Chelsey began looking around as they headed for the stairs.
“So the doctor gave him a clean bill of health?”
“He’s doing better, thank God,” Liz said as they walked. “The doctor was able to leave, to take a break, so he’s hopeful of a full recovery too. But he’ll be back to check on him.”
“Anybody else in the house?” Chelsey asked.
“Jimmy, that’s Tommy’s nephew, is up there with him now. Sal and their cousin Reno are out taking care of some business.”
“I still don’t understand though, Liz,” Chelsey said as they climbed the stairs. “Why would anybody want to kill a good guy like Tommy? Or do you know why?”
“We don’t know yet,” Liz said. “We have some ideas, but we don’t really know.”
“You may never know,” Chelsey said.
“Perish the thought,” Liz said and they entered the room. Jimmy was there, but he was asleep in the chair. Tommy, in bed, was also asleep. He looked drained in the face, and was heavily bandaged, but no worse for wear, Liz felt.
Chelsey looked at Tommy. “He looks pretty beat up,” she said.
“He is. It was a terrible ambush. But God was with him because if you would have seen the bullet holes in his Maserati you would be stunned he lived through that.”
“I can only imagine,” Chelsey said. Then she looked from Tommy, to the young man asleep in the chair. “That must be Jimmy,” she whispered.
“It is. He’s tired. I’m tired. We all are.”
“You do look awful, Liz, I hate to say it.”
Liz felt self-conscious. “I know. I could use a really hot shower.”
“Then go take one!” Chelsey insisted. “I’ll sit here with Tommy.” Then she smiled. “And Jimmy.”
Liz smiled too. It was good having Chelsey there. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Of course I don’t. Go!” She pushed Liz toward the bathroom.
Liz didn’t argue with her. Reno and Sal had been gone all day, Jimmy was exhausted, and she felt as if she hadn’t had any sleep since Sunday night. She needed the break. She hurried into the bathroom, closing the door behind her, before Chelse changed her mind.
Chelsey stood there. She stared at Tommy, then at Jimmy, and back at Tommy again. So this was the man who was going to take Liz from her, she thought. This was the one, of all the men Liz had before, who just might pull it off.
It was an inconvenient truth for her to face.
The car drove fast through the Chicago streets. Reno sat up front, while Sal sat in the back as the driver hurried them back to Sal’s estate.
“What if all of this wasn’t about getting Tommy?” Reno asked.
“What do you mean?” Sal asked.
“What if it it’s more about getting Tommy out of the way?”
“So Chelse can have Liz?”
“Or, I don’t know. But yeah. Something like that.” Then Reno looked ahead. “What the fuck?” he asked.
When Sal looked too, and saw that the gate to his estate was opened, his heart dropped. “Where’s the fucking gatekeeper?” he asked.
But when they saw the gatekeeper knocked unconscious at the guard booth, they panicked.
“Floor it!” Sal screamed to the driver. “Floor this motherfucker! My brother’s in there! My brother’s in there!”
And the driver floored it all the way up to the front entrance. Reno and Sal jumped out, their weapons drawn, and hurried toward the door.
Upstairs, Tommy was now wide awake and was staring at the woman with the knife to his throat.
And she was telling him the plan. “First I’m going to butcher you,” she said, “and then I’ll take care of the bitch in the bathroom.”
Tommy glanced at Jimmy. He was on the floor by the bed, knocked unconscious, and Tommy was concerned for his nephew. But he had an immediate problem of his own. Namely this crazy lady with a knife. Tommy looked at her hand as it unsteadily held that knife to his throat. He was stiff as steel, as he thought about, tried to figure out, plotted how in the world he was going to get that knife out of her hand without slitting his own throat.
“We worked so hard to build it up,” she was saying, “and that bitch in the bathroom came along and knocked it down. But that’s Lovely Liz. She’s pretty. She’s smart. She’s everything I’m not. And she exploited that. She used that. Now she’ll know what it feels like! I want her to see your bowels coming out through your neck. I want her heart to be broken when she leaves this life. I want her to know what that feels like. And she will know!”
The knife pressed into Tommy’s neck and was ready to slice it. Tommy, knowing that time was out, moved swiftly to grab her arm. But he was too late.
Her arm slung out just as the bullet crashed into her forehead, and she fell backwards, taking the now airborne knife with her.
“Jesus!” Liz yelled when she heard the gunshot from the shower. “Oh my God!” she cried and jumped out, grabbed a towel, and hurried to the door. She opened it cautiously, not certain if it was another attack on Tommy. But what she saw floored her.
Sal was standing at the bedroom entrance with a smoking gun in his hand. Reno was running to Jimmy, and Jimmy was unconscious on the floor. At first she thought Sal had shot Jimmy, but then she realized Sal’s gun was still pointing toward Tommy.
Horrified, she looked toward Tommy’s bed. To her relief, Tommy appeared fine. Exhausted, but fine. But a woman she knew to be Karen Johansson was lying on the floor beside the bed. And she appeared dead, which floored her even more. What in the world was Karen doing here? And that was when she saw Chelsey, tied to a chair, duct tape over her mouth. She was trying to talk. She was bouncing up and down begging to be set free.
Sal removed the duct tape from her mouth and she immediately cried, “Karen no! Don’t do it! Karen no!”
She cried and she cried, as if there was still time. Liz couldn’t believe it. Reno and Sal either. But she kept crying for Karen to stop. She kept crying as if Karen had not already done what she was begging her not to do.
When Sal cut the cords that tied her down, she got out of the chair and ran to Karen’s lifeless body. She was still crying no. She was still begging her longtime lover not to do what she’d already done. And just as it seemed as if she had no more voice to cry, Chelsey grabbed the knife from the floor, stood up over Tommy’s bed, and stabbed him straight through his stomach.
Reno pulled out his gun and shot Chelsey in the back before anybody else could react. But it didn’t matter. Nobody else had to react. She was just as dead as her lover.
Sal ran to his brother’s side, and Reno ran to Tommy’s side. And Liz stood there, trembling, unable to move.
Tommy looked at her. He reached his hand out to her, as if he could see her fear, and he could feel her pain. She went to him. She took his hand, and with tears in her own eyes, looked into his big, bright, expressive eyes.
It took all Tommy had to look at her. His eyes were growing faint, but he willed himself to stay conscious and look at her. Until he could not see anything else but her. Until he could not see anything but her magnificent face, fade to black.
EPILOGUE
They walked silently along the quiet beach behind Tommy’s home. It had been a slow healing process for Tommy. Much slower than even his doctors had anticipated. But three months in, he finally felt like his old self again. But as the darkness descended over the horizon, and they sat down right at the riverbank, his thoughts were with Liz.
She was sitting on the sand between his legs, with her back against his front. She had been quiet all evening. Which wasn’t like her. She usually outtalked him. She had, in fact, been wonderful during his convalescence. He could not have asked for more. She even took a leave of absence from her magazine and spent time in Seattle taking charge of his recovery. But now it was the last day of her leave. She was heading back to Chicago in the morning, and he was returning to work shortly thereafter. And she seemed concerned.
“What’s the matter, s
weetheart?” he asked her.
“I leave tomorrow.”
“That’s right. Do you have a problem with that?”
She smiled. “No. No problem.”
Tommy looked as her soft, short afro blew in the November wind. He couldn’t see her face, but he could feel the stress. “Then what’s wrong?” he asked her. “And don’t say nothing’s wrong because I know it is.”
Liz looked across the river. “It’s beautiful here,” she said. “I see why you bought this house.”
“It’s a lot of house. Even bigger than the house I used to live in. The one my ex-wife now owns.”
Liz looked back at him. “That doesn’t bother you that she’s living in your house with her new husband?”
“My daughter lives there too. It’s the only house Desi has ever known. I wasn’t taking that away from her.”
Liz looked at him.
“When you have children,” he said, “you’ll understand.”
Liz smiled and turned back around, facing the peaceful river. “Who says I’m going to have children?” she asked.
“I do,” Tommy responded. “We’re going to have babies, that’s for sure.”
Liz didn’t dispute him. She was in this relationship for the long haul and she loved how he wasn’t rushing anything. She was thirty-three and he was almost ten years older, but they were going to take their time. He’d already made that clear. “I’m glad,” she said.
“Glad about what?”
“The fact that we’re taking it slow. That we’re taking our time.”
Tommy hesitated. He knew they needed to revisit it. “My ex-wife had a similar thing happen to her,” he said. “She had to use firepower on one of my ex-lovers who had been stalking her. She never admitted how much that affected her. I think that night was the beginning of the end of our marriage.”
“It was an awful thing, I’m not gonna lie,” Liz said. “But not for the reasons you think.”
“Come on, Liz. Don’t you dare minimize this. I won’t allow that again. You’re still stunned by what happened to me that night and what you had to do to protect me. You have to be.”
“Yeah, it was tough having to do what I had to do. Yeah, I’m not saying it wasn’t. But I’d do it again to save your life. That’s what you don’t understand. I mind my own business, I do my own thing, but if people put my back against the wall I’m coming out swinging like a motherfucker.”
Tommy smiled and wrapped his arms tighter around her.
“Let’s make that clear,” she continued. “I’m not your ex-wife, Tommy. I know you have nightmares about me turning on you or whatever, and saying how I can’t live this kind of life or whatever, the same way she did, but that ain’t me. All right? Those assholes wanted to kill you that night. What was I supposed to do? Let them? Please. I’m not losing any sleep over people like that. They wouldn’t be losing any sleep over me if they would have won that battle. So bump them. It’s not about them.”
Tommy waited for her to say more. When she didn’t, he went there. “What is it about, Liz?”
“It’s about Chelsey and Karen. That’s what I can’t seem to get over. I just still don’t understand it. Karen is dead for what? Chelse is dead for what?”
“They would say love,” Tommy said. “Karen was madly in love with Chelsey, and she thought you were going to take her away.”
“But I’m not gay. Why would I want Chelse? Karen knew I was seeing you. And why would she have her brother set up that attack on you, if she was so angry with me?”
“Her brother was a small-time hood. He knew the rules. He knew, if his sister would have killed you, then I would have tracked her down like a dog and killed her. They had to take me out first. When it didn’t work, thanks to that little gun you kept in your nightstand drawer and your quick thinking, then they had to improvise. He got out of the country for his own safety.”
“You think Chelse came here to warn me about Karen. Didn’t you?”
“I know she did. I looked into it. Karen followed her here. When she realized her brother’s henchmen did not finish the job as they were paid to do, she decided she was going to finish it herself. She was coming here to kill you as soon as she found out I was dead. Now she had to get us both. She followed Chelsey because she knew Chelsey, unwittingly, would lead her to you.”
“But why would Chelse stab you?”
“Because I lived, and Karen didn’t. They had crazy love, Liz. And crazy love does crazy things.”
Liz shook her head. “It’s crazy alright. Me and Chelse have been best friends since childhood. Why would I all of a sudden want to take her away from Karen?”
“Because Karen had asked Chelse to marry her, and Chelse had turned her down.”
Liz turned completely around and looked at Tommy. “How do you know that?”
“My security firm investigated those two.”
“The same firm that can’t find Karen’s brother?”
“They’ll find him, don’t worry. Carmine Fontaine will be found. They know he’s no longer in Dubai, and all indications are that he made it to Europe, but he’ll be found.”
“So Chelse turned Karen down?”
“Yup.”
“Did you investigators find out why?”
Tommy hesitated.
“What?” Liz asked, more curious than ever now.
“Chelse told Karen that if she was going to marry anybody, it was going to be you.”
Liz couldn’t believe it. Chelse was holding on to impossible love, and Karen was holding on to Chelse.
And Liz finally grew faint. It seemed as if everything in her life had been turned upside down. What was happening?
But then she looked at Tommy again. He saw that look on her face too. He opened his arms to her.
And that small gesture alone, from the one human being she was growing to trust so completely, gave her strength. She went into his arms.
Despite the pain he still felt; despite the concern he still had that she might not be able to endure any more times like these, he pulled her tighter and tighter into his arms. He held onto her for dear life.
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Tommy Gabrini 4: Dapper Tom Begin Again Page 19
