"Have 'em clipped."
"Shoot my own dogs?"
"No, I mean have their balls clipped. I don't want you looking at those dogs that way no more."
"I fix them dogs, they'll turn into girls."
"You don't fix them dogs, and I'll have you clipped. And I don't want no rumors around my family. I take pride in my family. We are family men. Fuck the dogs and find a wife. And another thing. I don't want you peeing on the guys you clip no more. It's unsanitary."
"It's just my way of sending them off. You know. It don't mean nothing."
"The papers are calling you an abuser of corpses. I do not want this word abuser to be connected with members of my family."
"It's all circumstantial. It don't mean nothing, Don Silvio."
"From now on you don't whip it out except in front of ceramic or lipstick. Capisce?"
"I understand," Vinnie said miserably.
When he got home, the dogs were all over him, sniffing and pawing his best suit.
"Cut that out, you three! You'll get me killed. Down, Numbnuts. Get offa me, Bonehead. You too, Fatface."
When they finally settled down, Vinnie tried to explain the facts of being mob dogs to them. "Now listen, you guys," said Vinnie, getting down on his knees on the floor. "We gotta talk about our futures together."
The dogs began licking his face.
"Don't do this to me! I'm trying to break the news to you gently,"
In the end he couldn't do it.
"You guys are men. Just like me. It's not right to lop off a man's balls even if he is a dog."
And so Vinnie "Three Dogs" Cerebrini made the most difficult decision of his life. He chose his dogs over his capo.
Unfortunately it wasn't that hard a choice. The rumors that he was gay were all over San Francisco. If he married triplets, he could never live them down.
Vinnie "Three Dogs" Cerebrini would have sued if he could. After all, it was slander what they were saying about him, the rat bastards. The trouble was you really couldn't sue La Cosa Nostra. Even if you were a soldier in La Cosa Nostra, suing your godfather was just not done.
The slander had gotten so out of control, Vinnie was forced to drop out of sight. Way out of sight.
Bangor, Maine, was as far out of sight of San Francisco as you could get without taking up residence in a cave. Vinnie had bought a tract of land and a mountain of old used tires. He dug the hole himself, and with his own hands and the sledgehammer he had once used to split open the skull of Salvatore "Sonny" Slobone pounded dirt into each tire until they weighed three hundred pounds each.
In the piny Maine woods he built himself the hideaway deluxe of all time. It was impregnable because it was completely underground. The buried sides and roof were made from stacks of earth-reinforced tires. Rifle bullets couldn't penetrate it. Hand grenades detonated harmlessly over it. Katushya rockets only turned the graded topsoil.
There Vinnie settled down with his dogs and his savings and figured the D'Ambrosia family would never find him here.
And for a solid year they hadn't. No one had.
Then one day in July the buried motion-sensor array picked up an intruder. Punching up his security cameras, Vinnie saw a man approaching on foot. He was lean and neat with his hair cut on the short side.
"Oh, man, what is this shit?" Vinnie moaned.
In his gray chinos and T-shirt, the guy looked like a poster boy for AIDS awareness.
"Those cocksucker fucking rumors musta spread like wildfire. Now I got the local fags sniffing around, looking for action."
Vinnie hit the loudspeaker system. "You! Get offa my property. You want people to talk?"
But the guy kept coming.
"I get it. I get it. He's bait. That's it. Don Silvio thinks I'll give him a tumble, and either the fruit whacks me or I contract AIDS offa him. Fuck! Gotta get rid of him."
He called out, "Numbnuts, Fatface, Bonehead-where are you stupid mutts?"
The dry padding of sandpapery paws came rushing out of the playroom, where the three ridgebacks had been sleeping contentedly.
Pushing their eager brown muzzles away from his crotch, Vinnie said, "See the guy on the screen? You gotta get rid of him for me. Got that? He's bad."
And Vinnie pulled down the drop stairs that led to the roof and the only exit from his underground tire fortress.
Not having seen daylight in weeks, the dogs poured out, their big, muscular, toast-colored bodies eager.
Vinnie sat back to watch the guy being torn limb from limb. There were no dogs more ferocious than the African ridgeback, for they had been bred to fight lions and hunt men.
REMO SAW THE DOGS coming for him and decided his search was over. They came out of a hole in an embankment. And knowing that dogs don't normally dwell underground, he figured he had the right patch of dirt.
Howling and yapping, the three dogs galloped toward him like small toast-brown horses.
Remo let the first one pass between his legs. The dog kept on going, snapping at legs that his eyes told him were still in front of him.
The second dog went for his throat, and Remo got him by his floppy ears. Spinning, he sent the canine flying tail first into an evergreen.
The third dog, seeing all this, skidded to a stop. The dark bristly ridge along his smooth back lifted like hackles. He growled.
Remo casually tossed him a dog treat. The dog sniffed it, gobbled it up and Remo tossed another.
By this time the other dogs had gotten themselves organized, and Remo began flinging treats in all directions. The dogs fell upon them with eager, sniffling muzzles.
While they were occupied, Remo opened the hatch in the ground and yelled down. "Vinnie Cerebrini?"
"You get outta my house!" an agitated voice shouted up.
"You Vinnie 'Three Dogs'?" Remo asked.
"I said, you get out my house, gaybo. I don't swing your way."
"I don't know what you're talking about. I'm here to kill you."
"Stay away from me," Vinnie said. "Don't touch me."
And Vinnie lifted a Mak-90 assault rifle.
"Look, you're a bad guy and that thing won't help you much," Remo told him. "Let's just get this over with, okay?"
"Listen, I'll blast you to hell before I let you lay hands on me."
Shrugging, Remo set himself as if about to drop in for a visit.
Vinnie "Three Dogs" Cerebrini opened fire. The Mak-90 emptied itself up at the hovering fruit. Trouble was the fruit had some really smooth moves. He sidestepped every shot. Must have studied ballet, Vinnie decided, yanking the clip out and inserting another.
He was about to bring the weapon up to bear when suddenly the roof started coming down. Dirt showered, then heavy tires started dropping like bombs. They hit, bounced and rolled crazily. Vinnie had to dance out of the way to keep from being run over by the very protection he had labored to create for himself.
Above, the fruit seemed to be stamping and stomping around in controlled, angry circles.
"Oh, man, look at him go. This flaming hornbag must not have gotten laid since Christmas."
So Vinnie began shooting wildly into his own roof. The trouble was, the very tires that had kept bullets out also absorbed those trying to go the other way. Try as he might, Vinnie could not whack the annoyed fruit. "You are a dead man," he shouted up during a lull.
"Not yet."
"After you are dead, I'm gonna piss into your dead mouth. I am going to abuse your corpse. I don't care what people say. How you like that?" raged Vinnie, peppering the ceiling above with hot lead. Cold dirt showered down in response.
More roof tires sagged and spilled earth. The air became a cloud of unbreathable dust.
Vinnie was on his fourth clip, surrounded by dirt and rubber with a big patch of New England sky overhead when he felt a hand on his shoulder. The hand felt like a claw bucket. Then the fingers dug in.