once they take me in. I don’t know if this is my last car ride, or if I’ll ever see Alannah again. If this means what I think it means, there’s a chance Alannah may never know what happened to me. They may never find my body at all, and she’ll be haunted for the rest of her life, wondering why I disappeared.
This is the life we live in Our Thing. Piss off the wrong guy, you get clipped. It’s something I’ve learned to accept, even though it’s fucked up. But that’s not the worst part of it. The worst part is knowing my life will end before I ever got the chance to live it with her.
Dominic
“Alright, let’s go.”
Big Sal has to remind me that we’ve arrived and it’s time to get out of his car. I sit there in the passenger seat, my breathing heavy and my nerves on high alert, feeling frozen. I can’t move. I don’t want to move. I’m not ready for whatever is waiting for me behind those doors. John has to open my door for me from the outside, and even then, I’m not still not ready.
Again, they walk behind me like guards escorting a prisoner, and with each step, I ask myself what I’m going to do when we get in there and I see Frankie waiting for me. Am I supposed to just lay down and let him put a bullet in my head? Do I not fight back out of respect of La Cosa Nostra and his title as acting boss? How can I possibly continue respecting This Thing of Ours if Leo and The Commission gave the okay for me to be clipped over my feelings for a woman who hasn’t broken any of our rules? The questions are many and the answers are few, and my heart can barely take it all. But when we push through the doors, it’s not just Frankie I see.
Inside, The Lodge is filled with every made member of the Giordano family. Every made member of Big Sal’s crew is seated on one side of the long glass table, every member of John Salvatore’s crew on the other. I even recognize the two made guys from Frankie’s crew at the back of the table, and seated in the middle of them, is Frankie Leonetti himself. He has the meanest face out of every man in this room, and when he sees me, he doesn’t even acknowledge that I’ve arrived. He doesn’t do or say anything.
John takes a seat with his crew, while Sal leads me to a seat closer to the head of the table. His crew greets me with smiles and open arms as I go to take my seat, and I feel even more questions being born in my head and crying for attention. Why the hell is everyone here? Why didn’t Frankie acknowledge me? And if he sent for me, why isn’t he saying or doing anything? What. The. Fuck.
I sit down and look around the room at the made members of The Family. Some of these men are absolute killers who wouldn’t hesitate to put a knife in your throat if you rubbed them the wrong way, but I’ve known these guys since I was a kid.
Jim Costello is the top solider of Frankie’s crew, and I remember meeting him when I was just thirteen. He latched on to the Boy Wonder bandwagon after he watched me hold up an ice cream truck at gunpoint, and he always told me I was going to be a big deal in this family.
Then there’s Raphael Barissi, the youngest made guy in Big Sal’s crew. He was the first guy who was made after me, and we’ve been good friends a long time. We used to hang out a lot when Alannah left, getting into all kinds of trouble, putting our names on the map at the same time. We used to call him Raphy for short, because nearly everybody in The Family has some sort of nickname. Raphy’s only problem was that his father became a rat back when the FBI was all over The Family’s ass, and he got a lot of the old heads sent away for a long time. So, even though Raphy was a good kid and a decent earner, his father’s legacy always kind of stuck with him, like a ball and chain attached to his ankle.