic wrap and put it in their fridge. Then I loosely wrapped the salmon and mashed turnips in aluminum foil and placed them on the middle rack of the oven, which was set to warm. The salmon might dry out a bit, but I doubted Ina Garten would mind. She seemed an understanding lady.

Tomás briefly opened the kitchen back door and retrieved a bottle of Don Julio Añejo Tequila that had been chilling in a snowbank on his back porch.

“Aren’t you afraid somebody could snatch it out there?” I asked.

“Fee-fi-fo-fum,” Tomás said.

Then we went to the basement and sat in webbed lawn chairs in front of his gun locker. Elena had switched out the poster of Mexican-American comedians for a religious motivational poster: a heart made of flames in a bright blue sky, a set of praying hands holding a rosary and the words his love for you. Draped over the top of the locker was a cream-colored lace runner.

“You remember Sister Luciarose Bonafusco at Ste. Anne’s?” Tomás said.