The Exceptions

FOUR


Years after my father’s elimination of Jimmy “the Rat,” he was still riding the wave of reputation from that hit. And I suppose he managed to go out with quite a bang: The Rat was the last time my father ever took someone out, ever needed to. That hit contained all the components necessary to propel fear and notoriety: It was grisly; it was a power play; it was sloppy—a mess everywhere—yet no one took the fall. It spoke to our community of an authority and immunity reserved for few others. To set another example would not be necessary; my father’s minions would now do the dirtiest work and take the biggest risks. Regardless of the end result, I always suspected that the McCartneys haunted him—not as ghosts like they did with me, but as reminders that we are not gods but merely participants in a world under His command. And I don’t think my father was ever able to shake the warning.

During those years, though, something else changed: the landscape of influence. Through my young life, the most valuable tool we had was the distribution of force and fear. But an evolution was occurring, and it wasn’t long before information became increasingly valuable. Some of our highest-volume debtors, mostly bottom-dwellers, were transformed into agents of utility. Guys working clerk jobs in the city with access to databases we could’ve never imagined suddenly captured our attention—and so did the status of their debts. One of our most consistent losers at betting pro football, Randall Gardner, managed to sustain his day job developing a system for the federal government. In lieu of paying back a debt, he gave Peter and Pop access to a particular database whereby they could see the FBI’s general plans, budgets, and priorities—information that was more interesting than valuable. Our access to this fascinating system lasted a mere twenty-two hours before our login was revoked, but the taste gave Peter a lust for information. To his credit, he began to marginally shift the power of our family to a slightly cleaner though equally illegal level of influence; we started playing more Monopoly and less Sorry.

I managed to keep my Beretta in secluded silence, hoping it would serve as nothing more than a defense weapon. Though I suppose it might be obvious where Peter’s longing for information took us, our family, and ultimately me.

By the time the football season was cresting the playoffs, Randall Gardner was betting his house—almost literally—on the Philadelphia Eagles to beat the Dallas Cowboys and cover the spread. Philadelphia didn’t show up for that game, and by halftime it was clear there was no hope Randall could save his house—or his marriage or the ability to see his kids again. Soon the Bovaros would be arriving at an odd hour with a pair of Louisville Sluggers if he didn’t fork over the five figures owed to us by the end of the week.

But Peter performed his magic on old Randall, working the guy’s Rolodex like an insurance salesman looking for potential leads. Make a list of ten people who could help you out, Randall. Three of the four built-in advantages to dealing with addicts are: (1) They have no pride remaining; (2) They tend to automatically leverage themselves; (3) They will work everyone they know for help. And Randall needed a lot of help. By that time, he served as a computer programmer in the information technology department at a small federal contractor that developed systems for the Department of Justice. Earlier that year, he had attended a conference in Washington, DC, where he met two other programmers he casually befriended. They exchanged numbers as a means of expanding their circle of potential job opportunities.

So when Peter approached Randall and gave him an opportunity to wipe away his entire debt—the proverbial second chance—Randall wept like a girl, said he would do anything.

Anything.

We never knew how Randall manipulated his friends from Washington, never came to understand if the information materialized through charm or force or threat, for therein lies the true benefit of the minion. We never cared if the information was acquired through hacking or social engineering or stealing someone’s briefcase, for therein lies the true benefit of the hopeless spirit with a need to supply a demanding addiction, the at-any-cost means of completing a mission.

Suddenly we had the exact address of the McCartneys, their latest aliases, everything.

My first gun had strings. It had a purpose.

Randall Gardner became one of our greatest assets. As for the fourth built-in advantage of addicts: (4) No matter how many times you wipe the slate clean, you can count on this: They’ll be back in debt to you even sooner than before. No more than two weeks later, the Redskins cost Randall another five figures. Mr. Gardner gave us more collected data over the years than the Farmers’ Almanac and Encyclopaedia Britannica combined, and Pop made sure we fed the man’s compulsion for gambling like a stray cat, doled out a fresh can of tuna and a saucer of warm milk with assured regularity. Randall always arrived on our doorstep looking for more, along with a cache of information in return.



I didn’t go to the McCartneys’ on my own. The hits were planned, and part of those plans included my older cousin by five years, Ettore Vido, an overstrung, highly skilled marksman who’d recently proven his talent to my father, who consequently found him endearing. Ettore—Hector, if translated—spoke infrequently, as though he’d recently arrived from Catania. He possessed a peculiar personality trait of being interested in absolutely nothing at all—no sports, no music, no television. He had not a single hobby. He didn’t have a favorite food, favorite car, favorite movie. He didn’t prefer blondes over brunettes, voluptuous over skinny. On the other hand, ask him to scrape the serial numbers off a collection of guns or clean the kitchen and he would silently oblige. As for the overstrung part: If you did anything to keep him from finishing an assigned task—say, dropping a glob of marinara on his clean kitchen floor—he would come apart at the seams, occasionally to the point of requiring restraint. All I can say is this: robot. And here, on our trip to find the McCartneys in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, he served as an automaton to make sure the assignment of taking out the McCartneys would be brought to a clean, comfortable close.

He accompanied me for one reason only: mission completion.

The late-winter, fifteen-hour drive out with Ettore was memorable only because it was not memorable at all. We did speak a few times:

ME: “Need a couple bucks for the toll.”

ETTORE: “’Kay.”

An hour later.

ME: “Want your order supersized?”

ETTORE: “’Kay.”

Three hours later.

ME: “I gotta hit the head.”

ETTORE: “Right.”

It wasn’t until we got a room at a roadside motel a few miles southeast of Mineral Point that he finally talked about the plan.

We sat on opposing double beds, shades drawn, one sixty-watt bulb lighting the room from ten feet away. As I studied my virgin Beretta, slowly unscrewing and rescrewing the silencer, Ettore put on a pair of gloves and began piling his reserve of weapons on the table between our beds, cleaning one at a time. He pulled them from everywhere—ankle holster, belt holster, two from his duffel bag. When the cleaning was complete, he went through the ritual of putting each in its respective holster, then quickly yanking it out and pointing it at some object across the room. The guy was a caricature of himself. Then again, rituals tend to give strength to disciplines, and Ettore was a proven killer. This wasn’t even his hit; the guns accompanied him on this trip for no other purpose than to act as a collection of steel security blankets. My Beretta? I tossed it on the pillow next to me and turned on the television.

“This is happening,” Ettore said to me.

I glanced at him, pursed my lips and nodded a little, then turned back to the TV. There was no way this was happening. Under other circumstances anxiety would have wrapped its hand around me and delivered a squeeze tight enough to crumble me like a saltine. The act of your first premeditated murder comes hard to anyone not belly deep in drugs or sociopathy, mobster or not. But my excuse was far easier; the most talented assassins ever to have been affiliated with the Bovaro crew previously failed at whacking the McCartneys. Ettore and I were hardly a step up. I figured we’d look for the McCartneys for a few days, then return home as an expected disappointment.

Turns out, though, Ettore and I were not on the same page.

“This is happening,” he repeated.

“I know.” I proceeded with the ritual of opening a new pack of Marlboros, shaking one loose, placing the filtered end against my dry lips, lighting it.

“You ready?”

I tried to determine what he was really asking, blew smoke over to his side. “Of course.”

“Don’t get comfortable.”

I shook my head at the television. “There’s nothing comfortable about this, Ettore.”

“There should be nothing uncomfortable about this, Johnny.”

I took a long drag as I watched a Budweiser commercial—young men and women laughing on a California beach, playfully flirting, falling into foamy waves, sunning on a strip of sand and rock. Somewhere, far away from Mineral Point, Wisconsin, people were doing innocent things.

Ettore came to my side, reached over and grabbed my Beretta, tightened the silencer, added it to his stack of firearms, next in line for a cleaning.

“This is happening,” one final time.

I glanced his way. “I know.” This time, just a little, I believed it.



We were assassins, but not the kind that would do the type of damage where no one suspected we were there; wasn’t the point that people knew we were there, that retribution lit this fuse? If military-trained executioners might be compared to a diamond-tipped saw, slicing a perfect divide into someone’s lifeline, Ettore and I were like a chain saw, cutting a half-inch swath through anything we touched, wood chunks and sawdust flying everywhere. Best wear your goggles around us.

The following morning we dropped our key on the front desk of the motel along with a wad of cash to cover the room. We loaded the car with our firepower and set on our way. The objective: I was to eliminate an entire family, drop the gun, drive straight back to New York.

As the clock passed ten on that Saturday morning, Ettore snaked us over the gentle hills, toward the historic section of Mineral Point, avoiding Highway 151 just to the west. From the moment we left the motel, everything seemed surreal. The sky was weighted with fast-moving gray clouds destined to unload a reserve of rain on us at any second. We passed roads with names like Cheese Country Recreation Trail and Merry Christmas Lane. We waited our turn at an intersection in the oldest section of the city, atop the crest of a hill, where the stores were sheltered by trees and wrought-iron lamps were still alight on that cloudy morning. Two families walked hand in hand down the steep hill as they viewed the windows of art galleries and pottery shops and answered questions from their children. It seemed wrong to disrupt this part of the world. In my turf back home everyone sort of has it coming. In Mineral Point, people moved out of the way for one another, nodded at strangers, and perused shops like Papa Pat’s Farmhouse Recipes and Leaping Lizards. Blood should never be spilled here.

We drove the four miles from the center of the small village to the McCartney residence on the north side, past the welding supply shop and the liquor store, past the Dairy Queen and the fairgrounds, past the open fields, and finally through the farm-rich outskirts. As we drew nearer, I noticed a few manufacturing buildings, one of which seemed likely to act as the temporary employer of the disguised Arthur McCartney.

Ettore made a series of left and rights—no doubt memorized the map to their house with great precision—and brought us to the edge of a bland street, devoid of trees and sidewalks and, in general, love. This was a flat field that someone had decided would make a good place for five carbon-copy homes, lined up like soldiers, facing and backing a distinct nothingness, a six-year-old’s crayon depiction of rural life.

“That it?” I asked, nodding toward a gray rambler tucked at the bottom of a courtless dead end, to which I never received an answer. I’ve been told the look and life of a house is a reflection of its residents. If that’s true, this house reflected death and disinterest. What landscaping remained alive had overgrown the pieces that had long since perished. The paint on the shutters had chipped and begun to drop in hunks down onto the gnarled bushes below. On the two concrete steps leading to a broken screen door sat three planters holding the stiff skeletons of deceased flowers. This house said on behalf of its residents: What’s the point?

We waited from a secluded distance for an hour, not a word spoken, and the longer we waited the more at ease I became. Who was to say they were even home? I could feel the victory of failure upon us!

I jumped in my seat when the old wooden garage door of the rambler started to yawn, each framed section jerking as the opener tugged on it with all its might. Ettore sat up, leaned forward a little, and an icy smile came over his face that will never leave my memory, a look that suggested he’d visualized the series of moves leading us to checkmate.

A rush of adrenaline pumped through me as we watched their Subaru creep out from the shelter of the garage, obscuring them from view. I hadn’t seen these people since I stole glimpses of them on the New York sidewalk that day as a child. They existed in my mind the way they were then, ageless and blameless and healthy. But I could no longer allow my imagination to have that latitude; after all, here we were.

We followed them to the A&P. And the gray clouds opened.

I watched them from a sheltered point of view a baseball’s-throw distance away at the far end of the grocery store parking lot. It seemed I was always watching them exit automobiles, the closest thing to time travel I might ever experience. But this time, as they emerged from the Subaru, they looked weathered and worn. The father crawled out first and looked around like he was expecting the bullet already fated for his temple, trying to determine from which direction it would come. Rubbing his neck with one hand and coughing into the other, he walked to the passenger side and opened the door for his wife; she, too, looked around as if trying to locate a friend in a large crowd. They were both emaciated, the father having aged two decades in one’s time, the mother thin with clothes hanging off her frame like hand-me-downs from a larger sibling and wrinkles identifiable from our veiled location forty yards away. Arthur scoped the parking lot and through the rain it seemed he lingered on our car. Could he have identified the New York plates from that distance, things might have turned out differently.

Then Melody surfaced from the backseat—and I stopped breathing. Up to that moment, she’d remained a kindergartner in my mind, an everlasting image of all the innocence we’d so cruelly removed.

Unless you’ve got a buddy who serves as an expert at age progression photography at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there is no way to anticipate the look a child will get when she transcends adolescence, and even if I’d had the skill, I could not have imagined how Melody matured. We were closer in age now—the four-year gap meaning less than it did long ago—and now I viewed her the way a college senior might view a freshman. She wore her chestnut hair short and tucked behind her ears, her skin an unhealthy white. Though she stood as tall as you would expect of a seventeen-year-old, I might’ve confused her for an older girl. And her size and shape suggested she could regularly raid her mother’s wardrobe. She pushed up the sleeves of a loose blue sweater, put her hands in the pockets of her jeans, stared at the ground, head hanging. I was just as mesmerized as all those years ago, fueled by the same curious interest, but now also with an obsession to understand the effect—the aftereffect—of what the world had done to this family, to this little girl.

Melody stared without aim, let the rain fall on her with no concern. She appeared as a girl with absolutely nothing to look forward to, a candidate for justifiable depression.

Ettore said, “When they come out.”

I could not take my eyes off of Melody. I’d never seen the spirit removed from someone the way it had been pulled from her, and I’d seen some guys really take an emotional beating that surely would have resulted in hopelessness. Gone were the swirling dances and the curious glances at the sky, along with her parents’ flirty kisses. She stood in the lot of the A&P, her face tipped down as though transfixed by the movement of a caterpillar. The look of dread and defeat on their individual faces spoke of permanent damage.

The cold rain intensified, hammered down on the roof of our car, went from dimes to nickels. Beyond the moving windshield wipers and through the wet window of the grocery store, we watched Arthur and Lydia lumber off in one direction and Melody sit down on a bench at the front of the store and stare out over the parking lot, her body twisted in our direction. She put her arm across the back of the bench, rested her chin over her forearm the way a dog rests its head on a paw.

The pain of watching them became so unbearable that I thought for a moment they might actually be better off dead. I thought that hardening my heart in the genuine Bovaro manner was the safest direction to turn my life. A hit is easier to understand when accompanied by an excuse of permissibility. They deserved it.

They had it coming.

After rubbing my eyes, I returned my gaze to the storefront. Melody had disappeared, no longer behind the window.

Then came the waiting. Ettore and I sat like a pair of mannequins, stiff and forward-facing, wearing black leather jackets and thin leather gloves and mismatching baseball caps, twins in all but our thoughts. Neither of us could comprehend what was about to unfold.

Ettore stared at the door, chewing a double-size wad of Juicy Fruit.

The rain intensified, forced us to kick the wipers into a faster rhythm.

At that moment, in the silence between us, a clarity of my existence dropped upon me, weighed me down, and the pressure pushed all the air from my lungs. How had I become the exact thing I didn’t understand—and hated most—in all my father did?

I had become one of the minions.

Should I throw this entire operation, Ettore would stool it right back to Pop; then the disappointment, the shaking of the head, the comment to someone out of my earshot: “How could my own flesh and blood do this to me?” To which I would never get to counter with the question: “How could my own flesh and blood have asked me to do this?”

Everything about the A&P fit the scene; what was about to happen really should have occurred no other place. People stopped loving this store long ago. The nearly empty parking lot exposed the cracks and rain-filled potholes in the pavement. Rain cascaded off the roofline where a hunk of gutter drooped like the jowls of an aging face, and the wide front window had lost its seal long ago, the inside of the double pane patterned with irregular swirls of dust and grime. This store possessed nothing in common with the new Kroger we had passed on the way from the south, with its parking lot full of BMWs and Eddie Bauer sweaters and double incomes. Melody and I were in the same image, a hopeless snapshot of history. If a building could cry, this one would not be sobbing, but shedding a tear with its final whimper. The A&P was about to die. And now so were its customers.

Ettore kept his dim eyes on the door of the grocery, chewing in time with the wipers, his heart likely pumping a cool sixty beats per minute. He looked like he was doing nothing more stressful than waiting in line to buy the Times.

Want to know what the detailed plan was? Kill them. Walk up to them and take them out one at a time, drop them like mail sacks, then jog back to the car. From there, Ettore would drive us back to New York. Just once you’d think our approach to taking down a building would be wiring it carefully with explosives, clearing the area, imploding the structure into a nice hill of rubble; instead, we had one solution only: Come in with a wrecking ball and start making big holes.

Then, through the streaky windshield, I saw the elder McCartneys shuffle from the store, both with a pair of plastic grocery bags in each hand.

At that very second I wanted so badly to revel in evil, wanted to be enraged at the actions of these people, wanted to want them to pay for troubling my father and family, and to taste the strong bitterness of revenge. To become a legend, to honor my father, to become feared and respected among those around me.

Instead… nothing.

Arthur struggled with the trunk, yanking on the patch of horizontal surface above the license plate. He put his bags down on the wet parking lot. Lydia shrugged her shoulders in some attempt to shelter herself from the strengthening rain. Melody remained out of sight.

I held my Beretta in my hand loosely, and were I not wearing gloves, a thin layer of sweat would’ve coated its stubbly grip. I gently tightened the silencer against the barrel of the gun.

The parking lot remained empty but for a smattering of vehicles, and the rain acted as a secondary shield of reasonable doubt for any potential witnesses. I pulled my baseball cap down over my forehead, flipped up the collar of my jacket.

Arthur yanked up twice, then the trunk opened—and that was it, the final piece in place for the perfect hit, the trunk lid offering one final defense against unexpected onlookers and a mild sound deflector. I reached for the door handle and tugged it with all the strength of a toddler.

Ettore turned my way. He knew as well as I did that this was the moment. All the years of hunting, all the attempts to eliminate the McCartneys, all the anguish of the past coupled with all that lay ahead if we failed now, came down to me opening the door of our Impala. I took a deep breath and let it out heavily enough to fog the window of my door. I tried, hoped, even—most despicable—prayed I could take life that day. Alas, the spirit didn’t move me. Despite Ettore’s repeated attempts at the power of positive thinking, bad news was coming his way: This was not happening.

MR. ROBOTO: “Take ’em.”

ME: “I can’t get the shot.”

“Hell you mean? Get out of the friggin’ car!”

Then, more honestly, “I can’t take the shot.”

“Get out of the friggin’ car!”

“Where’s the girl? We can’t—”

Ettore quickly tightened his gloves, grabbed the gun from my incapable hands, opened his door so quickly it slammed back into his side as he bolted. That moment, as my cousin departed my side and without fear navigated around the few cars between us and the McCartneys, my breathing became short and clipped, adrenaline now in flood. The wipers could not wipe away the rain fast enough for me.

Ettore moved up to Arthur from the side of the Subaru, Beretta at his side, out of clear vision from Lydia. Arthur stood back at full height, slammed the trunk down, and as Ettore stood before him, Arthur smiled a little at the stranger—until the barrel of the gun was leveled at his head.

Arthur did not try to run. He did not try to duck. He did not cover his chest or face.

He took two steps to his right to move in front of his wife, to shield her one more second from death. He raised a shaking crooked finger and pleaded, “Okay… wait…”

And with the pop of a muted firecracker, Arthur tumbled facedown on the pavement, his wife left with a red mist across her forehead. Lydia winced and stumbled back as though a car had just driven through a puddle and splashed her. Her eyes gone soft, head trembling like taken by a sudden onset of Parkinson’s, she did something that haunts me to this day: With quivering hands, she reached up and pulled the top flaps of her coat together and nervously buttoned them, as though she knew death was upon her, so that once she’d fallen to the ground she would not appear immodest. Lydia slowly went to her knees—she did not collapse—as though preparing for prayer.

Near gasping, I opened my car door and slowly entered the wet air.

Lydia leaned forward near her husband’s lifeless body, faced her killer, closed her eyes, her hands still clinging to the top of her coat, just kept whispering, “Okay… okay…”

Before squeezing the trigger, Ettore shot a glance my way, brimming with evil, one that could only have been read as Do you see what I am doing? This is how it’s done.

Another muted firecracker and Lydia slowly tipped over like a melting snowman.

Ettore dropped one more bullet into each of them, carefully stepped around the bodies before him, began his visual search for the last remaining target. But as I watched his motion, I feared I might have been a true Bovaro after all, that the genetic disposition toward violence might have been buried deep in the twist of chromosomes that made me who I am, for instead of being sickened and further weakened at what just happened, a surge of hatred and rage filled me—not toward the McCartneys, mind you, but wrath was well on its way.

My lungs filled with ease.

When Melody came to the front of the store, approaching the foggy glass, I saw her the same second my cousin did. He held his forearm as he leveled his sight on her.

This is when I left our car’s side and yelled louder than I knew my voice could go.

“Ettore Vido!”

He dropped the Beretta to his side and looked at me like the next bullet was for me. I walked in his direction in a manner that suggested that bullet would be the only thing that could stop me. He glanced back at the window, measuring the possibility of taking her out before our escape out of town.

“Ettore Vido!”

Melody moved to the window, cupped her hands around the glass to focus her view of the parking lot, unable to see her dead parents below the ledge of the sill. With her perfect position, she could have been eliminated with a slingshot, never mind a weapon as accurate as a Beretta. My cousin took one last look her way, raised his arm quickly, and aimed it in the general direction of Melody.

“Ettore! Vido!”

Then Melody slipped out of sight.

My cousin turned to me and held the gun in my direction, quickly walking my way and cursing his missed opportunity—but mostly me—with every step, his profanity merely foreshadowing what would become a brutal storm upon my existence.

He held that gun steady, aimed right at my head, but I stood my ground. When he got within a few feet, his cursing now laced in spit that splashed my face, he swung the Beretta down on the side of my head and I immediately fell to the ground. Just as I was figuring out what had happened, the Beretta made its way to my skull again. And again. I touched my face, looked down at my palm covered in the blood from my head, running from a gash across my temple that I would wear the rest of my life.

Ettore grabbed me by the arm, lifted me up, then smashed me again, this time with his glove-covered fist. I tried to regain my composure—despite the pain, I remained enraged—but I could not get my footing. When I finally staggered to my feet, Ettore grabbed me by the back of my jacket and shoved me into the front seat of our Impala.

As bodies began to cautiously slink out from the store, we sped from the parking lot and disappeared toward Route 151, down a series of back roads until we were within a half mile of the highway. Ettore drove off the road into a field, mud splattering the windows, and spun the car around so it was facing the street again.

He got out and looked at the Beretta with confusion—not sure why it was still in his hand. The robot did not follow his programmed instructions. He walked through the field, the cursing returned, my name embedded within each sentence.

I kicked my door open and crawled out, blood in my mouth and eyes, the world spinning beneath my feet. Of all the habits I spent my later life trying to reject—the smoking, the acid tongue, the careless drinking—I could never surrender the anger and rage and propensity to destroy by intimate physical means. There is no necessity for nicotine, for vulgarities, for inebriation. Unfortunately, though, violence is a necessary thing.

The pressure was crescendoing now, making its quick conversion to wrath. It was not due to some sense of shame that I was unable to follow my father’s instructions, not from Ettore’s desperate need to displace me and elevate his place in my family, not from his sheer nerve to pistol-whip me, to point the barrel of a gun in my direction. This moment clarified all that mattered to me, what would come to be the focus of my life. Ettore should never have made an attempt on Melody’s life, should never have been willing to eliminate that kind of innocence.

I walked to the rear of the Impala, opened the trunk, slid all the bags and boxes aside, and pulled out the tire iron. I slowly limped my way to my cousin, who stood facing the open expanse of land, raising his fist to some greater power that had failed him.

I trudged through the muddy field, my shoes filling with brown muck and slowing me even more. I approached Ettore, tightened my grip on the tire iron, and watched him writhe in the anguish of inefficacy.

In agony, I managed to mumble, “Turn around.”

I gave him the time he needed to understand what was coming, to know what I was about to deliver, that I would be changing the way he looked, the way he walked, and the way he would swallow for the rest of his life, that all of this was brought about by my hands.

“Johnny!” he yelled.

It should be noted he never pronounced my name the same way again; it forever sounded like this: “Shonny.”

I swung against his face with all my strength, leveled him. If it might be possible to propel the soul out of a human being by sheer force, I came close to doing it here. His body twisted in nearly a full circle, a drunken ballerina, falling into the mud facedown. I left him gurgling there for a moment, then reached down, grabbed him, and flipped him over.

“Get up.”

Both hands to his face, he shouted, “Shonny!”

“Up.”

And when he finally stumbled to his feet, I swung again and cracked his right knee. Ettore was brought into this world bowlegged, but he would spend the rest of his life knock-kneed.

I let Ettore scream it out for a minute, then stumbled over him, knelt on his chest, grabbed the tire iron by both ends and pushed the center down over his neck. The look in his eyes was pleading, for he could carry none of the grace the McCartneys did when mercy showed them no sign of arrival. His choking and gagging could only be interpreted as some form of begging.

I leaned over him, and as the rain and my blood and my spit dripped onto his mud-covered face, I said, “Yeah, this is happening.”

Ettore whimpered.

Then I unleashed. “Now listen to me. You never go near the girl. For the rest of your life you never go near her. You don’t think about her. You don’t even mention her name. Don’t ever use the word melody again, capice? You like a song? Call it a tune or jingle, ’cause if I hear you say her name, I will destroy you, you understand me? And don’t think what you witnessed back at the grocery was my inability to kill, ’cause you ever go near Melody I’ll blow a hole in your chest big enough to thread with this tire iron.”

Ettore made a feeble attempt to raise me off of him, like he was trying to bench-press an engine block. I pushed down on the tire iron and he coughed up a dark mixture of fluids.

And here is where I may have become a true Bovaro, for I played the card: “You’re a loser, Ettore. You’re nothing in this family. I’m Tony Bovaro’s son, and we both know all I have to do is mention what you did to me today and they’ll end you. What you fail to realize is that I outrank you, and I always will. You matter as much as that Beretta. Even your mother had to have known what a loser you’d be, couldn’t even name you after a saint.” Then with one last final push: “So, here’s how it’s going down. I didn’t touch you and you didn’t touch me. This never happened. When we get back to New York, you don’t mention the girl. You can take all the credit for the killings and be the hero. As for our wounds, I don’t care what you say, but that’s it, you understand? Not another word about the girl. I find out she so much as gets a hangnail, I’m coming after you and I’m bringing something better than a tire iron.”

I pulled the steel bar from his neck, stood up, cast a gray shadow over him.

“Not another word about the girl.”

Ettore sputtered for some time after that, sprawled back in the mud like an abandoned scarecrow. Then, finally, “Okay… okay, Shonny.”



To say there was a celebration upon our return would be incorrect. After all the stress and lost sleep the McCartneys caused my father, you might imagine ticker tape would have fallen from the sky, that our wounds might have been concealed by an avalanche of confetti, but that was never the way it went, even when it came to taking out the McCartneys. When Ettore and I walked into the kitchen of my parents’ recently purchased English Tudor across the Hudson in Tenafly, New Jersey, my father was leaning on the counter, wiping dry the remnants of a small bowl of red sauce with a slice of bread. The first he’d seen or heard of us since we departed, he looked up, stared at the clots and bruises on our faces, Ettore’s odd stance.

“Hell happened?” he said.

Ettore cleared his throat, tried not to look at me. “C’ran overush in loh ash wuhwuh leafin’.” A car ran over us in the lot as we were leaving.

Pop approached us, looked at me first. “You okay?”

“We’ll survive. Right, Ettore?”

My father touched my cheek gently, looked at the scrapes and swollen flesh. His face sagged into a pout, was the closest I’d ever seen him come to expressing regret. But the years had depleted him, and the distance between regret and revenge had shortened. His expression soon turned into Bovaro anger, a burst of required retribution.

“Not the guy’s fault. We took care of it,” I said, then, changing the subject, “Ettore’s a hard worker. Mom and Dad are out of the picture.”

Pop took a step back and nodded, passed a subtle grin of approval. “The girl?”

Ettore looked down.

I answered, “I learned everything I could ever need to know from my cousin. The girl is mine. Don’t worry, Pop. I’ll take care of her. That right, Ettore?”

My dad moved to my cousin, put his hand behind his neck. “This was clean?” Ettore nodded. Pop smiled, reached around and hugged my cousin, whispered something in Italian, likely a verbal commendation. And as my father tightened his embrace, I could see Ettore’s hands shake in agony, hear his staccato breathing.



Ettore ended up being celebrated for his kills, marginally elevated in our family and crew, famed for doing what no one else could achieve. He had eliminated the more important of the witnesses—what juror would truly rely on what someone witnessed as a six-year-old from over a decade earlier?—and provided proof of how impervious the Bovaros were to prosecution. And from that honored moment, he became Shimmy Vido, aptly nicknamed for the way his lame leg would wiggle from side to side with every step, remembered for his acts of heroism with a life of disrespect and indifference:

“Go send Jimmy and Shimmy down there to talk to him.”

“Hey, Sh-Sh-Shimmy! What’s sh-sh-shaking?”

“Throw me a beer, you friggin’ gimp.”

As for me, I made it clear across my father’s organization that Melody was in my sights, that I would make good on taking her out, that her eventual elimination would be my absolution. That no one else was to touch her. But it must be understood that my absolution did not rest in her elimination, but in her insulation. If there existed any hope for my redemption, it had to be in becoming her shield.

She was all mine to take care of. All mine.