He called me Christmas Day of 1986. He sounded happy and desperate at the same time. “We’re going to California to live,” he said. “Danny and Lizzy and me. I’m out, Ray. I’ve worked it out with Pop and Uncle Dom and-”
I hung up on him because I was furious.
Later that day, Christmas Day, Pop told me they’d arranged to let Mikey out of the family for as long as Jimmy was alive. So, Mikey didn’t exist no more. Obviously, this was out of respect for Jimmy, and not his coward of a son. All I could say on the phone to my own father was, “I’m sorry, Pop-I’m sorry I was the one brought Mikey along and couldn’t teach him one bit of sense or even the most basic rules.” Mikey was my failure.
Not long after, in the summer of 1987, Mikey did something even worse.
The video was sent to me by a friend in L.A. At first, I figured it was some more good San Fernando Valley porno, but no, this was a PBS news story showing some meatball walking across the stage at something-or-other junior high school in Irvine, California. And the meatball is Mikey.
The auditorium is full of children. Mikey’s got himself a cheap-looking suit and a white shirt but no tie. He’s put on some weight. He’s got a real serious look on his face. A fat lady introduces him as Michael Ticci, and Mikey goes to the podium and takes the microphone.
And he tells the students he comes from a prominent crime family in New York, where he was born and lived for all his life until a few months ago, when he quit crime, moved to California, got straight. He doesn’t name the family business. He tells about growing up in Little Italy, how it was a wonderful place for a kid, but he always thought there was something wrong about it. Then he tells how his great-great-grandfather built up a “wholesale food and produce” business before not-completely-honest men took it over. He’s standing up there with this kind of frown on his face, talking shit about his own family. In public, on TV, to a bunch of children!
And you could see the emotion in him. His eyes go kind of squinty and he gestures with his hands and his voice cracks when he talks about “beating that man until he nearly died,” and “Uncle Lou coming back from prison white as a ghost, with black hatred in his eyes,” and how difficult it is to get the smell “of another man’s blood off your hands,” and “what it’s like to live in a world where men substitute love of money for love itself, where money and power are all that matter, where there are no laws or limits.” He said Little Italy was gone now, it was just a skeleton of what it used to be, because organized crime had eaten it out “like a cancer.”
I watched the whole thing with my guts in a knot. Mikey had finally found something to say. I’d have gotten on a plane to California that day if it wasn’t for the family. I’d have choked him to death bare-handed and pissed on his face when I was done. But the arrangement was the arrangement, and there was nothing I could do about Mikey while Uncle Jimmy was alive.
Ten years went by, and I’d like to say I didn’t think about Mikey out there in California, but I did.
I thought about him a lot.
People like to think God lets things happen for a reason, and they’re right. Why else would the family decide to have a sixty-fifth birthday party for Uncle Jimmy? And why else would Mikey LiDecca decide to sneak back and see his father? And why, when Mikey went to his old house on Grand that morning to see his old man for the first time in eleven years, walked right up and rang the intercom on the gate outside, and when Jimmy heard his son’s voice, of course he let him in, why, when they sat in the old kitchen with Christina and the girls long gone, did Jimmy’s heart just give up? Why did he die in Mikey’s arms right there, one day before he was going to turn sixty-five? Answer me that.
I offered Mikey a ride home from the hospital, where the medics had rushed Jimmy and Mikey, just in case there was a miracle waiting for the old man. There was not.
Mikey gave me a long, kind of foggy look. “Thanks, Ray.”
I parked my Caddy near the house on Grand. “You gotta see this, Mikey.”
“What’s that, Ray?”
“It’s not far.”
We walked down Grand, past Elizabeth and Mott and Mulberry. Like we’d done a million times as boys. It was still sunny out, but cold. Mikey shuffled along next to me, looking down.
“You said on TV that it got eaten up by a cancer,” I said. “But I say, fuck that, Mikey. It’s smaller, that’s all. It’s still a place for people like us.”
“What do you mean?”
“This. Little Italy. You say it’s dead, but it isn’t. It’s alive. Here. Look at this.”
I led the way down an alley behind the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas. There were puddles of rain from the night before. I hopped around them, got out ahead of Mikey, then turned and faced him.
The alley was long and we were halfway down it, protected by the tall buildings. Mikey stopped and looked at me, and I saw that he got it. He finally got something. A little surprised, I think.
“With Jimmy gone, I can speak for the family now,” I said. “This isn’t just business. It’s personal, too.”
He did it right. Didn’t even put his hands up. I shot him, and he went down hard. Twice more.
I walked back the way we’d come, around the puddles, back toward the house on Grand. I felt like some long misunderstanding was now understood. Like the thing he wanted to say was said.
I felt bad for Mikey, but this was always our thing, and finally he’d gotten that, too.
T. JEFFERSON PARKER is the author of twenty crime novels, including Silent Joe and California Girl, both of which won the Edgar Award for best mystery. His last six books are a Border Sextet, featuring ATF task-force agent Charlie Hood as he tries to staunch the flow of illegal firearms being smuggled from the United States into Mexico. His most recent novel, Full Measure, is about a young man who returns from combat in Afghanistan to pursue his dreams in America. He lives in Southern California with his family and enjoys fishing, hiking, and cycling.
EVERMORE by Justin Scott
Stark ran west on Eighty-Fourth Street.
Starry-eyed gentrifiers had renamed the shabby old block Edgar Allan Poe Street. He crossed Riverside Drive against the light, gave a bus the finger and a cabbie a look that made the man reach for the tire iron he kept under the German shepherd on the front seat. It was the winter of 1981; life was already harsh in New York, and just when it seemed the city couldn’t get more dangerous, Stark was on the lam.
He cut into Riverside Park, turned off the tarmac path, frightened a child, and climbed an enormous rock. It stood high as the fourth floor of the apartment buildings across the drive. He sat beside an old steel door someone had stolen from someplace and glared at the Hudson River.
On the lam came in two varieties. Holed up in a four-star Bahamas hotel with a suitcase full of dough was good lam. The job gone wrong, a woman gone south with your getaway stash, and witnesses reporting which way you’d gone was bad lam. Bad lam meant you had to pull another job, like right now. But spur-of-the-moment heists promised jail or the morgue. So did sitting on this rock until the cops caught up.
The old door slid aside, and a cadaverous long-haired man climbed out of the hole it had covered. He sat on the door, gazed at the river, sharpened a pencil with a penknife, and scribbled in an ancient leather-bound notebook.