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DELLA

She knew exactly what was on her mind, but the words were a problem. How do you tell a man that his father is a crazy old bastard, completely out of control and dangerous and who, at that very moment, was scaring the living hell out of her?

“Have you heard from Sara?” Tony asked.

She’d not expected the sudden change in his voice, the way the tone went from a question to a plea. But it was the question itself that caught her off guard. She’d come to tell him that his father had confronted her, and later her mother, and that these confrontations had really frightened her and so she’d decided that he needed to know about them. That was as far as she’d intended to go. Certainly, she’d had no expectation of admitting that Sara had called her, even hinted at where she was and what she was doing. But Tony had asked her outright, and so she knew that the moment had come-the moment of truth, they called it in the movies-when you had to confront the full and awesome nature of your peril or live a coward all your life.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I have, Tony.”

His eyes caught fire, and she saw in that instant the depth of his love and the torment of its loss. “Is she okay?” he asked softly.

“Yeah,” Della answered. “She’s fine.”

She expected a volley of questions to follow, hard and blunt, raining down upon her like a hail of bullets. But instead, Tony shrank back against the car, folded his arms, and let his head droop forward for a moment. “Good,” he said.

“I don’t know where she is,” Della said. “Just that she’s okay.”

Tony drew himself up and settled his gaze on the empty street. “That’s all that matters.”

She had never heard a man say a more wholly selfless thing. She’d thought he was like his father, filled with the Old Man’s seething violence, but now he seemed merely broken, and in his brokenness curiously baffled, like a man who’d been badly beaten in some bar brawl and was struggling to understand how the argument began.

“You and Mike,” he said. “You’re happy?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good.” He started to speak, then stopped, and in that awkward gesture Della saw the young man Sara had first met, so vulnerable and uncertain, seeking love, infinitely kind.

“The thing is,” he began, then stopped, glanced once again into the night, then back to Della. “Before you know it, things get out of hand.”

“They do, Tony.”

“And the years go by, you know?”

“They do, yeah.”

He gazed at his shoes, kicked lightly at the cement pavement. “So, that’s how it goes.” He studied the deserted yard. His face grew somber. “You think she might come back, Della? On her own, I mean.”

She shook her head.

“No, I don’t either,” Tony said. “So, what now? You got any ideas?”

“Just one thing, Tony,” Della said. “You gotta be careful about your father.”

“My father?”

“He’s scary, you know?” The rest burst from her in a torrent. “The thing is, I told my mother about him coming over. I know that before I told you he didn’t come, but he did. And, Tony, he was really scary, and so I told my mother about it and she went to see him ’cause it turns out they knew each other in high school, and so she figured she could put in a word for me.”

“A word about what?” Tony asked.

“Like, leave me alone. That kind of word. Because, the thing is, he grabbed me. When he came over that time. And so my mother went over to tell him to, you know, leave me alone, but she didn’t get anywhere with that because he was the same way to her. You know, like real threatening.”

“He threatened your mother?”

“He scared her,” Della said. “And she came back and she told me to just stay out of it because he-your father-he was… dangerous.”

“Dangerous,” Tony repeated softly.

“Yeah, Tony. So that’s why she said I should stay out of it.”

Tony’s gaze was oddly admiring. “Why didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t do it,” Della answered. “Because… if he’d hurt me, and then my mother, well, I had to think what he might do to Sara, you know?”

Tony looked like a man who’d long expected terrible news but was only now getting the full report of just how terrible it was. “Thank you,” he said quietly, then reached out and touched her arm. “Thank you, Della.”

TONY

He’d been waiting for almost half an hour when his father’s dark blue Lincoln turned into the driveway. The Old Man drove the car himself now, the days when he’d been chauffeured around by some gorilla long gone. Tony knew that even in the old days his father had never been very high in the criminal pecking order. He’d carried himself like a big shot, though, smoked expensive cigars and dressed in fancy double-breasted suits, and hired muscle he didn’t need, usually some has-been boxer who chauffeured him from one crummy shylocking operation to the next. But now the great Leo Labriola was alone behind the wheel, a big, blustering man still, but one without backup.

“What are you doing here?” the Old Man said as he pulled himself out of the car. He was wearing flannel trousers and a floral shirt. In such attire he looked as if he should pass the autumn of his life playing pinochle in a retirement community in Florida instead of hiring some goon to track down a woman.

“What?” Labriola snapped. “What you looking at?”

“Nothing,” Tony said with a shrug.

“You curious?”

“What?”

“You curious where I been?”

“No.”

“With Belle,” Labriola said, his eyes daring Tony to say a word about it. “She blew me.”

“Jesus,” Tony said disgustedly.

“You don’t like it?” the Old Man barked.

Tony shrugged again. What did it matter what he liked or didn’t like about his father’s life? Belle Adriani had been the Old Man’s mistress for as long as Tony could remember, a bleached-blond club dancer with long fire-engine-red fingernails and a perpetual pout. Labriola had picked her up when she was twenty and had kept her as his personal sex slave ever since. Once he and his mother had run into them at a local street fair. His mother put her hand on Tony’s arm, led him in the opposite direction, and never uttered a word about it.

“Belle does what I tell her.” The Old Man laughed. “Not like that fucking hayseed you married.”

“We need to talk,” Tony said.

Labriola scowled, then elbowed past Tony and headed up the cement walkway that led to the house. When he reached the front steps, he turned toward his son. “Okay, so? Talk.”

“It’s about Sara,” Tony said.

The Old Man waved his hand. “That’s being taken care of.”

“How is it being taken care of?”

“I told you I’d find her.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“What difference does it make how I do it as long as it gets done?”

“You know anything about Eddie?”

“You mean that mick works for you? What about him?”

“He’s missing.”

Labriola laughed. “So what? Jesus, some fucking mick works for you goes missing and you think I know something about it? What’s the matter with you, Tony? What I got to do with this guy?”

“I need to know who’s looking for Sara,” Tony said.

Labriola glared at him. “You don’t need to know nothing I don’t want to tell you.”

“Who’s looking for Sara?” Tony demanded.

“What’s that got to do with this fucking mick?”

Tony started to answer, then stopped. If he told the truth, Caruso’s head was on the block.

“I want you to stop looking for Sara,” he said instead.

Labriola squinted, as if against an unexpected flash of light. “You what? You want me to stop looking for that-”

“Don’t call her names,” Tony blurted out.

“What, you a tough guy all of a sudden?”

“I mean it,” Tony said firmly. “Don’t call her names.”

“You’re still pussy-whipped, Tony. She’s still got you by the balls.”