Sal leaned his head back as if he’d been spooked, and closed his eyes.  Even his limo driver was shocked, and looked at the boss through the rearview.  Nobody in the organization knew about Robby, and this news, if it came out, was going to reverberate for days.  But what was boss going to do about it, the driver wondered, as he kept taking peeps at Sal.  He didn’t play that shit.  At least, he didn’t think he played that shit.  But it was hard to tell with Sal.

Sal had to dismiss Robby’s situation from his mind.  That wasn’t something he was going to deal with tonight.  He’d had too much new shit to deal with already.

Sal, instead, pulled up the app on his cellphone that monitored his son’s nursery, and checked on his son.  He smiled when he saw Salvatore Luciano Gabrini, Junior, better known as Lucky Luciano, lying fast asleep in his bed.  His two nannies drank coffee and conversed quietly with each other. 

Sal still couldn’t believe he was somebody’s father.  Who would have believed it?  But Lucky was all his.  And for his kid to be this precious little black boy was remarkable too.  Sal, a man who used to be a racist cop who didn’t think anybody was worth a damn unless they were Italian, was the proud father of a black kid.  The same kid who might be confronted by racists cops similar to the kind he once was; cops who could plant evidence or shoot first and ask questions later, and destroy his kid’s life.

And then I’ll destroy theirs, Sal said out loud.  But he prayed it didn’t come to that.

Then he checked the monitoring app in the master bedroom to make sure Gemma was okay before he shut off his phone.  He’d missed her tremendously.  These multiple-day trips were getting harder and harder for him to make without missing the shit out of his wife.  But when he checked in on her, fully expecting to find her either asleep in bed or at least working in bed, he found neither.  Gemma was not only not in bed, but the bed was still made up.

He checked downstairs in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen.  No Gemma.  He checked her home office.  His home office.  Out back on the patio.  No Gemma!

Before he completely panicked, he quickly pulled up the monitoring app he installed inside her office across town.  And there she was: Gemma Jones-Gabrini.  Sitting in her law office hard at work pouring over thick law books as she wrote what Sal could only guess was some sort of brief.  All alone.  At eleven o’ clock at night.

He stared at her as she worked diligently.  She put her heart and soul into everything she did, and her long-time law practice was no exception.  She was a beautiful, dark-skinned, regal black woman that Sal still had to pinch himself whenever he thought about how he managed to wrangle a special lady like her.  Him, a former cop now mob boss heavy, had won the grand prize called Gemma Jones.  And nobody was taking her away from him.

Then he thought about another decisive moment in their lives and pulled out the newspaper clipping he carried around with him.  He sat his phone on his lap and opened the clipping.  The headline was bad enough, as it blared in big, bold text:  Jones-Gabrini Loses!

But the text of the article was even worse:

Gemma Jones-Gabrini, the wife of reputed mob boss, Salvatore Luciano Gabrini, the head of the Gabrini crime family, lost decisively in her bid to become our next district attorney.

What got Sal’s goat was the fact that the article didn’t even mention the guy who did win the race until the third paragraph.  The article mentioned Sal more than it mentioned anybody!  And he knew why.  He knew those newspapers wanted to rub it in.  It wasn’t about Gemma losing.  It was about a Gabrini losing!  A Gabrini lost.  That was all they wanted to highlight.

But as Sal picked back up his phone and looked at Gemma again, he exhaled.  She worked her butt off in that campaign.  That defeat had to hurt, although Gemma, like every curveball tossed in her life, took it like a champ.  But Sal knew her better than any other human being alive knew her: She was hurt.

He pressed his limo’s intercom button.  “Take me to Mrs. Gabrini’s office,” he ordered his driver.

“Yes, sir,” the driver quickly replied, and made the necessary adjustment.