by Landon Beach
He turned the lamp back on and opened the manila folder slowly, hoping it would be a different picture inside from the one he had glanced at earlier. It wasn’t. The face of his childhood best friend commanded his entire attention. His breathing quickened, and his sweating palms stuck to the folder. Feeling lightheaded, he broke eye contact with the man in the picture and looked at his bookshelf, trying to slow down his breathing.
The situation isn’t going to change. He chose his path; you chose yours. He took in a quick breath and then attempted to perform an extended exhale. He ended up coughing instead. But why did their paths have to cross now? Thomas Wolfe had written about situations like this in his masterpiece, You Can’t Go Home Again. You cannot return home to your childhood, your family, and your old friends to escape the world. For the things that seemed everlasting and eternal in your mind ended up changing no matter how much you wanted them to stay the same. It was one of life’s crueler lessons, and it happened to every optimistic traveler who returned to the idealistic realms of his youth, only to be disappointed and wish that he’d never come back. Every glory of the past could not escape becoming diminished in stature when revisited in the present.
In Nashville, he had been assigned to the money laundering division. After serving there for over a decade, he had come to the conclusion that there were better jobs but also worse jobs. The better jobs were in the field—more challenging and dangerous; the worse jobs were almost all sedentary oases of long hours behind a desk, staring into a monitor that both wore your eyes out and tricked your brain into thinking that consuming a daily six-pack of Diet Pepsi and a large bag of Cheetos was normal. Bruno didn’t mind busting the bad guys in the heartland of country music, but he had been ready for a change and was pleased when the Bureau approved his transfer request from Nashville to Boston. His job would be fighting organized crime, which he considered one of the better jobs. Then, three weeks before they started their move, Tara’s father had blood in his stool, and the transfer destination switched from Boston to Detroit.
He looked back at the picture. Could he kill Gino Rizzo, the driver and bodyguard of the second-highest ranked Detroit mafia member, Fabio “Fabian” De Luca? “Had he and I but met...” The line of poetry sprung out of a distant memory as an unwelcome visitor. He tried to dodge it, but his attempt failed. He closed the file and grabbed his well-thumbed volume of Thomas Hardy’s poems from his knotty pine bookcase. Finding the earmarked page, he read the first four stanzas of “The Man He Killed.” Then, after exhaling, he read the fifth and final stanza:
Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.
The concept of two unknown soldiers trying to kill each other only due to the fact that their countries were at war resonated with Patrick. Except he knew some of the people he was now going up against, which made it more difficult than if he hadn’t known them at all. He recalled his white-bearded high school English teacher saying, “The speaker in the poem explains that if these two men had met under different circumstances, then they may have sat down in an ‘ancient inn’ and enjoyed a few drinks together. Instead, they both shoot at each other. One misses, and one doesn’t. They could have been friends! Heartbreaking, my young scholars. Heartbreaking.”
Patrick took a sip of the scotch that he had been nursing for the past half-hour. As he lowered the glass, his eyes closed once again, and he saw himself with Gino, both twelve, playing baseball at a park with a dozen other neighborhood kids. “Patrizio!” yelled Gino as Patrick rounded third base, heading for home. Then, he remembered going to a different high school than Gino and choosing from that point forward to go by Patrick. He saw Gino for the last time during his senior year. Patrick was up to bat against Gino’s high school team, but his friend was no longer playing. Gino was there but spent the majority of his time talking to a man wearing a driver’s cap and a leather jacket; he missed Patrick’s at-bat and was gone by the end of the game.
The door to the office opened, and Tara entered. She had on pink running shorts and a white tank top that was soaked with sweat, and her blonde hair was pulled back into a high ponytail. Must have just returned from her nightly run. He hadn’t heard the front door open and close when she had left, and he hadn’t heard it open and close when she had returned—too obsessed with his work.
“The boys are heading to bed and want to say goodnight,” she said.
The boys. What friends were they going to make this summer and in school next year? Would they go to school with any of the organized crime family’s children? Probably. What would happen when those kids found out that he was trying to put their parents behind bars?
“Patrick?”
He watched as she approached the chair across the burgundy carpet. “I’ll be down in a minute,” he finally got out.
She sat down on one of the huge armrests and ran her right hand through the thick black hair on the top of his head—the sides were almost all gray now. “Can you take the gun off before you come down?”
She knew his reservations about taking the job and had given him space since they had moved in, but now the actual work was starting, and he knew she was scared for him. He had never carried a weapon in his time at the Nashville office. Now, he had a .40 caliber Glock 22 in his waist holster while he was at work—and for most of the time when he was home. The boys had asked about it, but he had assured them that he forgot to take it off when he returned home. They were four and six years old, and his story elicited no further questions, just harmless joking. That was the key to extending any lie: making it a joke. “Dad, you forgot your gun again.” A smile followed by, “Got me again, buddy. Daddy’s losin’ his mind.” The last statement was not a joke, which was also a key to maintaining a lie—there had to be some truth attached. “Sure,” he said to Tara.
“You okay?”
He stood and started to remove the holster. “Yeah,” he lied. The Godfather, Don Ilario “The Smile” Russo was on his deathbed and had named his son, Ciro, to inherit the throne. However, an undercover agent had reported that something was not right. The agent was currently working in the caporegime headed by the underboss’s son, Leo De Luca, and had been given instructions from Leo himself to change his entire routine—deliveries, pick-ups, driving routes, etc.—for the past few days and to tell no one about it. Bruno’s boss, Special Agent in Charge of the Detroit Field Office Terrance Nolan, had word that the Detroit Association’s second-in-command, Fabian De Luca, was not happy with being passed over. There hadn’t been a succession war in almost a hundred years, and the Bureau wasn’t sure that there would be one. In New York? Maybe. But Detroit? They couldn’t see it happening. Besides, Nolan was still running his Top Echelon Informant—had been running him now for over a decade. Nolan’s predecessor had run him for ten years before that, and Patrick knew that this was why Nolan had stayed so long in Detroit; he was the only agent that the informant felt comfortable with. Because the informant was the most valuable Detroit mob informant ever, the Bureau kept extending Nolan. The information had been worth it, and the informant had never been caught talking with Nolan. More importantly, for twenty years, the informant had avoided suspicion of being a rat from the members of The Association.
But Nolan was retiring in less than a month, and the Bureau needed someone to transfer the Top Echelon Informant to. Last week, Nolan had pulled Patrick aside and told him that it was going to be him. The turnover process would be thorough. They would start this week. Patrick had told Tara none of this, just that he might be late a few nights this week.
He set the holster on the table next to his chair.
She kissed him. “I just got off the phone with Liz. Dari tried to run away from rehab last night.”
He gave her a hug.
“She didn’t get far. They lock up their shoes at night and make them wear flip flops. She ran barefoot and was caught a mile and a
half away trying to break into someone’s house to get at their liquor. She nearly got shot by the homeowner.”
“Where is she now?”
“In a different juvenile detention center for the time being. Liz wants to get her back into Wolverine immediately, but it’s not looking good.” Tara started to sniffle. “This was supposed to be the fix, Patrick. She’s fourteen.”
If working to bring down his former friend made him a bit uneasy, then Dari’s tragic story steeled him to continue his work. Organized crime was heavily involved in sports gambling, which could be considered a harmless vice—until you gambled away a month’s salary in a few hours—but drugs were a different animal. He couldn’t care less whether some dumbass OB-GYN, making $400,000 a year, lost $50,000 on the Super Bowl, but he did give a shit about innocent civilians getting caught up in addictive drugs. His niece, Dari Williams, had been serving a nine-month sentence at Wolverine Growth and Recovery Center in the small farming town of Vassar, which was almost three hours away from their house, two hours away from his sister-in-law Liz’s. Wolverine treated twelve- to seventeen-year-olds and tried to get them off drugs—mostly alcohol, pills, and weed—before they moved on to heroin and overdosed. Dari’s story was atypical from most of the kids at Wolverine. She came from a good family, had friends, lived in a nice neighborhood, and went to a nationally recognized public school. Furthermore, the family did not have a history of addiction. Both Liz and her husband, Jack, were light drinkers. All of these were reasons why the sweet, innocent Dari Williams was the least likely to ever start down the path she was now fighting to get off of. Unfortunately, she had become the poster child for the saying: One time is all it takes.
A year ago, she had attended a sleepover at a friend’s house—a campout in the back yard. Liz and Jack knew the parents but did not know that Dari’s friend had an older sister who was already hooked on pills. After the parents went to sleep, the older sister brought weed out to the tents. A month later, Dari was smoking up every weekend at her friend’s house and had tried alcohol. Two months later, she tried pills. Then, the phone calls from school started. Dari had been tardy to first period two times that week. Dari had lied and said she was being there for a friend. Her parents scolded her but believed her. The next week, her attendance was fine. A month later, her teachers called. Dari’s grades were slipping. The following weekend, she went to an adult party with her friend’s older sister and tried heroin for the first time. Two weeks later, Liz noticed some of her jewelry was missing. A week later, Dari had sex for the first time to pay for heroin. Two weeks later, the older sister died from an overdose, and Dari woke up in a hospital bed after being brought back to life by the same paramedics who had failed to revive the older sister. Her parents sat by her bed, sobbing. Then, a doctor came in and told them what the blood and urine tests had revealed about what was in their daughter’s system. He also mentioned that she had chlamydia and wrote a prescription for antibiotics. And so, the journey had begun to get Dari cured, which, after weeks of trauma filled with unimaginable stress, failed counseling visits, and a relapse after Dari escaped one night, had finally led to Dari ending up in Wolverine.
And where had the drugs come from that had entered Dari’s body and poisoned his sweet niece who used to go to the movies with him to watch Star Wars? Dealers owned by the Detroit Association, which was in business with the cartels. And now Michigan had voted to legalize marijuana. Well, he knew that law enforcement was in a tough spot, always had been. The war on drugs would never be won by law enforcement alone. The war on drugs would not be won by fighting the cartels down in Mexico; he’d read that ninety percent of all heroin came from America’s neighbor to the south. No, the war on drugs would be won in America, and it would be won by Americans no longer dishing out twenty-five billion dollars a year to the cartels for their products. Stop the money going south, and you win the war on drugs. However, to stop Americans from taking drugs would require Americans to face why they took drugs in the first place. Which...led him back full circle to his job: the stopgap measure, the everlasting Band-Aid on the wound, the best of a list of bad options to maintain societal stability. Law enforcement couldn’t walk away, and law enforcement couldn’t win—an ongoing draw with a host of casualties like little Dari Williams along the way was the best it would ever be until Americans stood in front of the mirror long enough or there were enough Daris to prompt different action.
He felt Tara pull away from him and thought he heard her say something, but his mind was still racing.
And now, with the majority of his home state about to be high on a regular basis, Patrick Bruno felt a hint of defeat. The tie would become a loss, but it was now his job to make that loss as slow as possible. But if legal pot became the gateway drug it had been rumored to be for decades as an illegal drug, then the addictive drug explosion was now on the horizon. And if that explosion was anything like cell phone addiction, then the loss would be quicker. If society felt pills, cocaine, and heroin use was bad now, just wait.
“Patrick?” she said.
He snapped out of it. “Mind took off again.”
“You were starting to mouth words and mumble. You’re far away when you do that.”
“Thinking about Dari and wanting to get my hands on the fucks.” He had said it louder than he meant.
“Shhh,” she said, frowning. “The boys.”
“Sorry,” he said. “And sorry about Dari.”
Tara’s eyes started to well up. “I’m not sure Liz and Jack are going to make it through this. It’s starting to tear them apart. You know, blaming each other for missing the early signs and second-guessing the past few years. They always seemed to be so put together. My sister was like super mom.” She wiped her eyes. “They are arguing about everything now.”
Patrick looked over her head and out the window. “Yeah, but stuff like this exposes cracks in relationships.” He looked back down at her.
She nodded.
He hugged her. “Let’s go down and see the boys,” he said.
“Okay.”
He turned the lamp off and followed her out the office door and down the stairs.
10
Greektown Historic District, Downtown Detroit
4 Days Ago…
It had been three days since Fabian De Luca had met with his uncle, Papa Pete. Their plan to seize control of The Association was now set, and it was time to start executing it. Flanked by GiGi Rizzo and three other family soldiers, Fabian entered Saint Anthony’s Mission through the back-alley door. Just inside, he was met by both the familiar musty smell and Father Antonio Ferraro, the overweight and charismatic head priest of Saint Anthony’s church, which Fabian had been baptized in and attended ever since. Father Tony, as Fabian called him, had been a friend for over twenty years and was preparing to host an afternoon meal for some of the city’s homeless. Fabian was there to help dish out the food but not before another matter was settled.
The men embraced.
“And how is my favorite son of God today?” Father Tony said.
“Ready to feed some of his lost sheep,” Fabian replied.
The old priest laughed. “There are many who need saving.”
Indeed, there were. The money Fabian had generously donated over the years had helped put some of them back on their feet. And, ironically, the family business, which he was soon to take over, kept a steady stream of them pouring into the church and mission looking for redemption, forgiveness, or just enough sustenance to keep them alive. He didn’t deny his role in wrecking a number of lives, breaking up families, or ending other lives. In its simplest form, life was one large cycle. A virtue was always counterbalanced with a vice. Power would never be and could never be eliminated. It could only be shifted. He had experienced both, and he had decided that the evils that accompanied power were much easier to live with than living with no power. Anyone who denied this was either a liar or someone who had never known power. And so, Fabian De Luca would continue
to be charitable: feed the poor, donate to the local hospital, buy presents for a host of families at Christmas, donate to the local school, keep Father Tony’s mission funded, his belly full, and his sexual voraciousness satiated, and do his part to keep fans filling Detroit’s professional sports’ stadiums by donating money and gifts for new arenas and the required upkeep of those arenas. And no one could talk him out of the money he diverted to keep the local YMCA and YWCA running. To him, a healthy body led to a healthy mind, and the two facilities were an important part of the community. Was it the ideal location to lure new people into the world of drugs? Of course. But the Detroit Association forbade it. The two centers existed to get people away from drugs. There would always be enough buyers, but some deserved the chance to escape that world. He felt a particular amount of pride in engineering a portion of those who would make it out and have a chance at a full life. There would also be those who were not strong enough, but the key to understanding power was to admit that you could not save them all. On this point, he had always justified the family business when compared to the other businesses that society labeled as legitimate. They did the exact same thing, played the numbers.
The men ended their hug, and Fabian’s eyes took in the room. The back parlor, where the men stood, looked like a Catholic church’s flea market—a stack of dusty hymnals on a rickety table, splintered pews with broken kneeling bars standing on end and rising to the ceiling in a corner, a rack of old coats against one wall, and old missals strewn across tables and the floor. There were large water spots on the ceiling, and water dripped into a bucket near a light bulb that hung from a cord coming out of the ceiling.
Fabian motioned toward the coats on the rack. “Still the same ones from when I was here last year?”
Father Tony rested his plump palms on top of his sizable belly. There was a sparkle of pride in his eyes. “Of course not.” His eyes led Fabian’s back to the rack. “These will keep our lost souls from freezing this coming winter.”