The Exceptions

by David Cristofano

  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 only one sweating. “Consider it done,” I said. “I’ll make sure I give her what she needs.” The source of my sweat: If I didn’t give her what she needed, someone else in our crew was going to. No longer a tying-up-loose-ends issue, Melody didn’t stand much of a chance. My father bit the inside of his cheek as he focused on me. “You need a chaperone?”

  I could see those words coming like a fly ball aimed directly at my glove. “Nah, this party is gonna be so big I’m assuming we need people cooking and cleaning elsewhere, right?”

  Pop squeezed his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger, his head tipped down further as he stared at me.

  “Okay, Johnny,” he said finally. “Treat her right, okay?”

  I looked down at my shoes, wiped the sweat from my forehead under the guise of a scratch. “I know, Pop.”

  The conversation lasted another hour, but the last words I tried to interpret were Peter’s: “You got to know how to treat a gal or she’s gonna leave you for someone else.” Not a single thought or idea ran through my head that wasn’t an attempt at solving this problem, at finding a way to set that little six-year-old girl free once and for all.

  My sisters-in-law prepared a table—a feast—filling the enormous gap my mother left when she passed away. We congregated to fill our plates, then evenly dispersed over the dining room, kitchen, dinette, and sunroom, consumed veal and sausage and pasta and salads and breads. The conversation turned unusually light, in both quantity and quality. No one noticed my lack of discussion; it had become the common denominator. The only perceptible voices came from the women; the men had a lot on their minds.

  And on mine: “You got to know how to treat a gal or she’s gonna leave you for someone else.”

  I sat in the corner of my parents’ dinette, my seat pushed back against a window that overlooked a crumbling brick patio, its devastation delivered by the roots of maples and oaks that predated the house by decades. I shoved my plate away, took a long pull off a Moretti, and stared at Peter, who sat in the dining room at a far and distant angle from me. He twisted his neck to get a kink out, and when he did he noticed me watching him. We stared at each other for a few seconds, his words still echoing through my head.

  And suddenly my mind opened wide, exposing a gush of beauty, like a daylily receiving its initial blast of morning sunlight.

  The first and only time I utterly adored my older brother, Peter: that very day—the moment he supplied me with an unintentional epiphany despite himself. “You got to know how to treat a gal or she’s gonna leave you for someone else.” The someone else quite obviously referenced the feds, that her allegiance would be given to them. But the intended resonance of his words did not reach my ears as an explosion, but as the sweeping crash of an ocean wave. I perverted his words to something beautiful and filled with hope, a line better used as a mantra than a reminder.

  I wasn’t going to kill Melody. I was going to win her.

  NINE

  The plan materialized later that night, after two full cycles of food consumption, after a few rounds of drinks to ease anxiety and inspire the imagination, after the team had been reduced to seven. The list was created; targets were matched to various members of the crew. I managed to convince everyone to leave Melody to me and me alone, the only person I’d been tapped to tap.

  We were dispatched, and within twenty-four hours a few kills were completed, the easy ones, with the intent that it would catch the feds off guard. But the real essence of the plan was this: We knew the hits would subdue the raging tide of other witnesses, create a flurry of doubt that the feds could really protect them the way they had certainly been promised. We were richer in the currency of fear than the feds; we had to abide by far less rules. And as my father and brothers explained, the point could be no better exemplified than through the death of one of their already protected witnesses: Melody Grace McCartney. Do my job, I was told, and the rest of the pieces would fall in place.

  And just like that: My hit became the most valuable.

  The first witnesses were having their splayed bodies traced with chalk around the time I left for Columbia, a
delay required to get things in order with Sylvia; my head chef, Ryan, was slowly becoming the general manager as it was, what with all of my recent random departures to places unknown (but with locales always resolving to suburban Baltimore).

  I’d slept little, managed only to squeeze in a shaveless shower before taking to the highways in the predawn darkness. The first opportunity to assemble a plan came as I was exiting the Holland Tunnel. I had four hours to put something together. And as I rode down the New Jersey Turnpike toward I-95, I couldn’t stop looking in my rearview mirror for someone from our crew—or from the federal government.

  Whatever plan I’d hoped might surface showed no sign of appearing even as I broke the line of the Keystone State. Then again, what choice did I really have?

  “Hi, Melody. Sorry for breaking in but let me explain. Yeah, I’m the guy you’re on the run from, but look, here’s the thing…”

  I had to keep reminding myself of the soul of the plan as it first came to my mind: Win her. The actions to match that sentiment did not come as I’d hoped, likely due to my having never considered this option; I’d spent my adult life determined to avoid getting in contact with her, from ever revealing who I was, how I was responsible for the way her life had turned out, for the way her life hadn’t turned out.

  As I broke the Delaware line, I started to ponder the solution to the second part of my problem: Assuming I could gain Melody’s trust, what was I to do with her?

  Tell her to run? She was doing that already, and other than me, no one was pursuing her. But if someone else put Gardner to work the way I did, she’d be taken out within twelve hours.

  Tell her to come with me? Where, exactly, would we be going?

  As the exit for Rising Sun, Maryland, came into view, the only thing I could sense rising was rage, a burn in my stomach derived from the ridiculous life I lived, forced into (supposedly) putting a bullet into an innocent woman because of nothing more significant than happenstance. And with the rage came a clouding of ideas, my mind preoccupied and disconnected.

  As I drove half the circumference of the Baltimore Beltway, I noticed my heart pounding harder, my seat belt holding it back like a weight belt, could feel the beat of blood through my temples.

  I’d started pushing the ideas to the front of my mind with such force that each one arrived broken and disabled. The closer I got to Columbia, at that point seven miles from Melody’s apartment, the less I had in my arsenal of possibilities.

  And as I wound through the streets that led me to her building, as the suburb stretched and yawned and came to life, I decided I’d use my last remaining time, the final moments as I staked out her apartment, to draw a conclusion, a final scheme.

  Except.

  Except I pulled into her complex distracted—distracted by the pair of black Ford Explorers with dark windows and meaty wheels that followed me in. I might as well have waved to them: I dropped under the speed limit, a certain signal I was doing something wrong, my New York license plates as hard to avoid noticing as a chancre sore. The massive vehicles were on my tail for too long, inspired me to turn down a different row of apartment buildings—any direction but toward Melody—and when I did, they kept on going, gunning their engines toward some other destination. My instinct suggested they were rushing to box off the exits; my reaction was to keep drifting along in second gear, pretend I was looking for some other address. I drove in a figure eight around two unconnected buildings.

  One minute passed. Nothing.

  I poked the nose of the Audi out into the lane of the next apartment building like a cat sniffing the scent of an unrecognized animal.

  Two minutes. Nothing.

  I pulled out a half car length farther to get a look; everything appeared docile. I let the car slowly float forward, had to tell myself to breathe. I sat on the verge of something: capturing Melody, being arrested, death.

  As I reached the end of the row of apartments, I gunned the engine and flew between the two rows like a soldier running from tree to tree to avoid gunfire. And when I got to the other side, I crept around to the corner of Melody’s building, pulled the car out of gear, and glided along in neutral, attempting silence.

  And sure enough, the Explorers sat running and idle in front of her building, the vehicles empty but for the drivers.

  Three minutes. Nothing.

  Then with a burst through the glass door at the bottom of her apartment came three large men, suited and armed: U.S. marshals. And in the center of their triangle walked Melody, cloaked in a bulletproof vest so large it overlapped the waist of her jeans, hung on her like a football jersey, a small garbage bag in her hand that appeared almost empty.

  Two of the men pushed Melody into the backseat of the first SUV, flanked her on each side; the other man got into the passenger side of the second SUV. Both engines raced and their exhaust hung in the air as they disappeared out of the complex and onto the road that led to Columbia Pike.

  And as I waited ten seconds, then zoomed from the parking lot in an effort to follow them, my heartbeat was hardly as noticeable as the word echoing through my brain: Why?

  The three of us—two Explorers and one red sports car—raced down Columbia Pike, onto Maryland Route 32 for a few miles, then onto I-95, heading north toward Baltimore. Whenever I followed Melody it seemed I was always retracing my steps, always going backward. I flipped on my sunglasses and ball cap and punched the accelerator. And as the SUVs briefly separated in an effort to slide over a lane on the interstate, I just barely made out each license plate, the only unique identifiers of these nondescript government vehicles.

  J21275

  J21263

  I didn’t have the time (or concentration) to come up with a foolproof pattern for the tags the way I did with Melody’s parents’ Oldsmobile. My best effort at seventy miles per hour: Both tags started with 212, the original area code for New York. Beyond that, the easiest thing to do was repeat the last two digits of each tag over and over in my head until recalling them became second nature. Sixty-three, seventy-five, sixty-three, seventy-five.

  All of my experience shadowing Melody came into full utilization, felt like a series of preseason games in preparation for this championship event. I was tailing the feds now, following the very enemies who waited and watched my family from dark Chevrolets in plain sight, for little other reason than to let us know we were being watched; Pop would occasionally send out a plate of bucatini all’amatriciana for them. And now that they had Melody in their possession, I hated them even more. Neither Melody nor the marshals keeping her had any understanding of how unsafe she really was.

  I’d become her only hope of holding on to life.

  I’d long since mastered the art of keeping a safe distance—the perfect distance—from the car in my crosshairs. Highways remained easy space to navigate; cities were another story. Traffic lights repeatedly posed a problem, creating potential gaps that could last more than a block. Not to mention the obvious intrusions: other drivers cutting you off, delivery trucks blocking traffic, short stops that had me right on top of Melody’s car.

  So as I followed them down into the center of Baltimore, right in the middle of the skyscrapers, my hands began to sweat; I knew if I lost her then, I’d likely lose her. Her life depended on my ability to stay right on the tail of those government vehicles.

  Then, the inevitable: We wound down an alley darkened and cooled by a lack of sun, a strip of pavement where natural light had not shone down since those towers were erected. They slowed behind a smaller ten-story building. I waited farther back as they came to a stop at a rear entrance for a gated parking garage. With a swipe of a badge, both SUVs disappeared into the mouth of the garage, and the teeth of the gate quickly closed. Once they were out of sight, I gunned it down the alley, slowed enough to read the small sign identifying the garage as belonging to the Garmatz Federal Courthouse. I suppose one way or another I was destined to be brought to the feet of such a building.

  I didn’
t move, every sense aware, my car waiting for instructions. I stared at the sign for some answer. What could I do? Go find a parking garage and wander back over to the courthouse and hang out, hope I run into Melody in an elevator?

  Had I formulated a plan on my way down from New York, it would have gone dim. Were I not truly hunting her, here is where I would’ve returned home and shrugged, offered up a better luck next time attitude as I plunged a hunk of bread into whatever sauce my father had going in the kitchen. But if I returned home right then, it would have been certain doom for Melody. Gardner would probably get her new locale within a day or less, and the enough is enough attitude would have been paired with a seasoned killer fast on her heels. After all, this was business now, and Melody had shot back to being one of our top priorities.

  So I did what any gambler would have done—Gardner would’ve been proud: I played the long shot. I parked my sore thumb of a car between two other red vehicles in a parking lot reserved for the medical center behind the courthouse, in a space reserved for a Dr. Bajkowski, and waited for one or both of those Explorers to emerge from the gated garage adjacent to my parked position. I figured the odds of the marshals moving Melody out of Baltimore in the same vehicle in which they’d brought her in were about the same as them transporting her by way of the same marshal: maybe four to one.

  An hour of nothing and I called Gardner, figured I’d milk him for any possible data that might offer some direction. Or hope.

  “Give me anything you’ve got on this transition plan,” I said.

  He gave me this meld of a grunt and sigh, then said, “Hold on.”

  Three minutes passed along with a series of clicks, and when he came back on the line a hum draped his words, as though he was sitting next to an air conditioner. Then, as if I had just said the words, “What do you mean transition plan?”

  “She’s on the move.”