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CHAPTER ONE
Seven Years Ago - Massimo
HE’S FUCKING DRUNKagain.
Why I am I not surprised? It’s seven am on a Monday morning, why wouldn’t my father be sleeping off his latest bender in a holding cell downtown? He has nothing better to do. He hasn’t had a job in years. I pay his bills, buy his groceries, and even have a cleaning service at the house once a week. All his needs are taken care of by me.
I scrub my hand down my face. It does nothing to ease the tension in my body. I don’t even know why I do it. Do I really think I can wipe away the stress that easy?
No. I do it because it’s a habit to keep myself from taking out my aggression on an unsuspecting and undeserving bystander. Lucky for me. I happen to have a suspecting and deserving little bastard at my disposal this time.
The irritation I previously felt from the Police Captain’s phone call fades away. The adrenaline of retribution now courses through my veins. I crack my neck and stretch my shoulders as I cross the room and join my latest victim once again.
Though, I shouldn’t use the term victim. The prick deserves everything he has coming to him. “You’re lucky Luca said not to kill you.”
Luca is my best friend. He’s also my boss. I report to him, and he reports to his Dad Ricco, the Underboss to the Caruso Mafia. As his firstborn male, Luca will inherit his position when Ricco retires.
“Personally I think you deserve it. You fucked us over Fred. You double crossed us.” I hit him with a jab to the gut. He grunts in pain. “Weren’t we good to you? We paid you handsomely, and all you had to do was keep our shipments off the manifests and the information to yourself. But you got greedy didn’t you?”
He can’t answer me. I broke his jaw before I was interrupted by my phone call. He can’t look at me either. The punches to his face earlier have caused his eyes to swell shut. It will be a few days before he will be able to see clearly again.
His arms are tied up and stretched above his head. I hung him so his toes barely touched the floor. It’s a classic torture method. Makes the person feel as though they have a smidgen of hope. Like a carrot dangled in their face.
“If I were you, I would get out of town. Run as far and as fast as you can.” I pick up the metal baseball bat from my table of toys. I test its weight in my hands before I give it a swing. Fred lets out an ear piercing howl. “Whoops. Guess you won’t be running. Maybe you can drive with your left leg.” I put the bat bag on the table. I prefer to feel the blood of enemies on my hands. With that in mind, I work a combination of jabs, crosses, and hooks on Fred’s immobile body.
He’ll live, albeit painfully.
I wipe his blood off my knuckles with a towel, then give a nod to the two soldiers in the corner. They know my expectations for the clean-up, so I leave them to it while I hop into my Camaro.
It’s time for me to pick up my father, Giuseppe D’Angelo. The cops know the drill. When they get a call for him, they are to pick him up, call me, and lock him up until I can get him. Nothing goes on his record. No reports are written up.
At one time my father was a soldier in the Caruso Mafia. He was part of the crew that padded the cops’ pockets when we needed them to look the other way. That seems like a lifetime ago. In a sense it is. Nothing is the same as it was back then. Not me, my family, not even the Mafia.
When I was little, I had a two parent home. My father, the soldier, and my mother, Helen, a hairdresser. We weren’t rich but we were happy. Or so I thought. Little did I know my mother was a lying, cheating, bitch. She had been sleeping around on my father while he had been working his ass off day and night, taking every job no matter how dirty or dangerous so we could have a better life. He knew she wasn’t happy with our financial situation. To put it blunt, we were broke. Dirt ass poor. Living in a rundown trailer with a roof that leaked and a fridge that only worked half the time.
While my father had grown up middle class, my mother’s family had lived beyond their poverty level means. Her father was a gambler. A bad one at that. He lost what little they had at the tracks. It got so bad he was taking cash he got from one loan shark to pay another.
At that time, my father and mother were recently married and expecting me. They had met in high school and it was love at first sight. Or so my father claims.
One night my father got a call for a job. A man was late on his payment. An example needed to be made. He couldn’t do it. The man was his father-in-law. My dad went to the Don and begged him to reconsider. Told him he would take on his debts and work them off in exchange for leniency.
It was granted on the condition that my mother’s parents leave the city and never come back. To this day, they haven’t stepped foot in the city. I probably should feel bad for never knowing my grandparents. I don’t.
My father ended up unable to afford our apartment and had to move us into the trailer park on the outskirts of town. It was only temporary. He promised my mom he would work the debts off quickly. The Don was a bastard. He kept adding interest, making it impossible for my family to crawl out of the hole they were in.
It wasn’t until Dad’s best friend Ricco had earned a favorable position with the Don’s son, Bosco, after saving his life that things started to turn around. Bosco ensured my father was put under his command and paid him handsomely. Unfortunately it was too late for my mother. By then it had been years, and she had already left us.
Her betrayal wrecked my father. He was so in love with her, that he couldn’t fathom how she was able to leave him. Especially after all he had done for her and her family.
Disloyal. That’s what she is.
I despise disloyalty. Much like I despise cheating.
It's been years and my father still barely manages to be sober for more than a few hours. It’s how he copes with the pain of her loss. With the loneliness. I want to hate him. I should hate him. He wasn’t the only one who lost someone that day.
Actually I guess you could say I lost two someones.
In my teens I kept waiting for him to go back to the man he was. To put the bottle down and put me first. He didn’t.
