Page 49 of Trina Gabrini: Bring Him Back Home to Me

“If we can find out who hired him,” Trina said, “then we’ll find out who’s behind this. Right Reno?”

“I sure hope so. Or at the very least he can give us some clue about Lydia.”

“Or she can give it to us herself.”

When Mick made that statement, everybody looked at him. “What do you mean, Uncle Mick?” Tommy asked him.

“You know where Lydia is?” Trina asked him.

Mick didn’t respond. Which, they knew, would be a yes.

Reno was perplexed. “But how would you know anything about Lydia before now, when I just told you about her?”

But Trina was studying Mick’s facial expression. “That’s the wrong question,” she said. “When did you know?” she asked Mick instead.

Bingo, Mick thought. Trina was always smart in a down-to-earth, practical way. That was why he once thought about taking her for himself. “When it first happened,” he said.

Everybody was stunned. Especially Reno. “But how could that be, Uncle Mick? I didn’t tell you anything about that night. Sal and Tommy didn’t even know until after it happened.”

“Do I look like I’m Tommy and Sal?” Mick shot back.

“But how did you know?”

“I pay attention to your asses,” Mick said as he stood up, prompting them to stand up too. “That’s how I knew. And after that shootout at that junkyard, I looked into it. My guys,” Mick said, although he almost said my spies, “saw Lydia after that Jeep caught fire. We tracked her down. Now do you want to get answers straight from the horse’s mouth, or do you want that secondhand bullshit you’re waiting on?”

“I’ll take the horse,” said Reno.

“Yeah I thought so,” said Mick. “Let’s go.”

As they began to leave out of the dining hall, Mick saw that Trina was heading out too. He stopped and looked at Reno. “Handle that,” he said.

“I am handling it,” Reno said with frustration in his voice.

Trina wanted to go along too, but they needed Mick, and she didn’t want him and Reno to have issues. Because she was certain there was nothing wouldn’t do for her after she heard what he did all those years ago, and decided to stay with him anyway.

She cancelled herself. “I’ll wait here,” she said to Reno.

Reno’s heart soared. Because, in that moment, if she had wanted to go he would have let her. He couldn’t say no to her. Not after the way she stood by him. He hugged her, whispered he loved her in her ear, and then they left.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Lydia Vatelli didn’t have anything remotely resembling that same confident look she had when Reno last saw her. Now, on the sixth floor of a boarded-up factory on the industrial side of town, she looked like a conniving woman still trying to come up with a scheme to get out of another mess she’d gotten herself into.

It was an odd location for a conversation, but Mick’s men had tracked her to that location as her next hideout when the junkyard shed was destroyed. They decided to keep her there and not move her to their location.

But when Mick the Ticking Time Bomb walked through that door after Reno, Sal, and Dapper Tom walked in, she knew her schemes were over. She could put a lot over on a lot of people, but she’d never known anybody to put anything over on Micky Sinatra.

“What are you doing here, Mick?” she had the nerve to ask him. Even the capos on duty inside the safe house looked at each other with a check her out look on their faces.

But Lydia knew what she was doing. She was buying herself time. Her mind was still churning: she was born to scheme. But it was more about surviving a man like Mick rather than spinning a yarn he would believe. “I haven’t seen you in ages,” she added.

Mick was staring as they all sat down in what used to be the supervisor’s office inside that factory.

“Who was the lady you sacrificed at that junkyard?” Reno asked her.

“What junkyard?” Lydia asked.

“Oh so that’s what we’re doing?” Reno asked her. “You think we came here to play games with you?”