A Mob Boss Christmas: The Pregnancy (4 page)

But
Dirty
still refused to
let her play.
 
As one
of Reno’s managers inside the casino, or a pit boss as they were called, Dirty
had sway over those tables.
 
The
dealers listened to him.
 
When he said
his wife couldn’t play, they weren’t about to let her play.
 
Fran, now furious, hurried
back to Reno’s office.

By the time she made it back upstairs, Jimmy Mack,
still sweaty from his basketball game, was standing in front of the desk
talking with his father.
 
He looked so
virile, Fran thought, in his shorts and sleeveless shirt, his fine bronzed body
making her wonder,
once
again, what it would feel like
to be with a black man.
 

But she knew she’d never know.
 
While her father was alive he instilled those
limits within her.
 
He was a straight up
racist when it came to that.
 
He and Reno
could fuck black all day long, and they did fuck black all day long.
 
But if she so much as looked at a black guy
or a Hispanic or an Asian, or any guy that wasn’t full-fledged Italian, then
her father would cut her a look that made her run for her life.

And that was why she dismissed such thoughts and
entered the office getting down to business.

“He still won’t do it, Reno,” she said as she walked
in.
 
“Even after I told him what you
said, he still won’t do it.
 
How you doing, Jimmy?”

“Hey, Aunt Fran,” Jimmy said with his usual affable
smile.
 
Fran was amazed how a boy who
looked so obviously black could be Reno’s son.
 

“I said exactly what you told me,” Fran continued,
looking at Reno.
 
“I told him over and
over what you said.
 
But he still said
no.
 
He still won’t let me do it.”

Reno had been joking with his son about how he could
probably take him in a one-on-one pickup game, but Fran’s sudden and rude
appearance dampened his mood.
 
“He still
won’t let you do what?” he asked her.

Fran rolled her eyes.
  
Sometimes Reno seemed so out to lunch she
wondered how he could ever run anything!
 
“Blackjack, Reno.
 
He still won’t
let me play blackjack!”

Reno couldn’t believe she was interrupting him again
about some blackjack game.
 
“Who the fuck
cares?” he asked.
 
“Get out of here!
 
Don’t you see me talking here?”
 

Then he frowned, as he suddenly realized
something.
 
“And what are you doing here
anyway?
 
I thought you and Tree were
going to make a day of it at the mall?
 
That was the big spiel y’all gave to me.
 
Whatta you doing back already?
 
And where’s Tree?”

Fran shook her head and moved from side to side the
way she was prone to do when she was remembering something unpleasant.
 
“I had to go,” she said.
 
“I couldn’t take that attitude of hers
another second.”

Trina, with an attitude?
 
“What attitude?”
 
Reno asked.

“She’s a bitch on two legs when she’s like that,
Reno.
 
How is that my fault?”

Reno stared at his sister.
 
Sometimes she seemed to respond to arguments
that no-one ever made.
 
“What?”

“I couldn’t deal with it.
 
I had to go.
 
So I left her.”

“You left her?
 
Whatta you mean you left her?”

“I left her.
 
She kept on saying
,
‘if you don’t leave me
alone,’ so I left her alone.
 
I continued
shopping at the mall by myself and when I went searching for her afterwards, I
didn’t see her.
 
So I got my goodies, got
in my car, and came back to the PaLargio.
 
I came back home.”

Reno couldn’t believe his ears.
 
“Are you telling me that you just left my
wife at some
got
damn mall like that?”

“Yeah, I left her,” Fran said which prompted Reno to
immediately pull out his cell phone.
 
“She’s no baby, Reno.
 
She knows
how to catch a cab.”

“It ain’t about her catching no
got
damn cab,” he said as he pressed the icon for his wife’s cell
phone number and waited for her phone to ring.
 
“You know what went down in Georgia.
 
I don’t know if there’s somebody out there who wants retaliation.
 
I didn’t want her going anywhere by herself,
and you know it.
 
That’s why your ass was
supposed to go with her.”

“But how’s that my fault?
 
She’s the one who hates bodyguards.
 
She’s the one who won’t let anybody follow
her.”

“And that’s why you went with her, nut brain.
 
Because she preferred you
to any bodyguard.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right.”

Reno shook his head.
 
“Sometimes I wonder if there’s a brain in your head, Francine,” he said.

And naturally, he thought angrily, Trina’s cell phone
shot straight to voice mail.
 
Trina was
notorious, to Reno’s dismay, for keeping her cell phone turned off.

He grabbed his suit coat from over the back of his
chair and began heading for the exit.
 
“Come with me, Jimmy Mack,” he said to his son.
 
If he needed a second pair of eyes looking
around that mall for his wife, he wouldn’t trust anybody at this point except
Jimmy Mack.

“Call Security,” he ordered Fran.
 
“Find out if Trina requested a car.
 
If she did, tell Danno to call me.”

“Where are you going?” Fran asked him.

“Where did you leave her?” he asked her.

“At the mall.”

“Where at the mall, dumbass?”

Fran resented her brother’s put-downs, but she didn’t
argue with him.
 
She knew she had to
remain vague.
 
“Just at the mall,” she
said.
 
“She was window shopping.
 
She didn’t go into none of the stores.
 
That’s why she was getting on my nerves
because she really wasn’t shopping.
 
And
she kept saying ‘if you don’t leave me alone.’
 
So I left her alone.”

Reno slung out of his office door mad as hell at his
kid sister.
 
But he let it pass for
now.
 
He had to make sure his wife was
okay.
 

He and Jimmy Mack hurried for the private elevator,
with Reno glancing at his son and shaking his head.
 
“See what I have to deal with on a daily
basis?”

“Yes, sir,” Jimmy said, moving swiftly to keep pace
with his older, but superiorly built father.
 

“Daily I have to put up with this shit,” Reno went
on.
 
“And here I am, for all these years,
thinking Fran was the brains of her household.
 
That between her and Dirty, she was definitely the brains.
 
But I was wrong.
 
Dirty’s the brains.”

“Wow,” Jimmy said.
 
“That’s scary.”

Reno glanced at his son.
 
Sometimes his sense of humor took him by
surprise.
 
And he would have at least
smiled at the joke, but he couldn’t.
 
Trina was on his mind.

It didn’t take long for Reno and his son to find
her.
 
They didn’t even have to split
up.
 
Reno had just left her an angry third
message, warning her rhetorically that if she didn’t turn on that cell phone he
was going to kick her ass.
 
But within
moments of that phone call, they found her.
 

There she was, Katrina “Tree” Gabrini, the wife of
the owner of the famed PaLargio Hotel and Casino, seated on a bench inside the
mall, chatting it up with some tall, dark, gorgeous black man.
 
Reno stopped in his tracks.

“Who is that?” Jimmy Mack asked his father, his big
green eyes staring at the strange man.

“I don’t know,” Reno said.
 
He was just as taken aback as Jimmy, but he
knew his wife.
 
He was certain it was
nothing.
  
Until Trina smiled, placed her
hand on the side of the man’s
face,
and the man hugged
her.

 
Jimmy,
stunned, looked at his father.
 
Reno’s
heart began to pound.
 

The man then stopped hugging Trina, whispered
something to her, and she nodded her head.
 
Then the guy stood up, helped Trina up, and they both began walking
toward the mall’s side exit.
  
The man,
the gorgeous hunk of a man, had his hand firmly planted on the small of Trina’s
back.
 

“What the fuck,” Reno said beneath his breath and
then began following them.
 
Jimmy stayed
beside him.

“What, you don’t know the guy,
Pop
?”
Jimmy asked again.

“Where are they going?”
 
Reno asked in that still stunned voice.
 
He knew Jimmy had no clue, either, but the
oddity of seeing his wife leaving with a man, and the man wasn’t him, had Reno
flummoxed.
 

“Where does that exit lead?” he asked, his face
frowned with concern.

“I’ve only come here a few times,
Pop
.
 
You’ve never been to this mall before?”

“What the fuck I got time to go to a mall for?
 
Where does that exit lead?”

“I think it leads to the side parking lot.”

“Parking lot?” Reno said, beginning to panic.
 
He was parked in the front parking lot.
 
“Geez,” he said and, as soon as Trina and the
mystery man walked through that side exit, Reno, with his son following, began
to run.
 

But a problem happened on their way to the exit.
 
They both suddenly found themselves right in
the middle of a massive flash mob.
  
A
flash mob at a time like this!
 
Reno, who
thought flash mobs had been a flash in the pan and were a thing of the past,
was astounded as a large group of people suddenly stood up or stopped walking
and started “expressing themselves.”
 
Some were dancing, others were turning around in circles, still others
were doing some form of what Reno could only describe as weird acrobatics,
while a few were handing out leaflets for their cause.
 

“Save the planet, sir,” one of the flowerchild
looking females said as she pointed her leaflet in Reno’s face.
 
But Reno and his son were trying to break
through the crowd and make their way for the exit.
 

“Save the planet, sir,” another woman said to him.

“I don’t wanna save the planet,” Reno replied.

The woman was baffled.
 
“What kind of human being doesn’t want to
save the planet?”

“The kind that’ll bash your face in if you don’t get
out of mine!”

“Kiss my ass,” the mild-mannered woman said and Reno
and Jimmy both looked at her.
 
But Reno
had no time to counter.
 

“Come on, Jim,” he said as he grabbed his son by the
arm and had to move sideways toward the exit.
 
But the crowd was too thick.
 
Reno
found himself tossing people aside just to get through.
 
But when he tossed the people into other
people, the other people retaliated for being tossed into and began tossing the
people back.
 
The people being tossed
back didn’t like being treated like human ping pong balls and retaliated
against the retaliators and soon the flash mob turned into a fighting mob that
Reno and Jimmy barely escaped.

By the time they maneuvered their way past the
massive mob, and exited the mall, Trina and her male friend were nowhere to be
seen.
 
Reno looked left, right, straight
ahead, behind him, around him.
 
He began
to panic.

“There they are!” Jimmy’s young eyes spotted
them.
 
Reno looked, too.
 
And there they were, well across the huge
parking lot, and they seemed to be hugging again.
 
Then the man sat Trina down in the passenger
seat of a car, and the man started walking toward the driver’s side.
 

“Go!” Reno yelled to Jimmy, whom he knew used to run
track, and Jimmy took off running.
 

Reno ran behind him, praying that his wife wasn’t
about to leave this mall with some man she’d just been hugging on, and he ran
as if his life depended on it.
 
Some women
even stopped and looked, as they wondered what had the young black guy done
that had such an esteemed looking older white guy chasing him through the
parking lot?
 

But Reno wasn’t thinking about those busybodies.
 
All he could think about was Tree.
 
And that good looking man.
 
And the fact that she was now leaving the
parking lot with that good looking man.