Page 41 of Trina Gabrini: Bring Him Back Home to Me

But as he was asking it, they suddenly heard gunfire.

Reno, Sal, and Tommy were jumping up and pulling out their guns. “Jimmy and Dom, get everybody in the safe room now!” Reno ordered as he and Sal and Tommy were running for the exit. “You too, Tree. Get in that safe house and stay there. And I mean it!” he added firmly.

“You just be careful,” Trina yelled back to Reno as she, Jimmy and Dom were already running down the hall yelling “Safe room! Get in the safe room,” to all of the younger set. The now-terrified younger people started pouring into the hall.

When Reno, Sal, and Tommy opened the door of the penthouse and hurried out, they could hear the gunfire coming around the corridor near the elevators. That was when Reno motioned for them to break up. He ran to the left. Tommy and Sal ran to the right. When they met up at the elevators, Robby was lying on his back firing up at the intruders as they were coming in from the stairwell beside the elevator. The Gabrinis began firing and took out the remaining six men. But the scene was horrific. All of the penthouse guards, all four of them, were down.

Sal rushed to his underboss, while Reno and Tommy took the pulse of the downed men.

“Robby, you okay?” Sal asked anxiously.

“I’m okay,” Robby said as Sal helped him to his feet. “I’m okay.”

But Reno and Tommy stood up. The other men were dead. Reno looked at Robby. “What happened?”

“They just came up like they were invited up. I’m out here talking with the guys and then the next thing I know I see the door to the stairwell open. And there they were.”

“What kind of bullshit is this?” a frustrated Reno asked. “What happened to the wall of protection downstairs?”

“I have no idea,” Robby said. “But I had a full security detail down there. Nobody should have been able to penetrate it.”

“And I had my guys on detail too,” said Reno as he and Sal both got on their phones to see what went wrong.

But Tommy heard footsteps. “Listen!” he said to them.

And that was when they heard them too.

Reno hurried to the stairwell and saw what looked like an army of men running up toward the penthouse. “Shit!” he said and began firing at them. Tommy, Sal, and Robby began firing too.

They took some out, and beat back some, but it was too many. They kept coming. Reno could see what looked like thirty or more men running up that stairwell. They didn’t stand a chance.

“We can’t let them get inside,” Reno ordered and they all kept firing and firing even as more men kept coming up those stairs.

But when it was clear that they were outgunned and outmanned, they had to retreat. “We can’t hold the line!” Reno said bitterly. “Get back,” he ordered his cousins. “Get back inside!”

Reno locked the stairwell door, and they ran back inside the penthouse.

All three knew there was no time to do anything but arm themselves to the teeth, and try to battle it out because the gunmen were already shooting up the door to the stairwell. And it gave way.

Then an army of determined killers broke through that door and were running toward the penthouse entrance to finish what they started.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Get everybody out of the safe room and get them on the backstairs going down,” Reno was yelling as he ran to his weapons cabinet.

“But what if they breached that too, Reno?” Sal was saying.

“There’s no other way. Just do it!”

Sal and Robby took off down the hall, unlocking the safe house by imputing the combination and hurrying everybody out.

Reno grabbed one bazooka out of his arsenal cabinet, tossed it to Tommy, and then picked up another one as they both began arming them with IEDs. Then they hurried back up front just as that army of killers knocked the door down to the penthouse with a massive thump, barely missing Tommy.

But they didn’t delay. Reno and Tommy fired their bazookas as soon as that door fell, and the army of men all were thrown off their feet and slammed against the corridor wall as those IEDs exploded into a ball of fire.

Sal and Robby got everybody out of the safe room and had them running down the backstairs with Dom and Jimmy leading the way. The fire from those IEDs, they knew, was only going to get worse.

But just as Reno and Tommy turned away from the front entrance and began running toward the back stairs too, praying that the mob hadn’t penetrated those defenses as well, another explosion erupted. Only that explosion made those IEDs seem like sparkles on the fourth of July as the power of that blast knocked Reno and Tommy off of their feet.