The door opened and blinded her.  She held up her hand to the sudden intrusion of light and looked at the short man who had entered the dark, windowless room.  Two additional men that she assessed as his protection, entered too, and stood behind him.  He was smiling oddly, as if they weren’t in some dank room somewhere and she was his captor, but they were on a cruise ship somewhere and he was the captain.  Amelia had never bothered to go on a cruise before, but she knew it didn’t look like this.

“Good to see you’re awake, Amelia,” the short man said.  “How are you feeling this fine evening?  You’re well, I trust?”

Amelia sat against a wall covered in graffiti and Lord only knew what else.  Her fur coat was gone, and so was her gun.  Other than her once tucked-in silk blouse now hanging out over her flare-legged trousers, her clothing had not been breached.  And Amelia knew her body well enough to know that her body had not been breached, either.  Which meant, she inwardly decided, that the man standing before her was not the boss and he nor his men could do whatever they wanted with her.  They needed intel, she decided, before they killed her.

“Why didn’t you eat your lunch?” the short man asked.  “You wouldn’t eat your breakfast.  Even though we cooked it specially for you.  But you spat in it.  Now we bring you dinner.”

He looked like a weasel, Amelia thought, with his long neck, his tiny face, and his big, bug eyes.  So that was the name she gave him: Weasel.  But she didn’t underestimate him like real weasels were.  She kept her eyes on him.

He smiled at her.  “Won’t eat, and won’t answer, will you?  But don’t worry.  You know why?  Because when we get through with you, you’ll be singing like a canary.”  His look turned hard.  “Either that or you will die.”

He continued to stare at her.  “We have questions for you,” he said.  “We need you strong to answer those questions.  But it’s up to you.  You can do this easy, or you can do this hard.  But either way, you will answer to us.”

“Maybe she’s waiting for the Hammer to show up,” one of the men in the background joked.  Which was further reason, Amelia thought, that Weasel was not the boss.  The leader of a crew maybe, but not the boss.

Weasel laughed.  “Is that it, Amelia?  Waiting for the Hammer to show up?  Or maybe Mick the Tick.  That’s your brother, right?  Mick Sinatra?  But guess what?  Around here, we ain’t scared of neither one of those motherfuckers.  So if you think they’re your ticket out of here, you can forget about it.  You’re all ours, Amelia.  We’re all you got right now.”

He waited, as if his words had convinced Amelia to cooperate.  They hadn’t convinced her to do a damn thing but plot and plan her escape.  How in the world was she going to get out of this, was the only thing on her mind.

Weasel continued.  “Besides,” he said, “you might be Sinatra’s sister, but you’re just his half-sister.  That mean asshole don’t give a fuck about you.  And the Hammer?”  He shook his head.  “When we finish with you; when we finish fucking you up the way we plan to fuck you up if you continue to be uncooperative?  He won’t want you, either.”

Then he motioned to one of the men behind him.  The man placed a bowl of food at Weasel’s feet.  Weasel then kicked the food up to the cot where Amelia sat.  Half of it spilled out of the bowl.  “You act like a dumbass dog, that’s what we treat you like.  Now eat,” he said with bite in his voice.  Then he smiled again.  “Or don’t.  But we’ll get what we’re after.”

And then all three men left out of the room that only locked from outside.  They locked it back.

Amelia didn’t give that “food” a second look.  She, instead, leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.  She thought about her two half-brothers, mob boss Mick Sinatra and Big Daddy Charles Sinatra.  They would kill her if they found out she was still in the drug trade.  She never told them she had gotten out of the trade, they just assumed she had because she was now a Sinatra and Sinatras didn’t go out like that.  Although, if truth be told, Mick used to sling drugs in his younger days and Teddy Sinatra, Mick’s oldest living son, used to be one of her biggest buyers.  But truth was always relative in their world.

She thought about her beloved son, Hannibal Joey Reese, or JoJo as they called him, and her exasperating son’s father.  She knew she had to quit this shit for JoJo’s sake, but it wasn’t as if she was all about the money or had some other frivolous reason why she did what she did.  She was all about her independence.  She did what she did because she’d been doing it most of her adult life.

Back then, she had no choice in the matter.  Her husband made her do all kinds of illegal shit.  Now it was all she knew how to do and she did it to maintain her independence.  Now she did it because she was never going to depend on a man again.  Not her brothers.  Not her nephews.  Not even her baby’s daddy, the man they called the great Hammer Reese, as if he were some circus act.

But she knew what they meant.

She opened her eyes as she thought about Hammer.  The room had plunged back into darkness with the closing of the door, but she barely noticed it.  She was too busy thinking about the man who became her baby’s daddy, and the man she felt was her best chance of ever knowing what true love was all about.

JoJo was born Hannibal Joey Sinatra, but Hammer went to court to have his last name changed to his name: Reese.  It was the first thing he did that made Amelia know he was a fighter.  He was the kind of man who fought for those he loved, and that was a good sign to her.

But he still had that reputation.  Every man supposedly feared him, and every woman supposedly wanted him.  At least that was the legend.  But when Amelia first met Hammer, she didn’t know a thing about any legend or his reputation.  She feared him, alright, that was the damn truth.  But she certainly didn’t want him.

 

It was the day of her first illegal act.  She was tapped by her old man, Angus “Bulldog” Valtone, a big-time crook disguised as a successful businessman, to be the getaway driver.  He was going over final details for all of his men involved, but he was also giving Amelia a last-second warning.

They were at the full-sized bar inside his home.  He poured himself another glass of wine and pointed the glass at her.  “Fuck this up,” he said, “and I’ll fuck you up.  You hear me, Mill?  This ain’t no game this time.  This grown-folks shit this time.  You do what you’re told.  Do everything Sonny tells you to do.”

Amelia sat on the swivel bar stool, her legs barely reaching the stool rail, as she twirled side to side and listened to Bulldog.  Sonny and the boys were packing their arsenal of weapons and their ski masks.  Bulldog handed Amelia a baseball cap.  She wasn’t surprised that it was an Baltimore Orioles cap.

“Put it on,” he said.

She put it on.

“Pull it down on your forehead as far as it can go.”

She did that too.

“Fuck up,” he said, pointing his glass at her again, “and you’ll be sorry.  I’m not playing with your ass this time, and I mean that.  This is your first job, and it’s an easy job.  Don’t make it your last.”

Then he added yet again: “Do everything Sonny tells you to do.”

But Amelia didn’t get the memo that said her thoughts didn’t matter.  “What if they take Sonny out?” she asked Bull.

Bulldog slapped her violently across her face.  She rocked sideways, against the wall, jamming her small shoulder.  “What the fuck is that your business?” he yelled at her.  “Asking me a question like that!  You do whatever Sonny tells you to do, and if he can’t tell you then you listen to the others and do what they say.  What are you stupid?  You don’t ask me about no what if.  Forget about what if!  What if I kill your ass if you blow it?  What if I cut you into little pieces and feed you to my fucking dogs?  What if that happens?”  Then he dismissed her with the wave of a hand.  “Get your dumbass out of my face and do whatever Sonny tells you to do.  About time you get some dirt on you, too.”

Amelia didn’t say anything else.  She was barely nineteen at the time and that mean asshole was her “husband.”  She always used air-quotes in her mind because she never consented to marrying him.  But her “mother”-another lie because she knew that woman wasn’t her real mother- had given her to him, to save her real daughter from a debt she owed, when Amelia was only fourteen.  He faked her age with fake documents and married her.  The fact that he had more than likely killed his first wife to make that marriage happen was just a myth, according to him.  But Amelia knew him too well.  Myth her ass.

But they didn’t call him Bulldog for the hell of it.  He was a tenacious, nasty piece of work who loved her and hated her and was creepily obsessed with her all rolled up into one big ball of confusion.  And when that ball burst, like the many times she tried to run away from his ass, the pain of his beatings lasted for months.  At nineteen, she was older than she had been when she first hooked up with the joker, but she was far more cynical too.  She knew what he was capable of.  She did what she was told.

She kept on that stupid cap, got behind the wheel of the car Bull had designated for this job, and drove those five men -three in the backseat, and two upfront with her, including Sonny- to their destination.  They were heavily armed and all had full-face ski masks with holes for their eyes and mouths.  They would put them on once inside.  Amelia wore that baseball cap pushed down on her forehead as her only facial concealer.  But she wasn’t going inside.  She was just the getaway driver.

And then, with bags in hand and their guns concealed, they prepared to exit the car.  But then a sportscar pulled up behind them.

Amelia was the first to see the car, and to see the tall, muscular man, a man in blue jeans and a bomber jacket, get out of the car.  “Wait,” she said just as her men were about to exit.  Bulldog taught her to make sure all was clear, and that she made sure they entered the bank when traffic was low and eyes were few.

Sonny looked through the side mirror and saw what Amelia was cautious about.  They waited, until the man had walked across the sidewalk, and entered the bank.

Then Sonny looked at Amelia.  “Good looking out,” he said.  “But you still better be here when we get back.  Don’t pull your running away shit today.  You know Bulldog.  You know he has a man watching your ass.  So watch out.”

Amelia didn’t know what she had to do to convince these fools that she had their back, and wouldn’t dream of leaving them out to dry like that, so she gave up trying.

Sonny was used to her silence, so he didn’t exactly expect her to respond anyway.  So he let it go too.  Then he nodded at his men in the back.  “Let’s go,” he said, and all of them got out of the car.

 

Inside the bank, young Hammer Reese, the muscular man who had gotten out of the sportscar, was a man going places.  As a former special ops agent with a reputation for producing actionable intelligence his fellow colleagues could never match, he had just been tapped as one of the youngest station chiefs in CIA history, and was being groomed to climb even higher than that.  He, in fact, was on his way to meet with one of his snitches on an international money laundering cell that nobody else had been able to infiltrate.

There was only one problem: the snitch would only give up intel if the price was right.  A cash price.  But Hammer Reese was broke.  He needed major cash fast, and, like always, he wasn’t waiting for approval from the brass.  People who waited for the bureaucrats to act never got results.  Bureaucrats delayed for too long, had to go through too many channels, and then the opportunity was missed.  That was why he was at the bank.  That was why he stood at the center counter and pulled out his checkbook to quickly write a big check, cash it, and get his ass to his destination.

As he wrote his check, Sonny and his men walked in.  The bank was sparsely occupied, with no more than a half-dozen customers inside.   This was what they had expected, and were pleased that what they saw days earlier, when they cased the bank, had paid off.  Now they were ready for the real payday.

As soon as they cleared the threshold, they pulled the ski masks over their faces, pulled out their concealed weapons, and hurried into the body of the local bank.  One man placed his gun to the throat of the guard on duty, and Sonny hurried to the center of the room.

“Everybody down!” he yelled, “or get your heads blown off!  And every teller back away from their windows now.  Now!”

The patrons and the tellers quickly complied.  Hammer Reese didn’t hesitate, either, and went down as soon as the order was given.  But unlike the other patrons, Hammer had a concealed weapon of his own, and he was already looking for the right time to use it.

“Stay down, lady!” Sonny yelled to one nosy patron.  “Don’t play no fucking hero!” Then he looked at two of his men.  “Do it now!” he yelled to the two men responsible for filling the bags, and both jumped over the teller counters and ordered the tellers to open the drawers.  They knew the drill.  No marked money.  No alarm-presses.  No funny business.  And they ordered the tellers to fill the bags.

Two other men ran to the bank manager and forced him into the back of the bank, into the vault.  But then, within seconds, and as Sonny continued to order everybody to have their hands where he could see them and to not talk, and to keep their faces face down, a gunshot was suddenly heard from the vault.

Hammer knew this was his chance.  He looked at Sonny, the obvious leader.  And as soon as Sonny looked toward the vault, and the other robber guarding the guard at the entrance looked in that direction too, Hammer reached for his gun. 

He shot Sonny first, and then rolled beneath the center counter for cover, and shot the man at the entrance.  Then the two men behind the teller counter began firing back, and got into a gun battle with the Hammer.

 

Outside, as soon as Amelia heard the gunshots roaring, her heart dropped.  Something had gone wrong!  Bulldog preached to them that there was not to be any violence.  Get in, get out, he ordered them.  If they did it right, there would be no reason to fire a shot.  Not one shot!  They had gotten in, but now it appeared as if they were firing several shots.

But just as she was considering what she should do, a side door opened, and three of the men ran out.  She cranked up.  They jumped in the car, yelled for her to go, go, go, but they didn’t have to say a word.  She was pulling off before they were barely in and the doors weren’t even shut.

But as she was pulling off, Hammer Reese was running out of the front of the bank, calling for backup on his cellphone as he did, and jumped into his own car.

And the chase was on.

“He’s following us!” Amelia yelled as she kept glancing through the rearview.  “That man in that sportscar is following us!”

“Then lose him, idiot!” one of the robbers yelled.  “Lose his ass!  He’s the one who took Sonny and Frank out!  Lose his ass!”

Amelia was determined to lose him.  She was in this craziness up to her neck now.  She was the getaway driver in a bank heist that claimed casualties.  She could tell those cops all day long how she was forced to participate.  She could tell them all day long how her abusive husband was a crazy fuck who made her do unspeakable horrors, and this was her initiation into his other job: robbing banks.  But she knew they weren’t going to believe her. They’d have her black ass under the jail by nightfall, even before they arrested the men.  She drove all-out.

Hammer kept up; he’d been in a few highspeed chases in his life, but she was a challenge.  She drove through busy streets with the precision of a pro, he could tell that, and through narrow streets with the nerve of somebody not afraid to push it.  But she wasn’t a pro, and Hammer could see that, too.  He could see her shortcomings.  She almost always lost control around curves and corners.  One time, she almost landed in a ditch.  Another time, she went on two wheels.  But she kept hustling.  She kept pushing the envelope.  He shifted gears and kept up.  They drove like death-wish daredevils through the busy streets of Baltimore.

Until she blew through a busy intersection, almost colliding with a taxi, and he nearly slammed into a truck.  He was forced to slam on brakes and skid to a halt, shift in reverse, and then speed around the truck with the efficiency of the expert driver he was.  His years in the field, with close call after close call, had taught him how to maneuver.  His years at the CIA had taught him how to never give up a chase of a high-target suspect.  Bank-robbing killers, in his opinion, were as high as it got.

But Amelia and the robbers were relieved the near-crash had given them some distance.  They just might get away after all!  Until Amelia’s lack of experience showed itself again, when she turned a corner too quickly, and her car, instead of going on two wheels, lost all traction and went airborne.  The men screamed.  It was odd to her that hard men like her passengers would be so fearful, until the car hit ground again on all fours.  But Amelia had already lost control, and the car jumped a curb and slammed into a concrete bench, stopping with such abruptness that they all nearly flew out of the windshield.  The entire front end was smashed.

“Stupid bitch!” one of the men yelled, as all of the men jumped out of the car, with their money bags, to make a run for it.  They could see the sportscar turn the corner, and begin heading their way.

Amelia jumped out, too.  It was each man for himself, but their options were few.  They either ran into the Mom and Pop store on the corner, or ran into the long, winding alley beside the store where they had a chance of getting out on the backend.

They all took the alleyway.

Hammer sped across the sidewalk toward the alley, and jumped out of his car, too.  The police were on their way, but he knew they were not going to get there in time and he wasn’t about to let gun-toting bank robbers get away with the loot they had, nor the murders they committed.  Because he wasn’t the only one shooting inside that bank.  Although he took out two of theirs, they took out the guard and wounded a few of the patrons as they ran out like the cowards they were.

Hammer pulled the gun out of the hip holster hidden inside his jacket, checked the chamber to see how many rounds he had left, and then ran into the alley.  He saw one robber as soon as he entered, and aimed and fired at him just as he was about to turn the corner.  His aim was dead on, and the robber hit the ground instantaneously.

But by Hammer’s count, there were still two others and the driver.  Hammer took off, running toward the corner the downed gunman had been about to turn.  But he waited at the corner, and then turned quickly, aimed and ready to fire.

But he saw no one.  He kept running.  He wore blue jeans that were tight across his thick thighs, and the adrenalin had him sweating under his armpits, but he couldn’t have felt more comfortable than if he was in his living room watching football.  He loved this shit!

But it wasn’t until he had turned another corner did he feel as if he was getting somewhere.  He got into a shooting match with one of the robbers, killing him, and then eyed the getaway driver as the driver was just ahead of the downed robber.  The driver stopped suddenly, knowing the gig was up.  But to Hammer’s surprise, although in this day and age he was not shocked, it was a girl.

“Freeze!” he yelled, as he aimed his weapon at her.  “Hands in the air and freeze!” 

Amelia quickly complied and threw her hands in the air.

Hammer began walking toward her.  “Hit the ground now!” he yelled in that authoritarian voice that made her assume he was a cop.  Cops who loved to yell were the worst kind of cops in her opinion: crooked cops.  She was as good as roadkill, she felt.  Just another statistic that he could claim was self-defense.  Was resisting arrest.  Was so belligerent he was forced to stand his ground.  Was bullshit.

She knew she had to make a run for it.

But first she had to catch him off guard.  “Are you looking for those white men?” she asked.  “I saw them.  I saw them run out of the alley toward that playground.”

“Put your hands where I can see them,” Hammer said, “and get down!”

But Amelia knew it was now or never.  As she moved to the damp and dingy ground inside the alley, she grabbed the first thing she could get her hands on.  “Why are you detaining me?” she asked, as she realized the big rock was in reaching distance.  “What did I do?”

And without looking, she grabbed the rock and threw it, as hard as she could, toward Hammer’s head.

Hammer ducked, and the rock flew wildly by, but it was enough for Amelia to jump up and run around another corner.  She was hoping he would hold his fire.  She was hoping her line about not being a part of the robbery gang would give him enough doubt to hold his fire.  But she knew she was on borrowed time.

And even more borrowed than she thought.  Because she had barely cleared the corner when Hammer was upon her.  He jumped on her, knocking her to the ground.  She screamed, but he put his gun to her face.  “Shut the fuck up!” he yelled.

And then they were face to face: he was on top of her.  Their faces were an inch apart.

He was stunned by the pain he saw in her big, green eyes.

She was stunned by the care and concern she saw in his big, blue eyes.

And somehow she knew, as if she’d known him forever, that he was not her enemy.  Somehow she knew that he could be the one to finally rescue her from her hellish life.  But she also knew that would only be possible if she believed in fairytales.

She didn’t.

Hammer didn’t, either.  She was just another young and dumb criminal as far as he was concerned.  Although, deep inside, if he was to admit it, he felt as if there was something more than that; that there was something more to her.  And it caught him off guard.  It shook him.

And the fact that he had these emotions inside of him, for some stranger, angered him.  He pressed that gun against her skull because of that anger.  “When I tell you to stay down,” he said between clenched teeth, “you keep your ass down!”

But then those eyes, those beautiful bright, emerald-like eyes of hers, went dark.  “Behind you,” she said.  “He’s coming behind you.”

Any other criminal and Hammer would have dismissed it as a distraction tactic out of hand.  He was young, but he’d been around that block too many times to fall for that. He knew better.  But something in her eyes made him know something else: she was not lying.  Those eyes were not lying!

He quickly rolled over and fired a shot just as the robber behind him was about to fire too.   The robber dropped hard, and his gun fell from his hand.  He was the third and final robber that had left the bank, by Hammer’s count.

But the gun that fell from his hand didn’t land far, and the robber began reaching for it, to make Hammer’s demise his last act on earth.

Hammer didn’t want to kill the man if he could help it, so he jumped up and ran to beat him to the punch.  He got to the gun just as the shooter reached it, and there was a brief tug-of-war that ultimately ended with the robber’s death.  But in the skirmish, Amelia had jumped up too, and was gone.

She was running for her life.  Not just to get away from the man she assumed was a cop.  Not even to get away from the cops whose sirens could be heard arriving on scene, with car doors suddenly opening and slamming shut far behind her.  But she was mainly running to get away from Bulldog and his abusiveness.  She was going to leave him once and for all.  She was willing to run to the ends of the earth if it would get her away from that bastard.

But she only made it to the end of the alley.

As soon as she ran out of the backside of the maze of an alley, a van sped up and stopped beside her.  She knew it was one of Bulldog‘s vans.  He always had her followed, and undoubtedly had been told by those following her that the bank heist had gone south.  One of his men got out, slid the van door open, grabbed her, and flung her inside.  She was in prison again.  She was in hell again.

He slid the door shut, got back in the front passenger seat, and the van sped away.

But inside, and to her shock, Bulldog was there.  She had no clue that he planned to watch how she performed on her first job.  But that was how he was.  He could be protective as hell, as if he loved her to death.  And he could be abusive as hell as if he couldn’t stand the sight of her.  But he always crazy, she thought, as a motherfuck.

But Bulldog Valtone was never so thrown by events that he couldn’t take a moment to teach her a lesson.  And his lessons, from the moment her “mother” dropped her off at his house, always came with pain.  He took his open palm and slapped her so violently that the side of her head slammed into the side of the van.  She heard a ringing in her ear.  But she was used to that, too.

But, to her amazement, she didn’t think about what Bulldog was going to do to her.  As she rode away in that van, she was thinking about the man who had captured her.  That big, beautiful man with the caring eyes.  Even as Bulldog yelled mercilessly at her.

“Get up!  Are you deaf?  Get up!”

She opened her eyes and realized she wasn’t with Hammer back in that alley, or even with Bulldog in that van.  She was in that dark room with Weasel and his men, and they were yelling for her to get up.

Her eyes hurt from the light behind the opened door, and she held them over her forehead.  But she apparently moved too slow for Weasel because, as soon as she thought to get up as they had ordered her, he tossed her over his shoulder, and carried her out.  To her death, they undoubted thought.  But she thought about her son, and her brothers, and yes, even her son’s father.  And she thought differently.  She was going to live and not die.

They thought she was going to die.  She knew she was going to live.