“Never mind,” said Ted, finishing the first half of his sandwich. “I gave the job to Richie. He’s gonna handle it from now on. Your boy doesn’t want it, he don’t have to have it.”
Vin tried to hide his disappointment as he tore another strip off his plate and began chewing it.
“None of these new kids we have is any good,” said Teddy. “They’re all junkies and bums. They don’t understand this thing of ours. We’ve gotta install discipline in our soldiers again. Especially with this indictment coming up, we don’t want anybody else turning rat on us. This is gonna be a Cosa Nostra ’til the day I die. Be it an hour from now or a hundred years from now. We’re gonna have unity and harmony even if it kills us.”
But Vin wasn’t listening. He was staring at the back of someone’s head over by the cash register, some twenty feet away. The head was covered with thick black hair. A small gold earring winked from one earlobe. But without even seeing the face, Vin knew it was someone familiar. The feeling burned across the room, like someone had lit a fuse on the floor. Then the head turned and Vin saw Larry DiGregorio’s chinless face. He felt his head get light as his heart went still. Larry, back from the dead. It took a moment to register that it was actually his son Nicky. They were identical, except Nicky had long dark hair flowing over his collar and more natural color in his face.
He rose off the stool and walked right over to the booth where Vin and Teddy were sitting.
“Happy Father’s Day, you fat piece of shit.” He slid into the booth and faced Teddy.
Teddy’s face got tight and shiny. “Is it, is it, ah, Father’s Day?”
Nicky gave Jerry Lewis’s picture a surly look. “No, asshole, that was two weeks ago, but that ain’t the point. Every Father’s Day, Larry took me here for a sub. It was our tradition with each other. This is the first year I wasn’t with him.”
“Hey, Nicky, we’re all sorry about what happened.” Vin, who was sitting beside him, put a furry hand over the sapphire ring on Nicky’s left pinky.
“Yeah,” said Teddy, putting down his sandwich slowly. “Larry was a good man. You get the flowers I sent over for the funeral?”
Nicky stared across the table at him. “I know you did it, Ted.”
“Did what?”
“I know you had Larry killed.”
Both Vin and Teddy reached for napkins out of the steel dispenser at the same time.
“Oh now Nick, you don’t have call to go around saying things like that,” said Vin, wiping his mouth. “Larry was a friend of ours. We wouldn’t let nothing happen to him.”
“Oh yeah?” Nick’s head slowly rotated to the side, like a department store security camera picking up a shoplifter. “Maybe you were the one that did it, Vin. It’s your style, ain’t it. Putting an ice pick in him, like an animal.”
Vin took his eyes away, as though the conversation no longer interested him. “You don’t have any evidence to say that, Nick. You oughta watch it. You could get sued by somebody.”
“That right? I don’t have any evidence?” Nicky leaned over and put his broad face down by Vin’s. Even sitting down, he towered over the older man. “Then how come when I went by the union the other day, they told me it was your son Anthony who was going to pick up the envelope from now on?”
“Hey, I don’t have to take this.” Teddy started to rise.
“Just hold the fuck on.” Nicky leaned back and dropped his hands under the table. “Right now I’m holding a Glock machine pistol on both of you. So which one of you bastards wants to get his balls blown off first?”
All the blood drained from Teddy’s face. Vin went on chewing his plate.
“Whooa, Nicky.” Teddy’s features began to smear. “We don’t know anything about this. If you got a problem with Anthony, why don’t you take it up with him?”
Vin squinted over at him for clarification. “We’re not saying Anthony had anything to do with what happened to your father,” he said quickly, pulling on his fingers.
“Well, that’s not for us to say, Vin,” Teddy interrupted. “If it’s a problem between the young kids, it’s not for us to settle it.”
Nick DiGregorio hit the table with his free hand and the napkin dispenser rattled.
“I don’t care who, what, or where,” he said. “But someone’s gonna fuckin’ pay.”
Hey, come on, don’t be like that,” said Vin, urging Teddy with his eyes to help him calm the young man. “We’re all friends here, Nick.”
“Fuck friends.”
Nick DiGregorio grabbed the cup of soda out of Teddy’s hand and poured it out on his lap. Then he stood up quickly, tucked the gun back in his waistband, and left the place, like a storm cloud heading out to sea.
“Aw, look what he did here!” Teddy tried to stand in his seat but the table got in the way.
Vin gave him a hard look. “Why’d you have to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Tell him my Anthony whacked his father.”
“Well he did, didn’t he?”
Vin scratched his head. “Yeah, but you didn’t have to tell him that.”
“Why not?” Teddy shivered. “If Anthony pulled the trigger on his old man, why shouldn’t he have to deal with the consequences?”
“Because he’s not expecting to get that kinda call from Nicky. We’re leavin’ him out there by himself.”
Teddy gingerly moved out of the booth. “Hey, Vin, it’s his problem now. He should take care of Nicky the way he took care of his father. If he got rid of the tree he can get rid of the branch.”
Vin shook his head and examined the greasy skim on the tabletop. “It’s not right. We’re leaving him exposed.”
Teddy wasn’t listening. He was too busy plucking at the dampened front of his pants. “Aw, I can’t believe this,” he said, looking for something he could use to wipe himself. “Total lack of respect. It demeans all of us.”
Vin threw a couple of balled-up napkins at him. “Clean it up yourself.”
16
AS WE PULLED OUT of Rafferty’s parking lot, the redI-Roc behind me flashed its high-beams in my rearview mirror. I should’ve recognized it as a danger signal.
“How’s the fight?” Rosemary asked as she settled in on the passenger side and fixed her seat belt.
“Which one? My whole life’s a fight.”
“You know.” She crossed her legs under the glove compartment. “The one you were telling me about.”
“Oh.”
It’d been so long since Carla was interested in what I was doing that the question caught me off guard.
I ignored the way the I-Roc followed us out of the parking lot. “I was just over at the Doubloon the other day, talking to some people.”
I mentioned the name of Sam Wolkowitz’s company and Rosemary nodded as if she was impressed. After the last fight I’d had with Carla, it was a relief not having to explain everything.
“You know I was making fun of you the other night,” she said. “But then I thought—when was the last time you ran into anybody with any goals around here? My ex-husband Bingo, he was a degenerate gambler—actually he was just a degenerate, he’d show up at the party already wearing the lampshade. Anyway, he’d gamble on anything. He would bet on the sun coming up in the west if he could get the right odds. He never understood how you have to work toward something.”
Listening to her was like hearing someone speak my language for the first time. I turned the corner onto Atlantic Avenue and a casino billboard practically screamed from ontop of one of the buildings: DREAMS COME TRUE AT OUR SLOTS. The I-Roc was still on our tail.