CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Reno was so exhausted he had to keep wiping his eyes to stay awake.
He was perched inside an abandoned warehouse that overlooked an abandoned junkyard. There was an old shed in the junkyard to where he had traced Lydia’s movements.
She didn’t know he could trace her. He planted a device on her when he was hugging her and telling her sweet nothings at that bar yesterday. He pretended they were going to go to a hotel room and talk it out.
But when they got to the hotel room, some dive on the west side of Vegas, she didn’t want to talk at all. All she wanted was sex. His sex. As in entrapment.
He knew the signs like the back of his hand.
It happened to him more times in a year than most men had in a lifetime.
There was always a crisis. But they didn’t want to talk about it in public.
Meet them at some motel or hotel room. That was the usual line.
And when he showed up, they’d be already naked and ready for action.
Cameras were undoubtedly hidden and waiting to record the action.
And then the extortion began. I won’t tell your wife if you give me x amount of dollars.
He never caved. It rarely worked. But Lydia’s ass was trying it too.
But why was the question to Reno.
He hadn’t seen her in decades. Not after he tricked her into signing over her fake interest in the PaLargio.
She left with her tail between her legs, that was a fact.
But her old man couldn’t blame Reno. She was the one who fell for his lies.
She was the one who should have seen it coming a mile away.
And after that war with his father, a war Reno won, he thought it was over. Now it’s back again?
Did she know about what his father did to her sister?
Or did she know about the other thing?
But how could she?
It seem about sex and sex alone when they first arrived at that seedy hotel room. As soon as they walked into that room, she began removing his suit coat and kissing on him as if he was her long-lost lover.
Although Reno pushed her away from him, she kept at it. He didn’t want to kiss her, fine. But she was betting the farm he’d want this.
She got her on knees, zipped down his pants, and before he could fully react she had pulled out his big, juicy, meaty rod and was about to put it in her mouth. Reno had to stop that too. What the fuck was wrong with this woman, he was saying in his head.
But he knew he had to keep his cool. She had her agenda, but he had his too.
“Get up from there,” he said to her as he took her by her skinny arms and lifted her up. “What are you doing? You don’t have to come with that kind of heat. We need to talk, Lydia. We need to talk first.”
The word first did it for her, as he knew it would, because it implied there was more to come. Because it meant she was going to get her video or pics of him in compromising positions, but only after they talked. Talking was the key for him. He had to know what she was up to.
They sat on the sofa. There was a faint smell of urine in the room.
Why she had to pick a hotel like this one was beyond him.
But he knew she didn’t pick it. It was a mob move.
It was what mobsters picked. The seedier the better because they wouldn’t be the only crooks in that hotel.
Because they would be able to pay off the front office workers just in case things got out of hand.
Which made Reno certain that it wasn’t Lydia who wanted to show back up in his life.
It was his old man. This had the Moose Vatelli gang written all over it.
But the question still remained: Why?
“I need to know the truth, Lydia. Why are you suddenly back in Vegas?”
“I told you why. I missed you, Reno. I tried to be with other men, but they don’t do it for me. Not like you do,” she said as she touched his private area.
He removed her hand. “Don’t play with me, Lydia. Tell me the truth.”
Lydia coquettishly jerked her long blonde weave back and then ran her long fingers through it.
She used to turn him on whenever she did that.
Long before he knew she was a plant for her old man, he turned her on.
But now he wanted her ass out of his life so that he could get his family back.
Because if it was the other thing that brought her back into his life, something so horrific he could not even speak it in his own mind, there was no going back to family. That would be over for Reno.
But she was still being coy with him. “Just give me some bed action, Reno. Then we can talk.”
“We ain’t doing shit until I find out what gives,” Reno said. “Don’t take me for your fool. You’ll do that shit at your own risk.”
Lydia looked at him then. It was as if she had momentarily forgotten whom she was dealing with. But she realized now. He could see it in her eyes. And her mood shifted. “Daddy knows what happened to my baby sister. To his baby girl.”
Reno had already suspected that part. But did he have accurate information? “What does he know?” Reno asked her.
“He knows your father raped her and then beat her to death.”
She made it sound so ordinary, as if she was accustomed to even worse herself. But it would never sound ordinary to Reno. Covering up for his father after he committed such a heinous crime was one of the shames of Reno’s life. But if his father was to go down, they all would have gone down.
“And what does he plan to do about it?” Reno asked.
“He didn’t tell me what. But as soon as he found out, he was ready to attack. He suspected all along your old man knew what happened, but he never would have ever imagined he was the one who did it.”
“If it was my father who did it,” Reno said as if he had no clue himself, “how did he find out now?”
“Somebody who used to work for your old man just got out of prison a couple weeks ago after serving a dozen years. He needed money to start over, and his ass was too old to begin at the beginning, so he told Daddy he had a story to tell for a price. That’s how we found out.”
Reno’s jaw tightened. His old man had been dead for decades.
But his enemies were still coming out of the woodwork.
That was why once any member in your family was in the mob, you could never get out whether you were in it or not.
That was the one thing he feared the most for his own children: that they would be bearing the scars of his past too.
“What does your old man plan to do about it?” Reno asked her.
“I don’t know. But he’s planning something big. That’s why I came to you, Reno. To warn you. You know how much I always loved you even after you did what you did to me. That was business. That didn’t change my heart. It never did.”
“How can I make it right?” Reno asked her.
“For me, you can sign the PaLargio back over to me.”
Was this broad nuts? “Even though that will you presented was bogus as hell and that woman never left shit to you? Is that what you’re talking about?
Are you talking about the fact that I stole back what you were trying to steal from me?
Is that what you want me to make right? You want me to let you steal it from me anyway? ”
She stared at him. “You aren’t hearing me, Reno. Signing over the PaLargio to me, the rightful owner, is the least you can do. My father knows. And with that knowledge he holds all the cards. I don’t think you’re hearing me.”
Reno heard her loud and clear. And her old man, and the reach he still had, that was worrying him to the point of despair.
But for her to suggest he had no cards at all to play?
Who did she think she was? “Moose does realize,” he said delicately, “that I kicked his ass once already and decimated his organization. Right?”
He could tell Lydia didn’t like the way he put it, but she tried not to show it. “He knows what you did,” was all she would say about it. “And he knows more than that.”
When she said those words, Reno’s heart dropped. Because her look changed and she could no longer hide her hate.
She stood up. “I know more than that too,” she said. “Don’t I boys?” she said and Reno, realizing she was giving the signal for her goons to show themselves, stood up too.
And that was when her men came out of the closet with their guns drawn.
“Put your hands in the air where we can see’em, Gabrini,” one of them said.
Reno recognized the voice, but he couldn’t place the face. Not that it mattered. He put his hands in the air.
Lydia went up to him. “This is for what you did to my sister,” she said and slapped him hard across his face. “And this is what you did to me,” she added, and slapped him even harder.
Then she smiled. “Now it’s my time to take care of you.” Her smile left as fast as it had appeared on her face. “Get’em boys,” she said as her two goons grabbed Reno. One of them began frisking him.
That was when Reno stopped her. “I thought you wanted bed action,” he said to her.
He didn’t give a shit about any bed nor her in that moment, but it was a distraction.
Because the two goons laughed and Lydia turned back around, undoubtedly to tell him how much she hated his guts and would never want to have anything to do with him ever again.
The wanting him was just a ruse. They wanted him disarmed.
But it was the laughter of his two goons that was what Reno was after.
Because as soon as they began to laugh, and before Lydia could set him straight, Reno had grabbed the gun of the man frisking him and shot his partner through the belly.
The guy he’d just disarmed jumped on him, to retrieve his gun, and they both fell down onto the floor.
But even in their tussle, Reno held onto that gun, turned the goon onto his back, and then wrestled with him for control of that gun. Lydia hurried over to help her goon, but it was too late. Reno was too strong. He shot the gunman in his chest and threw him off of him.
That was when Lydia, realizing her scheme didn’t work, took off.
Reno got up to run after her, but the goon he’d just shot grabbed him by the leg and tripped him down. The gun in Reno’s hand flew out, and sailed halfway across the room. And then the other gunman, who wasn’t dead either, saw his opening and turned onto his back. He began firing at Reno.
He was misfiring because of his injury, but Reno was in a bad spot. He had to get to that gun.
But the man, whose gun it was, wasn’t allowing it. He held onto Reno’s leg even as Reno was fighting to break free, and even as Reno was being fired upon.
But there was only one answer for it. And Reno took it.
He mustered all the strength he had and hoisted the first gunman on top of him, and used him as a shield as he shimmied his body toward that gun.
As the one gunman was being shot up by the other gunman, Reno hurried for that errand gun.
But when Reno got to the gun and grabbed for it, the second gunman, who was too injured to stand, shot within a hair’s breath of Reno’s hand.
Reno had to jerk his hand back, but quickly grabbed that gun with his second try and began shooting at the second gunman without skipping a beat. He unloaded on his attacker.
And Reno Gabrini didn’t miss.
He killed him in an overkill.
He emptied his chambers inside his attacker.
And then he dropped the gun and laid down. His heart was pounding instead of beating. Because he hated close calls. Because he knew he was no closer to getting the answers he needed than he had been before he met up with Lydia at that bar.
And the question still remained: How did Moose Vatelli find out about the other thing?
Why would he send Lydia to do his dirty work instead of doing it himself?
And what kind of ambush was this? Two men against Reno Gabrini? Moose would have known that would have been an unfair fight. Two men could never take Reno down.
The more he thought about it, the less it was sounding as if Moose had anything to do with this. And Lydia didn’t have the reach to be in charge.
But if not Moose, Reno wondered, then who?