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Across the desk, my father studied me as though he no longer recognized the son he had raised.
“What happened to the boy?”
“I let him go.”
“Where?”
“I gave him money and put him on a train.”
“You put a witness on a train.”
“I put a child on a train.”
His mouth tightened.
“And what do you think happens now?”
“He’ll live his life, far from here.”
“No.” My father rose until we were standing on opposite sides of the desk, almost a mirror image of one another. “He’ll remember. And one day, he’ll come back for you. Maybe not today. Perhaps not tomorrow. But someday.”
My father had loved me in the only way men like him knew how. He taught me to shoot before he taught me to drive. He taught me where to cut a man so death came quickly. When nightmares woke me as a child, he sat beside my bed until morning and pretended he had never been there.
He had made me dangerous because he believed danger was the only thing that could keep me alive.
“You think I made you into this,” he stated.
I looked at the blood on my shirt.
“Didn’t you?”
His eyes dropped. For the first time in my life, my father looked old. Tired.
“I gave you the skills needed to survive me.”
The anger left me so quickly that it made me dizzy.
He moved around the desk and stopped in front of me.
“You believe there is a clean life waiting somewhere beyond these gates,” he told me. “There is not. Men like us carry violence with us. Til death.”
I stared at him.
He reached up and straightened the collar of my shirt, the same small gesture he had made before funerals, weddings, and every first day of school. His hand settled against my cheek.
I covered his wrist with my hand. “I have to leave.”
He didn’t seem surprised.
“I know.”
“You will not stop me?”
“If I stop you, you will stay.” His voice lowered. “And whatever is left of my son will die in this house.”
Those were the last words my father said to me.
The next morning, he left the house early, heading toward a meeting in Rome. He had decided to take my car, which I knew was his way of delaying the inevitable. He knew I wouldn’t leave until he returned, and he could take his time knowing I would be waiting for my beloved Mustang Shelby.
