A man’s life will depend on the minute—a man I consider blood.”
“I’ll take care—”
He shook his head. “Take your wife and go somewhere. You run this now.” He looked around. “You should be as far as possible from the chaos that will ensue after this. If you prove to the world that you have competent and dangerous men who follow you—” he shrugged “—you will gain respect from my side of the world.”
“Stone,” I said. “He’ll be all over it.”
“Everyone who means something will be all over this—there will be a meeting with the families after this is done. Things will change. However, Stone is out of the picture.”
I narrowed my eyes. Even though I understood his subtle language, sometimes things got lost in translation.
“He has been suspended from duty.” Rocco took another drink and then stood. “No one fucks with my family and gets away with it.”
I nodded, standing, and offered him my hand. We shook, and he squeezed my shoulder.
“Tell me about the other threat,” he said.
“Same shit, different day.” I grinned. It was no surprise that he knew about the country club—whatever that was meant to be. He also knew that before I took care of the problem, I had to make sure my finger was pointed in the right direction.
Rocco seemed to think about it for a minute before he nodded. “Bene.” He shook my hand even harder and then went for the door. He stopped before he opened it and said one word. “Dolce.”
After he’d gone, I sat back in my seat, staring at the wall.
Dolce.
The restaurant the Scarpones used as a front. It was their personal pride and joy. A place they used for family functions, and on certain Sundays of the month, they got together for family dinners.
The head of the Scarpone family, Arturo, was paranoid about too many people memorizing his routine after a man named Corrado Palermo, one of his closest, had tried to slit his throat. Arturo switched it up every so often to keep enemies guessing. It also made it easier to pinpoint the rat in his family if another attempt was ever made on his life. He kept his circle as close as lifeblood after the first attempt had failed.
I whistled long and slow, then took a deep drink of my whiskey. It went down like honey and caused a nice fire in the pit of my stomach.
Maybe it wasn’t the whiskey doing the magic; maybe it was what was about to happen.
Dolce only meant one thing.
Macchiavello was going to end whatever fucking vendetta he had against them, and he was going to use some of my men in the game. After word got around that I was part of it, I’d be considered the real fucking deal to the families, and to my own people, stronger than my old man.
In this life, nothing was ever given. It was fucking hard-earned.
You wanted respect. You had to give up some blood. And I’d donated plenty.
26
Cash
About a month later, I got the call from Rocco. The plan was simple and clean and no problem, but he insisted that I needed to get out of town before the job went down.
I decided to take my wife to Ireland, along with Maureen and the two kids. Keely insisted, since Ryan was old enough to travel.
I hired a private plane, and we took a red-eye out of New York five minutes before my men stormed Dolce with weapons drawn. The instructions were clear—take out these people and these people only. The rest was not my concern.
Rocco phoned me while we were somewhere over the Atlantic to say, “I heard the weather was clear for a good flight.” Then he hung up.
That meant whatever debt I owed Macchiavello had been paid in full—we were square.
Before we returned to New York, I was determined to get square with the woman who shot daggers at me as I drove through the streets of Derry in Northern Ireland. I’d made arrangements for Maureen and the kids to spend time with a cousin she had in Dublin. It was a three-hour drive from there, and the ride had mostly been silent.
My wife spent her time taking pictures, only asking me to slow at the Free Derry sign, and then looking it over on her camera after she’d taken a few. Even after we pulled up to the house I spent some years in as a kid, we barely spoke a word to each other.