He knew she deserved better than a joker like him. He knew he could do better by her every day God send. But when he was on assignment, he could not be distracted by sentiment or love or anything else. He had to be singularly focused. He had to remove everything else from his mind, including her, and get the job done. It kept their marriage on edge far too many times, and their relationship intense. But he got the job done.
His Footman was standing at the opened driver side door of his Lamborghini, but hurried around when he saw Mrs. Sinatra approaching. He opened the front passenger door for her, and she got inside. Mick walked around, got into the driver side, and sped off around the horseshoe, and down the driveway. He didn’t get a chance to see the twins this morning, and he hated not seeing them. But it also reminded him of the kind of inattentive father he used to be with his other set of children. But it couldn’t be helped.
For the first few minutes of their commute, no words were spoken. Roz responded to text messages on her phone, and Mick paid attention to the hectic, rush-hour traffic. When Roz finally finished texting a couple of responses, and leaned her head back, he looked at her. The wall of Philly traffic was at a standstill, and Mick was finally able to relax.
“After I dropped her off,” he said, “I assume Gloria phoned and told you what happened last night.”
Roz exhaled. Gloria did phone and told her. She told her every graphic, horrific detail. “Yes,” she said. “I stayed up half the night looking for you.” She looked at Mick. “Worrying about you.”
Mick gripped the steering wheel and continued to stare straight ahead. “It’s delicate, Rosalind.”
“What’s delicate?”
“When a high-ranking member of my corporation is found dead, and I or one of my men had a hand in that death, there is a protocol I have to invoke.”
“A protocol? What kind of protocol?”
“A shadow protocol. A covering my ass protocol. Any cameras of myself and Gloria have to be confiscated. Cops have to be paid off. The D.A. has to be paid off. Certain journalists have to be rewarded to tell the story the way I need it to be told.”
“But your men usually handle all of that,” Roz responded.
“Not when it involves one of my children. Not when it involves a senior member of my management team. I handle it. I have to make sure it gets done, and done correctly.”
Roz remembered when Teddy got in trouble in Paris. Mick didn’t just send one of his men to handle it. He got on his plane and brought Teddy back home himself.
“I’m sorry it took most of the night,” Mick continued, “but it did.”
“And afterward?” Roz asked. “You showered and changed. You slept somewhere. And it wasn’t in my bed.”
“No, it was not,” Mick said. “I stayed in town, where I was handling all of that business. I preferred not to come home last night.”
Roz hated to hear him talk like that. “Why, Mick?” she asked him.
“Because I feel particularly dirty after handling all of that business,” he responded honestly. Then he looked at her. “I don’t want that filth around you.”
The traffic picked back up, and Mick’s car, along with the other hundred or so in his immediate vicinity, was moving again.
“I can handle it,” Roz said as they moved.
Mick glanced at her. “Handle what?”
“Filth. The dirt. I can handle it. You don’t have to treat me as if I can’t. I’m not delicate like that.” A flash of irritation showed on her face. “You should know that by now, Mick.”
“It’s not about what you can handle,” Mick said as his attention returned to the road ahead of them. He had a slight edge in his voice, too. “You’re my wife. It’s about what I’m going to allow you to handle. And I don’t care how tough you are, or how indelicate you think you are, you are not handling my filth. I am not bringing that home to you nor the twins. Not ever.” Then he glanced at her. “You should know that by now.”
Roz leaned her head back. “Being your wife is not easy,” she blurted out. But it was exactly how she felt.
But Mick came back with a quick retort. “You’re tough,” he said. “You can handle it.”
Roz looked at him, to make sure he wasn’t mocking her. When she realized that he wasn’t, and was actually smiling, she smiled too. “Fuck you,” she said, and grabbed his hand.
They held hands all the way to Roz’s office: the Graham Talent Agency. And when his car stopped at the curb, she turned to him. “Can I ask you something?” she asked.
Mick smiled. “You can ask.”
“Cute,” Roz said. Then she got serious again. “Gloria was really shook up about last night.”
Mick nodded. He knew. “Yes. Very.”
“She was grappling with understanding why you did it. Not why you took care of that bastard Will Flannigan. She understood how much harm Will could have caused you. When I told her about the embezzlement part, she understood even clearer. But what she couldn’t wrap her brain around was why she had to see you take care of him.”
Mick wondered if Roz understood. His hope was that she did. But did she? “What did you tell her?” he asked.
“I reminded her who you were, and what family she belonged to. I told her we’re not the Huxtables and she had better start realizing that. You believed in baptism by fire, and she just got a little wet. I told her to get used to it.”
Mick rubbed his thumb over her hand. Roz got it. She got it in spades! “What did she say?” he asked her.
“She said she was beginning to realize her pedigree before this happened. Now she had no doubt. We are not the Huxtables, she said. Even the Huxtables are not the Huxtables, she added, and we especially are not them.”
Mick smiled. “You told her right. And I’m sorry she’s upset. But she bought it on herself.”
“She said you beat the crap out of her,” Roz said. “I told her she’d better be glad that’s all you did to her.”
Mick agreed. “Damn right. If she wasn’t my kid, I might not have distinguished her from Will. If she had not come clean with me, I . . .”
Roz stared at him. This was the part of Mick she feared the most. “You what?” she asked him.
Mick felt vulnerable.
“What, Mick? You what?”
“She would have still gotten out of it alive. I love her too much to harm her that way.”
Roz knew it was a confession for Mick. She also knew Mick would never share such intimacy with Gloria, or any other human being alive, to save his life. Roz was a very privileged individual, and knew it. “Anyway,” she said, “I’d better get inside. I’ve been out of town most of the week. I have loads of work waiting for me.”
“You work too hard,” Mick said to her as their hands parted.
“So do you,” she responded, as she grabbed her briefcase.
“How long do you think you’ll be able to do both?” he asked. “You’ve got that London gig coming up. You’ve got another Broadway starring role not long after that.”
“As long as I keep all of my roles as limited engagement runs, I think I can act and run my agency just fine. I can continue to do both.”
“I know you can do it,” Mick said. “My question is why would you want to do it? Starring roles on Broadway had been a lifelong dream of yours. It came true.”
“Thanks to you completely financing my debut,” Roz quickly responded with a smile. She clasped his hand again. She didn’t know why it was, but whenever Mick stayed out all night on assignment, she felt needy around him. She felt as if she needed to prove her love to him all over again. She didn’t understand why that was. Especially since their bond was strong.
“Why would you want to do limited runs on Broadway when you can do year-long runs if it wasn’t for this agency you were still totally involved with? And that consumed so much of your time?”
“Because this agency is my dream, too. It became my dream after Broadway gave me it’s ass to kiss. There’s a lot of strugglin
g actors and actresses depending on me still. And now that I’ve ‘made it,’ quote unquote, I feel an even stronger obligation to bring them along with me. I don’t ever want to be somebody who gets all of the goodies for herself, and flip a bird at everybody else. I was struggling just like my clients are right now. I’ve been there. I know what all of that rejection and all of those shattered dreams feel like.”
Mick stared into his wife’s eyes as she spoke, and squeezed her hand even tighter. Why the good Lord saw fit to give a Rosalind to him remained the biggest mystery of his existence. He deserved her about as well as a pig deserved pearls. But at least, he thought viciously, he knew what to do with his pearl.
He leaned over and kissed her on her lips. She leaned into the kiss as well. When they stopped kissing, and opened their eyes, they both felt a sense of calm. Of the ship righting itself once again.
“I want to fuck you,” he said with a smile, as those spider lines of age appeared on the side of his eyes. “But I know. Not now. Work beckons.” Then he looked into her eyes again. He had flashes of her naked body on top of his, and his dick pouring into her. “But tonight.”
He said it as if it were a guarantee, and Roz accepted it as such. “Tonight,” she promised, kissed him again, and then got out of the car.
Mick didn’t drive away until she was safely inside the lobby of her agency, and was waving goodbye to him. He looked through his rearview mirror. Deuce McCurry, the former cop and the man he handpicked to be her bodyguard, was parked behind him. On watch duty at Roz’s place of business. Satisfied that she was in good hands, he took off.
But he wasn’t three minutes on the road again, heading to his office at S.I., when the phone call came in. It was Teddy. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“We’ve got trouble, Pop.”
Mick was Pop when Teddy was at work. Dad or Daddy when he wasn’t. “What kind of trouble?”
“Big Ridge Mahoney has reneged on our agreement.”
Mick frowned. “Reneged?”
“He now says he’s not ceding shit to us. Not eighty percent of his territory, per our agreement; not even twenty percent.”
“That fucker.”
“And not only that, Pop,” Teddy said. “His men just opened up shop in Detroit. Ten shops to be precise. Right in the middle of our turf.”
Mick couldn’t believe it. “What the hell happened between last night and this morning?”
“Hell if I know. I’m as baffled as you are.”
“Fuck baffled! Find his fat ass and haul him in.”
“I’m on it, Pop. I’m on it. I’ll call you when we find him.”
Mick ended the call and stopped at a red light. For Mahoney to renege this quickly, somebody awfully powerful had to have caused the switch. Mick couldn’t even imagine who that could be.
A beautiful woman, tall and sleek, was walking across the street in front of Mick’s car, and caught his attention. Not because she was beautiful. But because she was giving him an approving eye and even smiling at him. But he knew what that bitch wanted. She wanted what she thought he could give to her: money, jewels, and plenty of raunchy sex. It was all the same for practically every woman he’d ever had.
All except Rosalind.
The light changed and he kept driving, smiling as he thought about Roz. She turned him down when they first met. It was a first for Mick. Who the fuck did she think she was, was his true thought at the time. Then he found out who she was. He found out she was smart and tough and sassy as hell. She was his. And for the first time in his life, he didn’t just fuck it. He put a ring on it.
But he put her through hell, and he knew that, too. There were too many moving parts in his life for her to ever have normalcy. But she took it like a champ. Day in and day out. She didn’t love the danger. Nobody loved it, not even Mick. But she didn’t shirk from it. She didn’t let it overwhelm her. When they went on lock down, she locked down. When he put more security on her, she accepted it. Things were changing in their marriage. They were getting to that happy place. It wasn’t all good. Their argument this morning proved that. But it was getting better.
His phone rang again. It was Teddy again. Mick pressed the button on his car screen. “Yeah?”
“We’ve got ourselves another pull out, Pop,” Teddy said.
Mick frowned. “Another one? Who?”
“Richie Russo.”
Mick couldn’t believe it. He roped Russo in himself. And he reneged on him? “Find him.”
“I already have,” said Teddy. “As soon as our guys called it in, I headed over to his store. I’m outside in my car, looking at his dumb ass right now.”
Mick was pleased to hear it. At least he would get some answers. “Don’t approach him until I get there,” he ordered as he checked traffic, and then hung a U-turn. “I’m on my way.”
Then he killed the call, and floored his Lamborghini.
CHAPTER TEN
Richie Russo laid out the salami onto the white butcher paper and tightly wrapped it. He removed the sticker price and slapped it on the top. “Here you are,” Mr. Beamer,” he said as he handed the package to his customer. The customer handed him cash, he rang it up on his small cash register, and then the man left. “Come see us again,” he said.
A couple real customers milling about. A couple thugs waiting to pick up a “package.” It had all the trappings of legitimacy, Mick and Teddy thought as they walked in. But they knew better. That salami the man was carrying out of the store, wasn’t stuffed with meat, but with dope. Teddy especially knew it to be true. Before his father forbid him to have anything more to do with drug-running, Richie used to be one of his suppliers.
After taking care of the two legit customers, Richie had two additional customers in his delicatessen. The two dealers. He began preparing “meat” for both of them, but his heart was pounding. Mick the Tick and his boy Teddy had entered his establishment. Teddy might have been smiling, but he knew that shit wasn’t real. “Hey, Richie Rich,” Teddy said. “What do you know good?”
“Hey, Teddy,” Richie responded. “What’s up?” He glanced at Mick with pure fear in his eyes, Teddy thought. “How ‘ya, Mick?”
Mick leaned against the wall and folded his arms. His eyes never wavered in their stare down of Richie.
Richie continued to wait on his customers, and he also continued to take peeps at Mick.
“Selling lots of salami today?” Teddy asked. He knew what Richie was up to.
But Richie knew that wasn’t why they were there. “What’s your country club ass doing in my neck of the woods? What are you doing on the southside?”
“Same thing my father’s doing here,” Teddy said.
When Teddy invoked Mick’s name, Richie’s pretense at normalcy flew out the window. He glanced at Mick, although he didn’t mean to, and that air of confidence that Teddy thought he was seeing, left completely. Richie continued to wait on the two remaining customers in the deli, but reality had set in. Mick the Tick was in his store for a reason. A painful, undeniable reason.
Mick lingered in the background, but his eyes continued their hard assessment of Richie. Although Teddy saw confidence when he looked in their opponent’s eyes, Mick saw something far more sinister. And although fear was there: he’d better be afraid for going back on his word. But it wasn’t just fear. This shit cut deeper than that. Mick just couldn’t understand why.
The last customer grabbed his “salami” Richie had prepared for him, handed Richie an envelope, and took off. He knew who had just come into Richie’s deli. He got the hell out.
When the guy left, Teddy walked over to the door, turned the hanging sign from OPEN to CLOSED, locked the door, and then walked back up to the counter. The shit, for Richie, just got real.
But like most hoods who crossed Mick, Richie, too, decided to set up shop in the land of denial. “I already agreed to give up land,” he said to Mick. “What more you want from me?”
But Teddy was offended by the premi
se. “You didn’t give up shit,” he said. “You sold that territory to us. We paid you generously. What the fuck’s your problem, Rich?”
But Richie seemed agitated. “I sold territory that wasn’t for sale,” he said. “What the fuck’s your problem, Teddy?”
Teddy reached over the counter, grabbed Ritchie’s head, and slammed it violently onto the countertop. “Who do you think you’re talking to?” he asked him.
Blood began to flow from Richie’s ear. “I was just saying,” he said as he lifted his head back up and cupped his ear. “I didn’t mean any disrespect.”
“You reneged on our agreement,” Mick said without raising his voice or moving an inch. “Why?”
“I reneged?” Richie asked. “What do you mean?”
“Ah, fuck, Pop, he’s playing crazy!” Teddy said.
But as soon as Mick stood erect, and before he could even take his first step toward the counter, Richie bolted. He ran through the door that led to his kitchen, and kept on running.
Teddy jumped over the counter and ran after him. Mick, however, walked out of the door, closed it behind him, and got into his Lamborghini parked at the curb.
But in the back of the store, Richie ran out of the kitchen door, ran down the flimsy steps, and across an open field. Teddy bolted out of that same door within seconds of Richie’s appearance, jumped down those same flimsy steps, and took off behind Richie. Teddy was young and fit, with speed that could rival an athlete’s, but Richie was no slouch either. He ran across that field like a man determined to get away.
But when he heard the revved-up engine of a sports car, and looked back and saw the Lamborghini speeding past Teddy and then about to overtake him, he knew the game was over. And maybe his life along with it.
He stopped running, put up his hands, and turned around. Mick slammed on brakes at the sudden change, which stopped his car from ramming into Richie.
But just as Teddy ran up to his father’s car; and before his father could even get out of the car, Richie reached into his pocket, pulled out a gun, and fired. Teddy hit the deck, and “shit!” yelled Mick, as he fell backwards into the car, pulling out his own piece.
Mick Sinatra: Love and Shadows Page 6
