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.
They got up, when they realized the entire front side of the penthouse had been blown to bits, and they ran behind the family for the back exit.
The problem was the distance.
When Reno renovated the penthouse, it expanded the floors of the PaLargio to forty-six. Which meant they all had to run down forty-six flights of stairs. It seemed like an impossible task.
But Sal grabbed up his baby, and Tommy grabbed up his little girl GiGi, and TJ grabbed Destiny’s child from her, and they all ran anyway.
They had no choice. That last explosion could cause far more deadly damage than what their improvised explosive devices could even dream of causing. They had to run.
They were Gabrinis, so nobody was crying or panicking, but every single one of them was scared.
Reno was especially afraid that there would be an army of men waiting at the bottom of that long haul down. That was why he bogarted his way through the family members to get beyond Jimmy and Dommi to the front of the line. When he hurried past Trina, he squeezed her arm, but he kept on moving.
Trina just shook her head. She didn’t know how Reno did it. She and everybody else were already feeling drained, and they were just getting started. But he was bouncing off the walls with energy. But what they didn’t know was that Reno knew he had no choice.
But when the lights went out in the stairwell, plunging them into darkness, and then the roof inside the stairwell began to collapse with big chunks falling down and barely missing them, panic set in.
Especially since they couldn’t see where the chunks were falling from.
Some of the younger family members began screaming.
“We’re gonna get trapped, Daddy!” Reno could hear Sophia crying out.
“No we aren’t!” Trina yelled back. “Just keep moving.”
“Keep running!” Reno was yelling back up at all of them. “Don’t stop running! Keep going!”
And they kept on running.
Through the darkness. Through the still-falling debris. Through the agony of not knowing if it was even plausible to run down forty-six flights of stairs without collapsing before they got anywhere near the exit. They kept going.
Remarkably, they made it to the eighteenth floor, all on the verge of near-collapse, when they finally got some relief.
Firefighters appeared rushing up the stairwell towards them with bright lights. Some of the younger set cheered because at least now they could see where they were going. At least now they could avoid any falling debris. The firefighters led them down.
And once they got outside, and after most of them had moved across the street far away from the PaLargio, they all were astonished. The entire hotel and casino was being evacuated. Thousands of people were hurrying out and clogging up the Strip.
But Reno just stood there, in the middle of the street, looking straight up.
It was so horrific that Trina went over to Reno and held his arm.
Jimmy went over and held his other arm. Because they knew he was devastated.
Because the top floor of the PaLargio that he built to the luxurious palace it was today, the floor where he and his family resided, was consumed in fire.
The things he did for the right to own that palace.
Now look at it.
Reno, so outdone, fell to his knees.