Page 19 of Tommy Gabrini: All Fall Down
“Then make those phone calls, Trina,” Tommy said.
“Okay, I will.”
“Okay my ass,” said Reno. “Tommy isn’t thinking straight. Your ass don’t call nobody. You just get to that school and be there for Grace and TJ. We’ll call everybody that needs to be called. You just find out what’s going on and then let us know.”
“I will,” Trina said. “I will.”
“And be careful, Tree, and I mean that!” Reno ordered. Now he was scared for her life too. Trina was a tough broad, he knew, but when it came to family she was mush. “Don’t do all that crazy speeding. You’ll get there when you get there and that’s all there is to it.”
“Oh, Reno, I wish you was here,” Trina said in a voice that defied her image.
Reno sighed. “I wish I was there too, babe. But we’re on the way. You got this, you hear me?”
“You just should have seen Grace’s face. She looked like she was going to die where she stood when they said TJ did this. It’s just awful! Pray, Reno. You and Tommy pray.”
Tommy’s heart dropped to his shoe because he knew how devastated Grace had to be. “We will,” Tommy said and ended the call even as Reno was already making a call.
Then both men looked at each other. They thought losing that contract was the worst thing that could possibly happen to them that day. They were wrong. It paled in comparison.
Tommy got on the phone too.
CHAPTER NINE
“Mick, slow down.”
But he kept pumping.
“Mick, that’s too hard. Mick? Mick, it’s too hard.Mick?”
When he still kept going, Roz pushed her naked body up and out of his arms. “I like it hard too, but damn. Not that hard!” She looked at him with a fixed frown on her face. “What’s wrong with you?”
Mick Sinatra was breathing heavily when he finally stopped pounding her. Then he let his arms, that had been wrapped tightly around Roz, fall to his sides. He was still buried deep inside of her, and they both were still feeling the reverberations of his pounding, but even he knew he had gone too far.
“What is it?” Roz asked him. “You’re acting like you . . .”
Mick looked at her with thatdon’t you dare try itlook he gave to anybody that attempted to question his motives. “Like I what?”
“Like you’re trying to brand me. Like you’ve got some point to prove.”
When Mick’s hard green eyes grew weary, Roz wondered if she’d hit the nail on the head. It was four in the afternoon, East Coast time, and Mick had phoned and told her to meet him at the house for a quick one. It sounded like a good idea to her, something they rarely did, so she hurried home too. But he had gone overboard even for Mick. “Tell me what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me.”
Roz gave him a hard look. “Really? That’s what we’re doing? If you don’t want my black ass to be all up in your white ass you’d better tell me what’s wrong with your ass.”
Then Mick exhaled. He needed to get it off his chest anyway. “A couple assholes threatened to take out Teddy if he didn’t give up some of my territory. We naturally couldn’t let that stand.”
“Naturally,” said Roz. “But were they capable of doing that? Was it a serious threat?”
“No. But the very fact that they would even say some shit like that meant we had to pay them a visit. So we paid them a visit. When we approached them, they took off running. Teddy took off after one of them, and I took off after the other one.”
Roz was already worried. “And?”
“And I lost him. And you know why I lost him?”
“Because he was faster and probably younger than you?”
“Hell no. His ass was fat and slow.”
