Kari folded another pair of panties and placed them into her suitcase.  Jordan, lying across her bed, smiled.  “Dang, Ma!” he said.  “It’s only for the weekend.  How many pair of drawers do you have to take?”

Kari could feel her face blush.  She knew how often Alex liked to have it, and she knew she had to be prepared to change underwear a lot.  But she certainly didn’t want her fourteen-year-old son to know that!  “Don’t you worry about what I’m packing,” she said.  “Don’t you have homework to do, anyway?”

It was Thursday night.  “I did it already.”  Then he smiled.  “This time tomorrow night you’ll be on your way to New York to spend the weekend with Mr. Drakos, and I’ll be with Uncle Benny and Auntie Faye.”

“And you’d better be on your best behavior, too, boy,” Kari said.  “They better not give me any kind of a bad report.”

“They won’t.”

“They better not.”

“Where’s Mr. Drakos anyway?  Why is he always out of town?”

“What do you mean out of town?” Kari asked.  “He lives in New York.”

“That’s where he is now?”

“Why?”

“I was just wondering.”

“He’s handling some business, that’s all I know.  He doesn’t go into those kind of details with me, and I don’t ask him to.”

“Why not?” Jordan asked.  “You’re scarred?”  Jordan smiled as he purposefully mispronounced the word scared.

Kari smiled too.  “No,” she said, “but he’s entitled to live his life.”

“Are you living yours by going to New York just because he asked?” Jordan asked.

“I want to go, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“What are you guys going to do all weekend?”

“Okay, enough questions,” Kari said.  She had a great idea about one thing she and Alex were going to do all weekend.  “Go find something to do,” she said.

Jordan smiled as he got off of her bed.  Then he looked at Kari.  “I heard his ex-wife came to town,” he said.  “Is that true, Ma?”

Kari wasn’t going to lie to him.  “Yes,” she said.

“Is she moving here or something?”

Kari shook her head.  “I doubt it.”  Then she exhaled.  “Don’t worry about her, Jordan.  Alex can handle her.”

“What about you?  You can handle her?”

“Child please,” Kari said as she continued to pack.  “Can Lebron James handle a basketball?”

Jordan laughed, and felt better as he left her room.

 

The EMT loaded the gurney onto the back of the ambulance, and got back out.  Vito Visconni, paralyzed from the neck down, laid on that gurney waiting to be transported.  It was his first day out of the hospital, and he was being transferred to a nursing home for rehab. Why they felt a need to rehab a man the doctors already said would never walk again was insane to Vito.  But at least it got him out of that hospital.

But when a man, fully dressed and wearing gloves, got into the back of the ambulance with him, and the EMT was nowhere to be found, Vito became concerned.  When the man looked up, and Vito saw that it was that fucker Alex Drakos, Kari’s new man, he nearly jumped from that gurney.

“Wait a minute,” he said.  “Wait a fucking minute!  What are you doing here?”

Alex closed the door of the ambulance and took a seat beside the gurney.

“No, wait!” Vito yelled.  “What are you doing here?  You aren’t supposed to be in here!”

Alex hit the roof of the ambulance, and the driver began driving away from the hospital.

Vito cut the hysterics.  He knew the game.  He’d been a wise guy most of his life.  Alex had obviously paid off those hungry EMTs and had his man behind the wheel.  All of that crying foul didn’t mean shit now.  “What do you want?” he asked him.

Alex leaned back, crossed his legs, and just stared at Vito.

Vito frowned.  “What are you looking at?  I know I look good.”  Then he paused, and stared at Alex.  He knew how to get a rise out of him.  “How’s Kari?” he asked.

Alex remained silent.

“Cat got your fucking tongue?  I asked you a question.”

Still no response.

“I don’t know what she sees in you with your fancy clothes and women.  What you want with Kari and that bigmouth boy of hers?  She ain’t your speed and we both know it!  She ain’t glamourous.  She ain’t even all that good looking.  Why some dude like you want her?”

Still no rise out of Alex.

Pain gripped Vito’s chest.  Tears appeared in his eyes.  He laid his head, the only part of his body functional, back down.  “I miss her,” he said.  “If she would have just come back to me when I got out of prison, none of this would have happened.  Why she had to act like that?  Everything would have been so different if only she would have . . .” 

He shook his head as if he wanted to shake off the emotions.  “You know why I wanted Kari back?  Hun?  You wanna know why?”  Although Alex didn’t answer, Vito proceeded as if he had.  “I wanted Kari back, not because I was all in love with her and was all attracted to her.  I wanted Kari back because she was my lucky charm.  I had my best run of luck when I was with her.  Hands down.  As soon as she left me, I get picked up by the Feds!”

He shook his head again.  “Kari’s got something that none of them bitches I was fooling around with ever had.  She’s a woman a man can rely on.  I could trust her and depend on her.  I knew she wasn’t gonna be cheating on me or lying to me or stealing my dough.  That’s why I wanted her back.”  More tears appeared in his eyes.  “She was my lucky charm, man.  I knew if I didn’t have her with me, I wasn’t gonna make it.  Now look at me.  I was right.”

Alex understood exactly what he meant about Kari.  She was his lucky charm too, and so much more.  But Alex was greatly unimpressed with Vito’s sob story.  “Why did you hire those men to kill me?” he asked him.

Vito was so shocked to hear him finally speak that he, at first, just looked at him.

But when Vito clammed up, Alex grabbed Vito by his neck and squeezed hard.  “This motherfucking head is all you’ve got.  Answer me or you won’t even have this big-ass head anymore.”

“Okay, okay,” Vito said, giving in quickly.

Alex stared at him.  “You used to want death.  When you were first hospitalized, you used to beg to die.  Now?  Not so much.”

Vito got his second wind.  “The only thing I want dead now is the bastard who paralyzed me,” he said defiantly.  “Since you’re that bastard, why wouldn’t I want your raggedy ass dead?  What do you think?”

“You want to know what I think?”

“Yeah, motherfucker.  Yeah.  What do you think?”

“I think,” Alex said, as he moved closer to Vito and placed him in a headlock, “is that you should have quit while you was a head.”

And then he twisted Vito’s neck until he broke it.

And Vito was dead.