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“From what I’ve gathered, the people in this town gave Jake a hard time while he was growing up.”
“He brought it on with his devil-may-care attitude,” Cole said, and then softened. “It was all a cover-up, though. Jake was a great guy. The best. He just couldn’t get a break. He was a bastard and his old lady was the town’s barmaid. Growing up in the back of the bar…The things that guy heard and saw made the rest of us drool, even in the retelling.”
It couldn’t have been easy, Blake figured, being so different in such a small town. He’d struggled a time or two with his own untraditional upbringing, with fitting in and feeling like a normal kid during those insecure adolescent years, and he’d lived in a town where you didn’t even know the people who lived in the condo above you.
“I think what did him in was falling for Rachel Diamonte. Her father, Mike Diamonte, owned quite a successful spread just outside of town. It was a classic heartbreak waiting to happen, boy from the wrong side of the tracks in love with one of the beautiful rich girls.”
“Did she like him?”
“Seemed to. But when he finally got up the guts to ask her out, she said no. He saw her alone once more after that, in the pecan grove by the bar. He never told me what happened, but I gathered it ended badly.”
“Whatever happened to her?”
“Last I knew, she’d married, was living in Chicago and was expecting a baby.”
“Are her folks still around?”
Cole shook his head and emptied his bottle of beer. “Mike died about five years ago. His wife, Sarah, sold the ranch. Moved into an elite development in River Bluff.”
“You’re doing a good job on this place,” Blake said next, looking around.
“It’s coming. But slowly.”
“Need some help? I got time this weekend.”
Cole was in the middle of enthusiastically accepting the offer when the doorbell rang.
Dinner had arrived.
SONNY CORLEONE WAS a hothead. A concern, considering that, as the eldest son of Don Vito Corleone, the godfather, he was next in line to run the family. And take on responsibility for handling many millions of dollars in businesses, as well as managing politicians and hit men.
With his
last bottle of beer just started, Blake pushed back in the lounger. He was replete with pizza. Enjoying comfortable, nonthreatening companionship that demanded nothing of him, and an interesting film. He was good. Better than good. He was fine.A few scenes back, when Sonny had started beating up Carlo, husband to Sonny’s sister Connie, for roughing her up, Blake had had a moment of discomfort. But that had turned out to be nothing more than the normal adrenaline rush that came with experiencing something secondhand.
Alone when another call came through, Sonny heard that Carlo was at it again. That Connie was being brutalized. And with the famous Godfather theme playing in the background, Sonny rushed to his sister’s rescue. Disregarding his father’s orders that he go nowhere, ever, without his entourage of bodyguards, he blew out into the streets in his big black car. If he lost even a second, it might cost Connie her life.
He was going to show that bastard what happened to a man who disrespected his women. He was going to beat the pulp out of him. He was going to make him pay for what had been done to his sister.
Reading all of this in the man’s expression, Blake was there with Sonny, determined to set the world right for his woman. Sometimes there were just things a man had to do—regardless of what he’d been told. And taught. Sonny might have a temper, but this time it was serving him in good stead.
He was a big brother going to the rescue. A knight in shiny black armor.
Reaching the entrance to the gated community where Connie and Carlo lived, Sonny skidded to a halt at the closed gate. It didn’t open. He pulled up to the gatehouse, ready to drive through the damn thing if he couldn’t get a response at once.
Hurry, Blake urged silently. Every second of hell for Connie, for the victim, was another infusion of stress, another series of memories, another level of walls being built to endure—walls that would imprison you forever, if they became too thick. If you needed them for too long.
If there was so much pain that you couldn’t cope with it anymore.
Men appeared on either side of Sonny’s car. There was one moment of shocked recognition. Blake could still see the streets of Jordan outside the restaurant where he’d been eating. And then, in his peripheral vision, they were there again, those men on the screen, coming up on both sides of him. Dressed in black, with hoods and rifles.
Shots fired. Hundreds of them. Sonny’s car was riddled with bullet holes, so many the car would never be the same. His body jerked, again and again, one way and another, as the slugs hit their mark, some tearing clear through him. Some lodging inside.
Blake could feel the burning against his wrists. Down his lungs, inside his diaphragm, as they poured something down his throat. Something touched the back of his head. He had to swat it off, to push and shove and get away, but he couldn’t move. There were too many of them, and every one of them had a vise grip on his body, hauling him away in plain sight of the other patrons in the restaurant.
Not one of whom said a word.
He was going to die. That was inevitable. His body would be found slumped over, bloody, beaten to an unrecognizable pulp. As with another body he’d seen. Annie would come to identify him and she’d be unable to do so. His baby was not going to know his father.
