Page 3 of Trina Gabrini: Bring Him Back Home to Me

Then they looked at the floor. A girl was lying naked on the floor. Naked and passed out.

“Reno, she’s bleeding,” Sal said as he hurried to her. They all hurried to the young lady.

Reno turned her over. That was when they saw that she’d been beaten in the face almost beyond recognition.

“Good Lord,” Tommy said, appalled.

“She couldn’t be more than sixteen,” said Sal. “She’s a gotdamn kid!”

Reno looked at Dirty. “How many times he did her?”

“I did her a few,” said Dirty as if it was no big deal, “but your old man been going at it since we got here. He likes it rough.”

Reno was so disgusted that he jumped up and punched Dirty with such a powerhouse right that he knocked Dirty out cold. He fell forward on his face.

Then Reno hurried to the bed and angrily tried to wake up his old man. Paulo woke up, but just barely.

“Pop, what did you do to that girl?”

“What girl?”

Reno angrily turned his head toward the floor. “That girl, motherfucker! What did you do to that girl?”

Paulo actually smiled when he saw her lying there in her own blood. “Just a bit of fun,” he said.

“She’s not even legal yet!”

His father frowned. “Who cares? I got Vatelli back for stealing a piece of my territory. I got his ass back.”

And there it was. Every single thing that his old man ever did was transactional. Everything!

But Sal was frantic. “She’s dead, Reno. I can’t get a pulse. She’s fucking dead, Reno!”

Tommy took over, to see if he could find a pulse. But there was none to be found. He looked at Reno and shook his head. “She’s dead.”

Reno’s heart fell through his shoe.

His father lifted up his large head. “Dead? Damn. But that’s what he gets for stealing my territory. But I didn’t want her to die. I had plans to go a few more rounds with the bitch.”

Reno’s rage broke loose and he let his father have it. He beat him down with punches so severe that he nearly broke his own hand. His father was howling in pain, but Reno kept on punching. Tommy and Sal had to rush over to Reno and try to pull him off of his father, but Reno kept on punching.

“Don’t kill him, Reno,” Sal was saying as they finally managed to pull him back. “You’ll never recover if you ice your old man!”

Tommy glanced at his brother. But Reno was too consumed in his own fire to realize the irony of Sal’s statement. That was why Reno snatched away from them and jumped on his old man again. But they managed to pull him back again.

“Gotdammit, Reno,” said an angry Tommy. “Get your ass out of here before you do more harm than good!”

“I’ll get a cleanup crew up here,” said Sal as he pulled out his phone. “We’ll take your old man and Dirty out the back way. Nobody will know a thing. Just the three of us in this room will know what went down.”

Reno knew that was a lie because his old man and Dirty knew too. His old man wasn’t stupid enough to tell Vatelli he was responsible, but he was going to be certain to ask about the daughter even as Vatelli would be searching for her. But Reno was tired of fighting his old man’s battles. He’d been fighting them his whole life. And what did it get him? A dead girl, the daughter of the most powerful mobster in the world, in one of his bedrooms. “Motherfuck!” he said frustratingly loud.

“Go downstairs, Reno,” Tommy said again, but this time calmer. He sympathized with Reno because Tommy’s old man was a sack of shit too. But this had to be cleaned up. This had to be handled. “Go and entertain your guests. Act as if nothing happened. Leave the rest to Sal and me. We’ll handle it.”

Reno knew he had no choice. The deed was already done. The girl was already dead.

“Nobody but us in this room will ever know about this,” Sal said as well. “Even if Moose have to search a lifetime,” he added, “she’ll never be found.”

Reno hated with a passion the things they had to do. They would never dream of doing shit like this if assholes like his old man didn’t force them into doing it. But he knew it had to be done. Because if this kind of heat fell down on his father, it would consume them all.