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“Tell me,” Frank insisted.
I started to go into the details, but Frank didn’t look satisfied.
“It’s a great deal,” I said.
“You never apologized,” he said, his eyes looking off into the distance. “Just took my daughter, that’s it. I bet it was your plan all along, you filthy pervert.”
My one second of hesitation to respond was all it took to set him off.
“You know what,” Frank said. “It’s over. You can forget it. No more deals with you. Consider us no more.”
“Frank, you’re acting rash,” I said. “We’re in public.”
There was a small sense of gratitude that I no longer had to deal with this childish man. We may have been friends but it was clear to me that he couldn’t handle the real world. He was obsessed with this vendetta against me for being with his daughter.
I wasn’t going to apologize. And I wasn’t going to admit that I had been with her. There was this fine line between reality and whatever it was that Frank believed. I wasn’t going to draw it for him.
“I’ll kill you,” Frank said. “Right in this restaurant.” His words were met with awkward glances from those around us. I sipped my coffee.
There was a gun in my breast pocket, if it came down to violence between Frank and me.How sad.
Luckily, he had the sense to leave. My waitress came by and put the check on the table without saying a word. She was smart to not want anything to do with me or Frank.
Putting people in fear wasn’t my business, it was making it rain cash. I placed a handful of assorted bills on the table, and walked out into the cold, winter air. It was a dreary morning with an overcast sky, and I took in the view.
For a few moments, it was just me and the city. All of the surrounding noise, the car horns, the beeping of pedestrian lights, and the shuffle of people’s footsteps, it was all just that. Noise. I breathed and didn’t think about a thing.
Still, I could feel an emptiness from within. Adriana should have been with me, telling her father that he needed some sense, that I was the prime reason for their comfortable lives, and that his actions would get us all killed.
I had to do something about it.
I got my phone out and dialed.
“I can meet you at Millennium Park,” I said.
“How long?” The other voice on the line was a distorted one. Whoever it was, they didn’t want me knowing who they were. Only that they had an important message for me.
“Give me 30 or so,” I said. I wanted to take the day in, and move around slowly. Frank wouldn’t really kill me in public. At least, I hoped not, and I felt safer out in the open.
I took my time because I needed to move slowly and vigilantly. Frank wanting to kill me made me realize just how fragile my existence was. Yet, I moved on, because honestly, there was no other way.
I needed to make money and live life, dominating. My thoughts went back to Adriana, and I felt this overbearing guilt. Whatever happened with her, her father, and myself, was going to be dangerous. Someone had already died. Frank killed the poor guy just to prove a point.
Being a rich man didn’t mean every experience was pleasant, and I didn’t like the idea of Frank being the way he was. I had known him for years, and he basically just told me he didn’t want me alive. Life was so worth living, and it was ridiculous to think that our business relied on people dying.
The truth was a lot more complicated than that.
Living as someone who benefitted from breaking the law was a road you paved yourself. The establishment needed people on the inside, and I was their man. I did what I wanted because I was willing to do what no one else could - deal with the toughest, most dangerous people, by being better at their game than they were.
Really, I was no one’s man, yet I was owned by the interpersonal politics in which one wrong move would prove to be disastrous. With Frank, I felt cornered, and sadly, Adriana was a piece of the puzzle.
She had the power to topple empires with her beauty, with her fierce intelligence, and she wasn’t one to back down from a challenge. As a man who had made his way in the world through his own cunning, women from my past held nothing to Adriana. What could I say? She was, in fact, my best friend’s daughter. My best friend, who was now my worst enemy and all because I had stuck my hand in the wrong pot.
If only her father understood the pull, if only we hadn’t met each other. But I couldn’t live that way. I couldn’t imagine a life without Adriana, and if it existed, it was a dreary one.
There had to be a way to have her back. I just needed to bide my time, and make the right moves. One misstep, and it would all be over.
Getting to Millennium Park wasn’t difficult, but finding my contact proved out to be. I had received the message shortly after Adriana had been rescued from her kidnapping.
