Trina Gabrini: Bring Him Back Home to Me

PROLOGUE

DECADES EARLIER

Reno Gabrini, with a fat cigar between his polished-white teeth, was a young man full of himself. One of his buddies was getting married and he, as the brand-new owner of the PaLargio Hotel and Casino on the Vegas Strip, offered up his penthouse apartment for the festivities.

His first big mistake.

It started out innocent enough. Everybody was in the huge space having a blast. Reno, along with his cousins Tommy Gabrini and Sal Gabrini, were in a private room playing poker with a group of other guys.

You couldn’t even hang around the table unless you were willing to cough up two hundred grand off the bat.

It was an exclusive room. But it all changed when the fun arrived.

The door opened and one of Reno’s assistants peeped in. “The girls are here, Reno.”

Sal Gabrini looked at his cousin. “What’s he talking?” Sal, like Reno, spoke with an accent so heavy that it sounded as if they were two Italians straight out of Jersey. Which they weren’t. “What girls are here? The girls already here.”

“I ordered more,” Reno said as he threw in his sorry-ass deck and made his way to check them out.

“Go with him, Tommy,” urged Sal. “Leave it to Reno and he’ll pick a bunch of barf broads again just so long as they’re blondes.”

“Yeah, you go Tommy,” said another man at the table. “We want some good-looking dames this time around.”

“Cover my deck,” Tommy said to Sal as he left the table to go check out Reno as Reno checked out the ladies.

When Tommy made it into the living room, there were another twenty or more women lined up for inspection.

It seemed demeaning to Tommy, and he could see that some of the ladies didn’t like it either, but Reno was an efficient man.

He wasn’t wasting time just to make them feel better or to make it look better.

They were there to be entertainment at a bachelor party.

What did they expect? Respect? A wedding proposal?

“You, you, and you,” Reno said as he picked out three blondes.

Tommy had no problem with his selection. All three women were beautiful. But they didn’t bring any spice as far as he was concerned. “And you,” Tommy said, as he pointed to a gorgeous black woman. “And you.” Another black. “And you.”

Reno looked at his cousin. “All black,” he said. “Why am I not surprised? What is it with you and these black chicks?”

“Same thing it is with you and these blonde chicks. I like what I like.”

Reno couldn’t argue with him. Tommy had great taste and every one of his selections were all gorgeous too. “I was gonna pick’em,” Reno claimed. “You just didn’t give me a chance.”

Then he looked at the remaining ladies. “Those of you who wasn’t picked can go downstairs to my casino and mingle.

You’re still on the clock. I want you to get some of those old geezers to gamble more.

You do that, and my pit bosses give you a good report, you’ll get extra pay.

You don’t make a difference, you won’t get any pay. Now go.”

The ladies left.

“Now as to you fortunate few,” Reno said, “I want you to mingle with the guys up here. You can turn down anybody you don’t wanna be with, and if anybody gets too aggressive you come see me.

But otherwise, do your jobs. I didn’t hire you to sit around looking pretty. I hired you to work. Understood?”

They nodded their understanding and began heading for the various groups of men. But Tommy pulled one of the black ladies back. “You’re mine,” he whispered to her. When he said those two words, the gorgeous black girl beamed since “Dapper Tom” was known as one of the best-looking men ever created.

But Reno wasn’t so enamored with the idea. “Whatta you mean she’s yours, Tommy? She’s everybody’s.”

“But mine first,” Tommy said.

But Reno removed his hand from her arm. “Go mingle,” Reno ordered the lady. “You can hang out with Tommy later. Go make some money.”

She knew Reno was the one who buttered her bread so she did as she was told. But not before making it clear to Tommy with her eyes alone that she wanted him too. Which made Tommy nod and smile.

Sal came up. “Who we got?” he asked.

Reno pointed them out to Sal. “Your brother, of course, picked only the black dames. He thinks only black women are hot.”

“Compared to those ugly blondes you favor,” said Sal with a grin, “they are.”

“Damn,” said Tommy.

“What?” asked Reno.

“Look who’s here.”

When Reno and Sal looked up the stairs where Tommy was looking, they both frowned. A man called Dirty, who was a made man in Reno’s father’s crime syndicate, was walking downstairs zipping his pants.

“What the fuck Dirty doing here?” asked Reno. “Who invited his slick ass? This is by invitation only.”

“He came as security for your old man,” said Sal. “And since you weirdly invited your old man . . .”

Reno’s second mistake.

“I didn’t exactly invite him,” Reno said. “I mentioned one of my pal’s was having a bachelor party at my crib tonight, thinking nothing of it, until Pops invited himself. He said he was just gonna pop in and pop out.”

“And you let him?” asked Sal.

“I thought he was blowing smoke. I didn’t figure he’d show up.”

“Hey there Reno,” said a smiling Dirty as he walked up to them. “Hey there Tommy.” Then he frowned when he looked at Sal. “Fuck you, Sal.”

“Fuck your ass!” Sal fired back. He and Dirty never got along.

“This is by invitation only,” Reno said. “How did your ass get in here?”

“You gotta ask the boss that question,” said Dirty. “But if I tell you I’m having a blast, I’m having a blast man. You know how to put on a show, Reno.”

“He used to manage and now owns a hotel that puts on shows every night of the week,” said Sal. “He should be able to put on shows.”

“But you outdid yourself this time, Reno. How you manage to get her to do it though?”

That sounded odd to all three Gabrinis. “Get who to do what?”

“To entertain us. It’s like winning the Super Bowl to get that chick. Vatelli’s gonna be angry, but who gives a shit, right?”

Reno, Tommy, and Sal heard that name, but it made no sense what Dirty was saying. Reno frowned. “What Vatelli?” he asked. “What Moose got to do with this?” At that time, Moose Vatelli was the most notorious mob boss in the world.

Sal was perplexed too. “What you mentioning Moose Vatelli for?”

“His ass better not be in my house,” said Reno.

“You know that man ain’t in this house,” said a grinning Dirty. “This is nice. But it ain’t up to no Moose Vatelli standards.”

“Then what the fuck you talking about?” Reno asked him.

“Moose ain’t here,” Dirty said, “but his daughter is.”

“What daughter?” Reno asked him.

“His daughter. Moose Vatelli’s daughter. She showed up just after we got here. She said you picked her to mingle.”

“She must have been in that first group of girls, Reno,” said Tommy.

“All I know is she was here. And then me and the boss showed up. When she told us who she was, that’s when Boss wanted her.” Then Dirty grinned. “That daughter is something else! How you manage to get Moose Vatelli’s daughter to be a whore for a night?”

“I didn’t even know Moose had a daughter,” said Reno. “Had I known who she was, I wouldn’t have picked her ass.”

“Well he got one,” said Dirty, “and she’s upstairs right now. Boss putting it on her good too. You should see him. She’s in bad shape, but he still won’t quit.”

Sal and Tommy looked at Reno, but Reno was already running toward the stairs.

They ran after him. They knew what kind of brute Reno’s father was.

They knew what that bastard was capable of.

They were taking those stairs two and three at a time.

They couldn’t get up those stairs fast enough.

Dirty, who thought this was all good fun, was running right behind them.

And when they got up the stairs, Reno ran from bedroom door to bedroom door until he bust into the right door. And that was when they saw Paulo Gabrini, the head of the Gabrini crime syndicate, naked and drunk on the bed.

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.

He looked disgustedly at his mob boss of a piece of shit father one more time, looked again at that girl who had the misfortune to be in the grips of a sadistic man like his old man, and then he left.

God help him, but he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

He left his loyal cousins to do the dirty work.