Page 51 of Tommy Gabrini: All Fall Down
But Hammer took her arm and pulled her back. “Over my dead body,” he said.
“That can be arranged,” she fired back. But although she fired, she didn’t defy Hammer. Which surprised the Gabrinis. They knew Mick and Big Daddy had that kind of authority over Amelia. Her ass, like their asses, were afraid of them. But she was increasingly ceding that ground to Hammer too. Which was so not like Amelia that they knew if it continued their marriage was going to be, once again, in serious trouble.
She stayed, but Tommy and Sal, along with Mick and Hammer, and Robby Yale, who would act as their driver, took off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
When they entered the safe house and saw Barry “Barbell” Sedaka against the backwall tied to a chair and guarded by two capos, Sal was astonished. He looked like a shell of the man he used to know. His eyes were so badly beaten that they were bulging. His lip was swollen three times its size. There were small cuts all over his face and arms. He’d been tortured. There was no doubt about it.
Sal frowned. “Damn,” he said. “What did they do to you?”
“Who gives a shit?” said Tommy. “He snatched my son. He got what he deserved.”
It was unusual for Dapper Tom to be so animated. But it wasn’t unusual at all for Backdoor Tommy. And Tommy, ever since his children were threatened, had become Backdoor all the way.
Tommy went up to Barbell, grabbed him by the top of his hair, and then angrily lifted his face up until they were eyeball to eyeball. “Remember me?”
Barbell began shaking his head. His mouth was so swollen he could barely speak. “I ain’t got no beef with you, Tommy.”
“You don’t think so?”
He was shaking his head. “I don’t!”
“Then why did you snatch my son and take him to that diner?”
“But I left him there. I didn’t do nothing to him. I paid a couple cops to stop him, then me and some other guy I never worked with before took him to that diner. That was all we was supposed to do. Then we left. The cops took him back home, or wherever they dropped him off at. But that’s all I did.”
As if that wasn’t enough, Tommy thought. “Who paid your ass to do that?” asked Sal.
“They never gave a name,” said Barbell.
Tommy grabbed him by the hair even tighter. “I’m not lying, Tommy! I never seen no face, and I never heard no voice. I got nothing to tell you.”
But Mick had something to ask him. “Why didn’t you conceal your own face?”
“Yeah,” said Sal. “You didn’t show your face, then we wouldn’t be here. Why did you show it?”
“Because I figured it wouldn’t matter.”
“Why would you figure that?” asked Sal.
Barbell hesitated. Tommy grabbed his hair even tighter. And Barbell blurted it out. “Because he wasn’t supposed to live.”
Tommy’s jaw tightened. “What do you mean?”
“The other guy riding muscle with me said they were going to take him out before that day was through.”
Tommy’s heart dropped.
“I didn’t know who, what, or where,” said Barbell. “I did my job and got out of there. I just wanted to get out of there.”
Tommy didn’t know what to say. He and Hammer glanced at each other. They both knew that had Hammer not been able to disable that implantation device, TJ would have been killed. The fact that Hammer just so happened to be there and to be able to disable it, changed the course of TJ’s existence. Had he not been there? Just the thought of it was almost too much for Tommy to bear. For a second, he didn’t know what to say or even do.
It was too much for Sal too. He and his brother’s son were close. He didn’t know what to say either.
That was why Mick spoke up for both of his nephews. “You claim you saw nothing,” Mick said to Barbell. “How did they pay you? And don’t fucking tell me about no bank deposit. People who pull this shit don’t deposit in banks.”
“It wasn’t a bank,” said Barbell.
