“I said it was an error,” said Pauley. “Bump did wrong. I’m not defending what Bump did. But it was a mistake, Robby. A terrible mistake.”
“Men died,” said Robby. “Mistake my ass.”
“The question is,” said Scrubs, “should Bumper die too?”
When Scrubs asked that question, they all looked to Sal for the answer.
Sal finally stopped walking when he stood at the window, his back to all of his men. He hated with a passion when his men fucked up. And it was a royal fuck up. Two of his men dead. A war diverted because Sal had to call in a favor. He didn’t like handling his business that way. “Bring their asses in here,” he ordered.
Robby nodded at PeeWee, a big, burly man who got his nickname because of his high-pitched voice, and he got up and made his way to the door. When he opened it, he stood aside and Bumper Collins and two other men walked in. They were all Sal’s made men. They were all well-experienced men who should have known better.
“I don’t see where this is an issue,” Bumper was saying as soon as he walked in. “Why are we being put on the grill like this? Those guys came at me, and hell yeah I fought back. What’s the big damn deal?”
Sal turned around. When Bumper saw that cold, chilling look in Sal’s eyes, he knew he should have shut it. But he couldn’t. He was pissed. “I’m no fucking novice. I knew what I was doing. Is it my fault that two of our guys got caught in the crossfire? I didn’t kill’em.”
“Shut up,” Sal said to Bumper with as much self-control as he could muster, although he was raging inside.
But Bumper, being Bumper, kept talking. “What I’m trying to say, Boss,” he said.
But Pauley, who was a close friend of Bumper’s, intervened. “Shut the fuck up, Bump!” he yelled. “Just shut the fuck up!”
“Why I got to shut up?” Bumper asked. “What did I do wrong? I defended myself, that’s what I did. Is it my fault that it didn’t work out?”
“Button it, Bump,” said Robby, looking at Sal. He knew better than any of them when Sal was enraged.
But that damn Bumper wouldn’t let up. “Everybody wants to silence me when all I did was defend myself. Wouldn’t you defend yourself, Robby? Why I can’t defend myself? Those cocksuckers started badmouthing me and I was supposed to just take it? Shit went sideways. It happens in our line of work.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Sal angrily yelled. “Didn’t I tell you to shut the fuck up?!”
Nobody realized Sal had a gun in his hand until he started angrily waving it around. “I don’t wanna hear your punk-ass voice again, you hear me?!”
“Yes, sir,” Bumper said quickly. It was as if he suddenly realized Sal was in the room too.
“When shit goes sideways it doesn’t blow back on you,” Sal yelled. “That’s why your ass can afford to be all cavalier about this shit. That’s why your ass talking all that stupid shit. Because it doesn’t blow back on you. It blows back on me and my family! Me and mine!”
Sal had to calm back down. “And for you two to go along with his stupid ass,” Sal said, waving his gun toward Bumper’s two sidekicks, “makes me wanna get rid of all of you. Now two of my men are dead,” he said, looking at Bumper again, “and you don’t see where it’s a big damn deal? Well I’m about to show you just how big a damn deal it really is,” he said and began firing at Bumper. One shot. Two shots. Three shots. He walked and fired. Fired and walked. Four, five, six shots. Bumper was backing up, and his body was shaking with every bullet hole that shot through him. Sal’s men had stood up, too, and were backing up too. Until Bump dropped dead.
The other two men, now even more terrified than they had already been, started begging for their lives.
“We didn’t mean to do any harm, Boss. We thought he had permission to call us in. We thought he had permission!”
But Sal wasn’t even looking at them. Bumper was the man who had to pay. His attitude didn’t cause his fate. Sal would never kill a man for mouthing off. But he knew he had to eventually get rid of a loose cannon like Bump, anyway, before he started a fight with the wrong mob. It was a long time coming. His mouth, and arrogance, just happened to speed up his fate.
“Wipe it clean,” Sal ordered his men.
“Yes, sir, Boss,” said Scrubs as he pulled out his cell phone to call in the cleanup crew.
“What about these two?” asked Robby as he motioned toward Bumper’s sidekicks.
“Spare their miserable lives,” Sal said, “but teach them a lesson.”
Robby knew that meant give them a beating they wouldn’t soon forget. But one of the two men was so relieved that he wasn’t going to die that day that he began relieving himself.
Robby shook his head. “You better be glad we have a fair boss. Any other boss would have killed your asses too. Now let’s go!” he ordered, and pushed them toward the exit. They looked back at Bumper’s body, a man who dragged them into a fight they should have never allowed him to drag them into, and they were as angry with him as Sal was.
Sal continued to stare at Bumper’s body. There was a time when Bump showed a lot of promise.
But he should have taken him out a long time ago, and everybody knew it. Sal was becoming distracted: by his wife. By his kid. By his own legitimate businesses.
He’d better get a grip, he knew, before the grip got him.
CHAPTER THREE
It was long after midnight when Sal made it back to Vegas. He entered his quiet home, peeped in at his young son Lucky, who was fast asleep in bed, and made his way upstairs. Gemma was who he wanted. All those days on the road, handling one crisis after another one, and he needed to see her cheerful face again.
And when he made it into their bedroom and saw that she was sitting up in bed, he became elated. She had waited up for him! But then he realized she had fallen asleep reviewing notes on her iPad. But that made him smile too. That was his Gemma. Always working. He went over to her, sat on the edge of the bed, and closed her iPad.
When he closed her tablet, she opened her eyes. When she saw that it was Sal, and that he had returned home, she smiled that angelic smile he loved. “Sal!” she cried happily, and wrapped her arms around his neck.
He moved further onto the bed and pulled her closer against him. Then he pulled her onto his lap, cradling her. She smiled up at him. He smiled down at her. “Miss me?” he asked her.
“Yes. Terribly.”
“I miss you,” Sal said. Then his look turned serious. “More than you’ll ever know,” he said. And then he moved down, to her gorgeous lips, and kissed her.
For the longest time all that could be heard in that entire bedroom was the sound of their smacking lips. They couldn’t seem to get enough of each other. Sal was moaning as he kissed her. Gemma was clutching him tightly as he kissed her. And then Sal’s hands began moving beneath the big shirt Gemma wore, and he was feeling all over her body as he kissed her. He was getting too hot to handle. Kissing was not going to be enough to satisfy his outsized need.
That was why he unbuttoned that big shirt, and began sucking her breasts.
Gemma’s slender body leaned into Sal as he sucked her. He was making love to her breasts and she was moving up and down as if he was inside of her already. And he couldn’t stop sucking her. For the longest time he sucked and sucked, and his hand continued to massage her below.