by the bushel, hoping the wheat and chaff would separate themselves. “Mickey Roughneck?” No. “Seventh Street Stevie?” No. “Biscuithead?” Confused stares, then no.
Peter offered up, “Maybe we should consider including our buddy in Alphabet City?” Should we take out Matthew McManus?
Pop squinted, returned to massaging his temples. “We invite him we gotta invite all his friends, too.” That opens up an entirely new list of people to consider, and everyone on that list carries approximately the same threat.
“Not to mention,” I said, “it would likely offend his friends back home.” We’d long suspected that McManus was serving the Irish mob at the same time, figuring he didn’t want all of his eggs in one frying pan, patiently waiting to see which family would emerge as the ultimate force in New York. If true, we wouldn’t want to take him out unless absolutely convinced he posed a problem.
In came a gap in the conversation, filled with nothing but sighs and audible swallowing. My father scanned the room slowly, moved from face to face as if mentally extracting a list of individuals out of their respective lifetime experiences, and when he finally turned my way, he stopped. We stared at each other for too long a time. I licked my lips a little, my hands slightly cupped and aimed skyward. I was thinking, What, why am I so interesting? He tilted his head down as if using it to point and said, “Johnny, you got to take that girl of yours on a date.” Stop screwing around and kill the McCartney girl.
I snapped to attention like I’d been asleep in class and called on for an answer. Suddenly, each and every nod was exaggerated, the entire den filled with bobbleheads.
Nodding the hardest, Peter added, “Really, Johnny. You got to know how to treat a gal or she’s gonna leave you for someone else.”
Then only my own swallowing could be heard. I surveyed the eyes of the room, looks of annoyance and impatience layered upon me like winter blankets, that of all the people who might need to have their hearts stopped, here was a witness who should have long been buried.
What had I been doing all this time? Where my family was concerned, I figured the best I could do was stall, make so much time pass that no one would care about her anymore. But the frigging feds had brought her right back into the limelight. The problem was this: For all I knew, Melody really was planning to use her waning testimony against us. Though what she’d witnessed was thrown out of court all those years ago, they might want to use her for some angle of evidence, something as innocuous as acknowledging that she saw my father in Vincent’s and nothing more, a piece of evidence that might be linked to someone else who would take the baton and dash forward to the next witness.
Give a paintbrush and a unique color to a hundred different people and ask them to paint an object on the same canvas. What you get in the end is a convoluted mess of different styles and strokes—but when the last painter is finished, there is no denying you’re staring at a completed work. You might not get it, but you’d probably nod your head and think, Yeah, I guess that’s a piece of art. Melody would be nothing more than a twenty-six-year-old woman holding a brush dabbed in blue. And the jury would be nodding our crew all the way to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.
And then another realization arrived like a kidney punch: Most likely, the feds knew how aware we were of their operation—in fact, we figured it was probably part of their plan all along, that they hoped to catch us in the act of taking out one of their witnesses, a partial setup at the potential cost of a human life or two. If that were true, my staking out of Melody would have to come to an end, for I would have been perceived as a threat—hunting Melody instead of protecting her—and taken down on the spot.
If it were possible to taste pallor, I would’ve been swallowing down its sickly aftertaste. I cannot recall any other moment when I felt my anxiety surge as it did in those few seconds. What my family had seen as an annoying hobby of mine—feeble attempts on Melody’s life—now had a predetermined, absolute ending.
I smiled a little, wiped my brow; luckily, I wasn’t the