“Tommy, who?” Grace asked anxiously. Please don’t let it be any of the kids, she was praying. Please!
“Maddie,” Tommy said, and Grace and Gemma looked at Tree. Tree’s heart fell. It looked as if life itself had seeped out of her.
“Just get here,” Tommy said. “Just get here.”
Grace ended the call and she and Gemma hugged Trina.
“They took Maddie?” Trina was saying. “Somebody took my grandbaby, and they tried to kill Jimmy? This is craziness! This is madness! What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” Gemma said. “But don’t you worry. Our men will get to the bottom of this. Don’t you worry, Tree. They’ll bring Maddie safely home. You can rest assured of that.”
Gemma’s words were needful, and Trina needed to hear those words. But words alone weren’t about to calm her fears.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Why aren’t we doing something?” Jimmy was agitated. It had been nearly five hours and they still knew nothing. He couldn’t keep still and was pacing around all of them.
“We’re doing everything that can be done,” Reno said. “We’ve got every man on every one of our payrolls on this case. They’re searching every inch of Vegas and every surrounding area they can search. He couldn’t have gotten that far. We’ll catch his ass.”
They were all upstairs at the PaLargio: in the penthouse. The children were in the playroom, away from all conversation, the ladies had long since returned, and Buddy Wellstone, Maddie’s maternal grandfather, had been there for hours too. The tension in the air was as thick as fog.
Reno, wearing his reading glasses, was standing behind the desk in his home office as Maria and Bo Jackson were looking at every inch of footage available for around the time the kidnapper was at the PaLargio and took Maddie. They need Maria to point him out. But so far, she wasn’t recognizing anybody.
It was decided, the way it usually was, that no police would be called in. In the Gabrini mindset, cops would just make it worse.
Trina was standing beside Reno, with her arm around his waist, worrying that he would go into panic attack mode again, or worse, and Gemma was standing beside her. Grace was seated in front of the desk, and Tommy was seated on the arm of her chair, while Buddy was seated beside them. Sal was pacing too. He understood exactly how Jimmy felt.
“Maybe we can just hit the streets anyway,” Sal said. “Just see what we can see for ourselves.”
“That’s what I’m trying to say!” Jimmy proclaimed. “What if they aren’t doing their jobs? What if they’re letting these assholes get away and they aren’t doing a damn thing? Look how Bo and your men downstairs let that card thief get away with a hundred grand of your money, Pop. What if they let them get away with Maddie too?”
“He won’t get away!” Reno said angrily, staring at the video footage himself.
“But how do you know that?” Jimmy asked. “You don’t know that, Pop! Somebody has my daughter and we’re just standing around doing nothing!”
Trina looked at Jimmy. Her heart went out to him. She was inwardly hysterical too. “We’ll find her, Jimmy,” she said to him. “Reno’s got every man on the case. Tommy’s got every man on the case. Sal’s got every mobster on the case. And Uncle Mick’s got men and mobsters and crooked cops on the case. Running out there in those streets won’t solve anything. Everything is being done.”
“Wait a minute,” Reno said, leaning closer to the computer screen.
“You see something, Boss?” Bo asked.
“Go back,” Reno said to Bo. When he said that, Trina, Jimmy, and Sal looked closer too. Tommy, Grace, and Buddy hurried over, and looked too.
Bo did a rewind.
“Keep going,” Reno said, and Bo kept rewinding. Then he said: “Pause it right about . . . right there!”
Bo paused the film to a point where a group was getting onto the elevator.
“You said he was blonde,” Reno said to Maria. “Didn’t you, Maria?”
“Yes, sir. He had blonde hair and he had on a suit. A dark suit.”
“Look at that blonde guy in that dark brown suit,” Reno said.
“The guy with the big suitcase?” Bo asked.
“That guy, yes,” said Reno. “Does this guy fit the build of the guy who came to Jimmy’s apartment?” he asked Maria.
Maria looked hard. “I think so,” she said. “I wasn’t looking at him that hard. I’m sorry, sir.”
Trina squeezed her shoulders. “It’s alright, Maria. You’re doing fine.”
“Now fast-forward the footage about ten minutes up,” Reno ordered.
Bo did just that. Reno was looking intensely. Trina was amazed that Reno would have caught something and then remembered it ten minutes later. But that was Reno.
“Stop it right about . . . now,” Reno said, and Bo stopped the footage just as a dark-haired guy with that same big suitcase was getting off of the elevator.
“Looks like the same suitcase to me,” Sal said. “You think he was wearing a blonde wig and took it off?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Why isn’t there any footage of the guy on Jimmy’s floor?” Buddy asked. “That would narrow it down.”
“Unfortunately, most of the biggest hotels in Vegas don’t have cameras in the halls,” Tommy said. “It would be an invasion of privacy, their customers complained.”
Buddy shook his head. “We need that invasion right about now,” he said.
“Where’s Val?” Tommy asked. Val was Maddie’s mother and Jimmy’s ex-wife.
“I called her,” Buddy replied. “She’s very upset. She’s on her way.”
“But if he’s the guy coming down on the elevator from my place,” Jimmy said of the man on the video, “then wouldn’t he have Maddie with him? I thought we were trying to see if we saw Maddie in any of this footage.”
Nobody said anything, but the truth was obvious. They all looked to Trina to tell him.
“What?” Jimmy asked.
“What your father is thinking,” she said, “is that he could have given Maddie something to put her to sleep.”
“Okay,” Jimmy said.
“And then,” Trina added, “put her in that big suitcase he’s carrying.”
Jimmy’s heart dropped. “You think my daughter is in that suitcase?” He looked at it even harder. “Motherfuck.”
Reno and Trina were distressed too. Trina placed an arm around Jimmy.
“Find the footage that follows that one particular guy all the way outside and until he’s getting in whatever he got into,” Reno ordered Bo.
“Will do, Boss,” Bo said, leaned closer to the screen, and began the long, arduous process.
Then Reno’s cell phone rang. Everybody looked at him. He looked at the Caller ID. It was unknown. He placed it on Speaker, and answered quickly. “Hello?”
“Reno Gabrini?” The voice was disguised.
“Yes?”
“We have your granddaughter.”
Reno’s heart was pounding. So was everybody’s in that room. “Is she alright?”
“She’s fine. But she won’t be if you don’t follow my instructions.”
“We need to talk to her,” Jimmy said anxiously. “Let us talk to her.”
“Say hey,” the man said.
“Daddy? Get me out of here, Daddy.” It was Maddie. Her voice was undeniable.
“Are they treating you right, baby?” Jimmy asked her.
“Yes, sir.”
“You stay brave,” Jimmy said. “We’ll get you out of there. We love you, okay?”
“No more conversation,” said Maddie’s captor, and Maddie’s voice was no longer heard. Everybody’s distress quadrupled. It was no doubt about it now: they had Maddie. Jimmy grabbed his head and was turning around in agony. Buddy was tearing up.
But somebody had to keep a level head. Reno did. “What do you want from us for her safe return?” he asked.
“A hundred thousand dollars,” the man s
aid.
What the fuck? A hundred thou? It sounded like chicken change to Sal. Didn’t they realize they had the granddaughter of Reno Gabrini?
“When and where?” Reno asked into his phone.
“Best Buy on Hemsley. In the far back. After closing time. No cops. No Feds.”
“You got it.”
“And Gabrini, you and your wife come, but nobody else.”
Reno frowned. “My wife? No way. You deal with me. I’ll come alone.”
“You and your wife come alone, or you will not see your granddaughter again.”
“Say yes, Pop!” Jimmy decried.
“I’ll be there,” Trina said into the Speaker.
But Reno didn’t see the sense of it, other than as an opportunity for them to finish off what they tried to do the other day. “Why do you need my wife there?” he asked.
“Because we know you won’t try anything stupid if she’s there,” the caller said. “Now be there with the money, and you will get your granddaughter. Try to be slick and have some advance team showing up, and you and your granddaughter, and your wife, will be dead.” Then the call ended.
The room went quiet. Everybody looked at Reno. The idea that Trina had to go, too, and possibly be subjected to an ambush, too, doubled his distress. And it showed all over his face.
“We don’t have a choice, Reno,” Trina said to him. “I have to go.”
“You don’t have to do shit,” Reno lashed out. “I can go alone.”
“Then they’ll kill Maddie, Pop. You want them to kill your grandchild?”
“Don’t ask a stupid question, Jimmy,” Tommy admonished. “I know you’re upset. We’re all upset. But show some respect.”
“And the fact that they’re only asking for a hundred thousand dollars,” Sal said, “don’t sit right with me.”
“What don’t you like about it, Sal?” Gemma asked.
“We’re talking Reno Gabrini, the owner of the hottest hotel/casino in the world, and all they want is a hundred grand? That shit doesn’t make sense!”
All the Gabrini men opened their suitcoats and placed their hands on their hips. It was a lowball request to them, too.
“It’s like they just want to put a figure out there,” Sal said, “so Reno can get the money quickly and get to where they want him to be. It’s like they don’t give a shit about the money.”
“Then what are they after?” Jimmy asked.
They all looked at Reno.
Reno knew it too. “They’re after me, or Trina, or a combination thereof. That’s what those fuckers after.”
But Tommy knew his cousin. He knew how he would risk it all for Trina. “But Reno,” he said, “you still have to do it.”
“But I can do it alone.”
But Tommy, by far the brains of the bunch, was shaking his head. “But what if you get there and they say the deal is off because you didn’t follow the rules? What if they know you, and know your predilections, and will harm Maddie, our baby, if you show up alone?”
“But Uncle Tommy, what are you saying?” Jimmy asked. “Are you saying they’re expecting him to show up alone?”
“That’s right. Because they know how he is about Tree. Like all of us know. They know he wouldn’t put her in harm’s way any more than he’d put you or the rest of his children in harm’s way. They want him to come alone. For some reason they may need that excuse to take him out. I don’t know. But we have to assume these people are serious.”
Reno knew what Tommy spoke was true. And the fact that those assholes had his grandbaby was giving him heart palpitations.
“Ah, shit,” Bo said.
Everybody looked back at the computer screen. “What is it?” Reno asked.
“It’s the same guy,” Bo said. He had the picture of the man with the suitcase side by side with a man sitting at a blackjack table.
“What same guy?” Reno asked.
“The thief that stole that hundred grand from you,” Bo said. “It’s the same guy who might have snatched Madison.” The picture of the kidnapper was too grainy for a full comparison to the blackjack thief, as the kidnapper purposely kept his face down and away from camera view, but both men had a similar build.
Reno couldn’t believe it. “And we still have no read on the thief?”
“We still haven’t found him, no, sir,” Bo said.
“It’s like they’re toying with you, Reno,” Buddy said.
And Reno knew it too. Taking money from him was bad enough. But to try and kill his wife and kids; then to try to kill his oldest son; and then to snatch his granddaughter and threaten to kill her too? And now they were demanding that he put Trina at risk again? It was too much. Too fucking much! Reno began heading out of the office.
“Where are you going, Pop?” Jimmy asked.
“Reno?” Trina called him too.
“I need a minute,” Reno said, without looking back, as he continued to leave. “I need some advice.”
And he walked on out, headed upstairs to the master bedroom, and closed the door.
He laid across the bed on his back, with his feet on the floor, pulled out his cell phone, and made the call.
The line rang and rang.
And then, finally, it was answered.
“Hello?”
It was Mick Sinatra.
And hard as it was for Reno to go there, he knew, for Maddie’s sake, for his family’s sake, he had to go there. He couldn’t afford to get this wrong.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
Then Reno frowned a hard frown, rubbing his forehead. “I need help,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Mick told him where to park when he got behind the Best Buy, and he did as he was told. He pulled up, stopped his SUV in the exact spot he was told to stop, and he and Trina waited. It was a dark, isolated area at night, and but the sound of crickets all around them, it was quiet. There was an RV parked back there, and they wondered if it was some storage shed for the shopping center itself, or if Maddie could be holed up inside of it. But they didn’t make any stupid moves. They waited.
But they weren’t just sitting ducks. Trina had a gun in her hand, down by her side, and Reno had a small J-Frame pistol concealed in his hand. Because if they saw something else, something even remotely resembling an ambush, they knew they had to be ready.
They kept looking around, hoping for the best, but expecting the worse. Especially Reno, who was nervously strumming his fingers on the steering wheel as he looked around. This shit had his stomach in knots already, because Maddie was with whichever asshole took her, and because Trina was exposed too now. And both of them were his responsibility. Both of them had to come out of this alive, even if he didn’t. His heart was hammering.
“You see anything?” Trina asked as she continued looking around. “Other than that RV.”
“Nothing,” Reno said, looking through the rearview mirror to make sure no one was attempting to blindside them.
“I would have thought Mick’s men would have been around here somewhere by now. Wouldn’t you?”
“If we can see them,” Reno said, “they aren’t doing their jobs.”
“How many men he said he would have onsite?”
“What are you nuts? He didn’t tell me. He wasn’t about to tell me any of that shit. He just told me where to park my ass and he’ll talk to me later. And that was the full sum and substance of our conversation.”
Trina smiled, although it was a weary smile. “Typical Mick,” she said. But then she thought about her grandbaby, and what she had to be going through, and even that tired smile dissipated.
And then, as if she had willed it to be so herself, the door to that RV opened. Trina hit Reno’s arm and sat up at attention when she saw it. “Look,” she said anxiously. “Reno, look!”
Reno looked too. The door was opened, and then nothing. For several seconds they waited. And waited. And then finally, to their great relief and fear, a man came wal
king out, holding Maddie’s hand.
Reno and Trina wanted to jump from that car and run to their grandbaby right then and there, but two other men came out of that RV, too, and both of them were heavily armed. And they were looking around too.
“Remember what I said,” Reno said to Trina as he grabbed the briefcase from the backseat. “No false moves. We don’t want to spook those fuckers. Keep an eye, not on the men coming toward us, but around this place. I can handle the three coming toward us,” he added as he rechecked his small gun by racking the slide. “I can take them out. You may have to take out anybody else.”
“I will,” Trina said. “You know I will. You just be careful, Reno.”
Reno, with the briefcase in one hand, and his weapon in his other hand, took a deep breath, looked at Trina one last time, and then got out of the SUV.
But what Reno and Trina thought was not material to where Mick Sinatra told them to park their SUV, became very material. Because beneath that SUV was the manhole cover Mick told Reno to park over. Reno thought it was simply a landmark so that Mick’s sharpshooters, wherever he had them, would get the best shot off. But it wasn’t.
Unbeknownst to anybody on the scene, that manhole cover was pushed up and over, and Mick Sinatra himself, concealed beneath the SUV, got out of that hole. In his white coat, in his black trousers and turtleneck, he laid prone with his rifle in tow, a rifle with a scope and automatic magazine, and his big, green eyes darted around, from rooftop to rooftop, looking for an ambush. He didn’t give a shit about what was happening in front of that SUV; he knew Reno could single-handedly handle those a-holes. His entire focus was on the bigger picture: the heavy weapons.
And sure enough, as Reno walked toward his grandbaby and her kidnappers, and as Trina looked around as carefully as she could, Mick spotted trouble. Major trouble. Not on the rooftops in their immediate vicinity, but much further away.
He aimed his scope in that direction and guided it in for a close-up. And his eyes were not deceiving him. Three men were on a warehouse rooftop aimed and ready to fire with what looked like rocket-propelled grenades on the tip of their weapons. And they weren’t aiming at Reno. They were aiming for Trina. They wanted Reno’s wife. Which meant, Mick knew, they wanted Reno to suffer unimaginable pain.
Reno Gabrini: Turn Back Time Page 10