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“You’re a pretty bad liar, Lucas.” He punches me in the gut.
Any air that I had left suddenly leaves me with a gasp.
“How can I believe you’re not in this too? How can I believe that you haven’t got a van following you? I got my best men watching right now, anyone suspicious comes onto this road and we will kill you quicker than you can blink.”
I try to answer. I try to free a hand and wave surrender, but the gun only tightens. I can’t breathe. My head is pounding and my heart is throbbing in my ears. “I swear,” I choke out. “I didn’t do this.”
“I’m sorry, what was that?” Tommy asks, cupping his ear. “I’m a little hard of hearing. Obviously, you thought I was some old bastard you could screw with!”
I swallow. A sliver of air finds its way to my lungs. “I couldn’t—” I’m dropped to my knees and the gun is pressed harder, a knee is put in my back and it well and truly crushes my throat closed. Tommy is leaning over me.
“You seem pretty fucking capable of it,” he whispers “You had my men killed in Labersky six years ago. Pretty fucking capable then. So I’d say pretty capable now. I only trusted this deal because of your father.” He slaps me as hard as he can.
“I can’t—” I try to say.
“Can’t what? Breathe?” Tommy asks.
I nod. “I can’t do this to—” I gasp for my last breath. “I can’t do this to women—”
“Don’t gimme that chivalry crap,” Tommy says. “You’ve done worse to people before my daughter. But you made the mistake of doing this to my daughter!”
He winds up to slap me again. “I can’t do this to the woman Ilove,” I finally blurt out.
Tommy’s face changes immediately. He drops his arm and nods. The gun is removed. I’m pushed to the ground where sweet oxygen floods my lungs and brain. I lie there for a few moments breathing deeply and grateful for the smell of fucking dirt. I savor the chance to keep on living. My head is pounding and hurting, my throat feels like it’s filled with crinkled paper, but at least I’m alive.
Tommy kneels down with me. “The woman you love, huh?” he asks. I’m picked up and put on my knees. I look up at him. “You pulling at my heartstrings, Luca?”
I shake my head softly. I rub at my throat tenderly. It’s as painful as anything I’ve ever experienced. Breathing burns. I rub the raw skin where the gun was pressed and feel the cuts. “I love her,” I repeat. “I do. I didn’t realize—I've been struggling with trusting her. But it was all Marco. He’s been playing us against each other. I didn’t see it because I was so blinded by rage and guilt over my father’s death. Over all of my stupid bullshit, wanting to be Don … He just played me. But—” I can’t bear to look Tommy Russo in the eyes. I can’t stare up at the same eyes, the ones that I love, the ones that Sophie has. I hang my head. “I mean, would I have come into this trap if I’d not felt that way?”
It’s silent for a while. The night creeps back in around us and I realize there are many men standing around us. I’m at the center. A fallen man on his knees. It’s only then I realize that my execution is still in the cards.
Tommy puts his hands on his hips though. Then he ducks down and puts a head under my shoulder and helps me up. “It’s alright, kid, I made some shit decisions too when I first took the job,”
“You’re not gonna kill me?” I ask.
Tommy laughs. “Lucas, I need you to get my daughter back. The woman you love. If I kill you, I lose the last connection to her that I need to get Marco.” Tommy carries me through to the workshop we’ve been beside. The lights come on and the men have followed us too. They all stand there with an arsenal among them. Handguns and shotguns, one guy even has an M4 hanging loosely in his hands. Some of Tommy’s men are ex-military, then. “What did you think I was bringing?” I croak, a laugh falling from my lips. “I came here expecting to die.”
Tommy smiles despite the situation. “Gotta be prepared, kid. Now,” he sits me in a chair and then sinks into one across from me. “So, how much do you know about Marco?”
I shake my head. “I’ve been trying to think it over, but I just met him when I was a young kid. We hit it off and he was homeless. He was stealing cars when I met him.”
Tommy nods his head and licks his lips. “Right. Nothing else? Any times where he seemed a little off? Any times where maybe he was more secretive than normal?”
I shake my head. “Nothing comes to mind. I’ve always been busy, so he was able to work around my business.”
Tommy scrubs his cheek and signals for a man to bring over a piece of paper. On it is a face. It’s a courtroom drawing.
“For a long time, there’s been a mystery down here in the mob families of Miami. This here is Al Manetti.” He gives it to me. “He used to be a big name in the Manetti family forty years ago. He snitched on the family though. Made a deal with the feds that got a lot of them put away. He betrayed the whole family and got a new name. Witness protection and all that shit. Of course, that kind of betrayal runs deep. It took them a long while, but eventually the living family members not behind bars for life found who and where he was. Luckily for your friend Marco, he’d been out at the time they dropped in to say hello. They killed Al and his wife and daughter in the living room. All of them had their tongues cut out.”
I’m staring at the drawing in awe as Tommy talks. He looks just like his father. Marco is his spitting image.
“Hold up, why wouldn’t my father mention this?’ I say. “If he knew that Al Manetti had been hunted down and killed, and that his son was alive, wouldn’t he suspect Marco?”
“Maybe,” Tommy says, pondering the thought. “But Michael always felt odd about it. You see, the way Al got a connection into the feds was because they’d tried contacting Michael first. Back then, he wasn’t Don, just the son of a Don instead. He of course said no, but because Al had all of us being watched at the time. Paranoid prick … well, you can guess the rest.”
“You mean my fatherallowedMarco to hang around because he suspected him?” my body feels as if it’s been punched again.
“Potentially. But you have to also understand that technically Marco was dead. Because before he wasMarco, I’ve since learned that he is also a spitting image of Sam Piraldo—his witness protection name. Sam died in a car crash off the port bridge heading down Key West on the same night as his parents and sister were killed. Car was found, but no body. Assumed dead once a heavily eaten corpse was found among the shores of the Everglades. He then came into your life five years after he supposedly died. That’s enough time to change who he was.”
