Mick Sinatra: For Once In My Life (31 page)

Roz waited
for him to talk to her.
 
Maybe he got it
after all, she thought.
 
But it would be
several seconds before Mick could find his voice.
 
And when he did, he spoke with pure anguish
in it.
 
“I never saw it before I met
you,” he said to her.

Roz stared
at him.
 
She understood what he meant,
but she needed him to verbalize it.
 
“You
never saw what?” she asked him.

“The pain in
my children’s eyes.”
 
Mick looked into
Roz’s eyes.
 
His sleepy eye seemed wide
awake at this very moment.

“Pain?” she
asked him.

“Pain,” he
said.
 
“We used to gather around, and
laugh, and talk about a lot of nothing.
 
Then they would go back to their lives, I would go back to mine, and
they would rest in the comfort of knowing that their sugar daddy was going to
continue to plow them with sugar.
 
That
they were still in my good graces.”

“But you
didn’t see that tonight?”

“I saw it,”
Mick said.
 
“But I realized I was seeing
what I wanted to see.
 
I thought about
you, and how you never went along with anybody’s bullshit.
 
So I decided not to go along with theirs
either.
 
I heard their happy words, and I
saw their happy smiles, but I looked into their eyes.
 
And there was no happiness there.
 
There was no joy there.
 
All I saw was pain.
 
Some bitterness.
 
But lots of pain.”

Tears
finally welled up in Mick’s eyes.
 
It was
a sight to behold for Roz.
 
“They’re
strangers to me, Rosalind,” Mick said.
 
“I have allowed my children, my flesh and blood, to become strangers to
me.”

Roz wanted
to pull him into her arms and comfort him, but this was beyond comfort
now.
 
He didn’t need to be
comfortable.
 
She saw their pain
too.
 
She saw that anguish in their
eyes.
 
Mick needed to understand his part
in that pain.

“What are
you going to do about it?” she asked him.

Mick stood
there, like a man alone, and then he looked at her.
 
“Change it,” he said.
 
“Don’t ask me how.
 
I don’t know how.
 
But it’s got to change.”

It was the best
answer, Roz thought, he could have given.
 
She was proud of him for not pretending that the answer was easy and
fast.
 
She would not have believed him if
he would have went that way.
 
But he
didn’t go that way.
 
He settled on the
truth.
 
She pulled him into her
arms.
 
He had a tall order ahead of
him.
 
They
had a tall order.
 
But Mick was
right.
 
It had to change.

Four days
later, when Roz was back in New York teaching at the actor’s studio, and Mick
had just arrived back in Philly after a business trip to Florida, nobody would
see this change coming.
 
Young Shane, his
mother, and her entire household were murdered, two of Mick’s operatives were
murdered along with more than a dozen of his men, and Mick was rushing back to
his private jet to get to Roz.
 
Before
his enemies could.
   

“That’s not
stage presence, Alice,” Roz said to one of her students as the others looked
on.
 
“You have to play big.
 
You have to play to the back of the room, not
the front row.
 
Everything has to be
over-exaggerated.”

“Everything?”
the unconvinced budding actress asked.

“Everything,”
Roz responded with even more vigor.
 
“Your voice, your walk, the way you sashay your hips.
 
You’ve got to bring it, or they won’t be
bringing you back.”

“But what
about auditions, Miss G?” Terrance asked.
 
“Those directors don’t want you to overact, do they?”

“No.
 
And that’s not what I’m talking about now,”
Roz pointed out.
 
“Never oversell.
 
But you have to remember that everything
looks small on stage.
 
It is the actors
who bring the big.
 
It is the actors who
stretch the limits of the environment so that you aren’t just looking at little
people moving around on a stage, but individuals moving around.
 
The audience can’t just see a guy.
 
They have to see Terrance.
 
The audience can’t just see a girl.
 
They have to see Alice.
 
It’s stagecraft.
 
It’s knowing what you’re doing. It’s not
getting caught up in the glitz and glamour of being on stage, and running to
Twitter to tell all about your experience.
 
It’s about living that experience on that stage at that moment in
time.
 
Because if all the audience sees
is a boy and girl moving around on stage, you have lost them.
 
They have to see Terrance.
 
And Alice.”

Roz turned
to her remaining students.
 
But before
she could instruct them too, or entertain more questions, the doors of the
studio flew open and five men, five gunmen, came rushing in.

The students
let out screams of horror.

“Shut the
fuck up!” the men began yelling at the students, and Roz, certain that whatever
was going on was all about Mick, quieted the students too.

Then she
looked at the gunmen.
 
They were ready to
strike.
 
She knew it.
 
But she belonged to Mick, which made her
valuable.
 
She knew that too.
  
They were not going to hit her.
 
Those were not their orders.

That was
why, when they pointed those guns at her students, and were about to kill them
all to get rid of any witnesses, she moved in front of the students.
 
The students, smartly, moved behind her.

“You don’t
want them,” she deployed.

“Get out of
the way,” one of the gunmen yelled.

“Don’t you
do it, Miss G,” Terrance said, who ended up directly behind her.

But Roz
wasn’t about to anyway.
 
“I’m the one you
want,” she said to the men.
 
“I’m his
girlfriend.”

“Get out of
the way,” another gunman screamed, pulling her by the arm.

But Terrance
was pulling her back. “Don’t you do it, Miss G,” he said again.
 
“Stay right where you are.”

But the
gunman managed to pull Roz away.
 
Roz
knew she had to think fast.
 
“The cameras
already have you on tape,” she said, and the men immediately began looking
around.
 
“Killing them will only make
your escape that much more unlikely.
 
Cameras are everywhere!
 
If you
murder all these innocent people, the entire police department will be after
you.
 
You won’t stand a chance!”

She was
pointing at what was actually stage lighting in the ceilings, but could easily
go for high tech cameras.
 
“There’s one
there, and there, and there,” she said.

Terrance,
figuring out what she was doing, started pointing too.
 
“And there, and there,” he said. “And there’s
cameras in the walls y’all can’t even see!”

“Let’s go!”
the gunman at the door yelled again.
 
“Get the package and let’s go!”

The men,
panicking now too, grabbed Roz and took off.
 
When they ran out of the door with her, Terrance ran and locked the
door.

“Call the
police!” he yelled to his fellow students. “Call the fire department!
 
Call the ambulamps!”

The students
were all calling on their cell phones until he said that last word.
 
“Ambulamps?” Alice asked him.
 
“What the hell is an ambulamps?”

“Just call,”
Terrance said. “Lord have mercy just call for Miss G’s sake!”

But Miss G
knew she was in trouble when the gunmen ran her down the stairs of the studio,
and she saw a pile of dead bodies.
 
There
had to be nine or ten men.
 
Mick’s
invisible men no doubt.
 
But completely
visible, and outmatched, by these five.

She also
knew she was in trouble because they were going to take her to a second
location. She knew she had to do something.
 
She knew she had to think fast.
 
But when they arrived at the exit door, they waited.
 
They didn’t go anywhere.

One man had
an earpiece as if he was waiting to get the word.
 
Finally the word came because he said okay,
and then motioned to the other men.
 
They
then moved into a one line procession, with Roz in front, and hurried out of
the building.

A limousine
was just driving up as they hurried out, and Mick and Leo jumped out.
 
Roz realized at that very moment that it
wasn’t about taking her to a second location.
 
It was about using her as a human shield so that they could gun down
Mick.

“Mick!” she
screamed as soon as she realized what was happening.
 
She wasn’t screaming to warn him.
 
She was screaming to spook her captors just
enough for her to tear away from them, and for Mick to have a clear shot.

It
worked.
 
To Mick’s great delight, Roz did
exactly what he needed her to do.
 
Because now he was ready to play ball.
 
He came out of that limo with two guns, and both were blazing as he
hurried toward Roz’s two captors.
 
Roz
was terrified, but she didn’t try to make a run for it.
 
That would have been too risky.
 
She would have been giving one of the three
men a license to gun her down.
 
So she
fell to the ground and stayed down, covering her head.

Mick was
firing on all cylinders as he made his way toward the gunmen, with his white
coat flaring out, and the gunmen were trying to return fire.
 
But they were being picked off with
precision, one after the other one.
 
Leo
took one out, Mick took three out, and then both men started firing as another
group of men jumped out of a parked car, the getaway car, firing too.

That group
was shot down as quickly as they exposed themselves, but Mick and Leo spared
the final man.
 
They needed an inside
man.

Mick pointed
his weapon as he hurried toward the last man standing.
 
“Drop it now!” Mick ordered.
 
He was terrified that the gunman would still
try to take Roz out.
 
He kept his eyes
trained on him.
 
But thankfully, Mick
thought, the fool knew he was a dead man anyway.
 
He dropped his weapon.

Leo quickly
grabbed the man and hurried him to the limousine, while Mick ran to Roz,
grabbed her, and hurried her too.
 
Now
they were in a race to avoid the cops.
 
That was why the limousine, with Carissa Caine, the driver who flew with
them to the Big Apple, sped off even before the doors were shut.

What Roz
didn’t understand was why they had allowed one of the gunmen to not only live,
but to get in the limo with them.
 
She
quickly found out.

She and Mick
were seated on one seat, while Leo and the gunman were seated on the seat
opposite them.
 
If she thought Mick was
going to pamper her, and make sure she was okay, she was sorely mistaken.
 
Mick’s total focus was on that gunman.
 
Mick’s total focus was finding out who
ordered this hit on his infrastructure and he had to know now.

Mick placed
his hand behind the scruff of the gunman’s neck, yanked his head forward, and
then placed a gun to the side of his head.
 
Roz saw a look in Mick’s eyes, a look so chilling, that it scared even
her.

“Give me the
name,” Mick said to the gunman.

But the man
was crying like a baby.
 
“Don’t kill me,”
he pleaded.
 
“I was just following
orders.”

“Whose
orders?” Mick asked angrily.

“Don’t kill
me.
 
Please don’t kill me.”

“Whose
orders, motherfucker?” Mick screamed.
 
“I’ll blow your fucking head off of your fucking body and scatter your
fucking brains all over your fucking face if you don’t tell me who gave you the
orders to take out me and mine?
 
Who?”

The man was
shaking his head, the tears draining down.

“Who motherfucker?”
Leo angrily asked.
 
“Tell him who!”

“Carp,” the
man said quickly, still shaking his head.
 
“Carp Bianchi.”

Mick and Leo
both stopped cold.
 
Roz could tell it was
not the name, not in a million years, that they expected to hear.
 
Carp Bianchi was one of the trio of Dons Mick
did business with.
 
Roz had met him
before, in Mick’s office, and she also remembered how Mick nearly rearranged
his face just for speaking ill about her.
 
It didn’t seem that impossible to her that the man would seek revenge.
 
But Mick and Leo looked dumbstruck.

It was such
shocking news that Mick didn’t ask for more information.
 
He didn’t try to bully that man any
further.
 
He sat back.

Roz was
sitting on the edge of the bed while Mick was pacing the room and talking on
his cell phone.
 
His white coat was off,
the sleeves of his turtleneck were rolled up, and his black trousers looked as
if they were sagging on his sagging body.
 
He was exhausted.
 
Roz could see
it even in his posture.

They were at
what Mick called a “safe house” in upstate New York.
 
It was in an isolated area not far from
town.
 
The house itself was nothing to
write home about either. Just a walk-up to the residence, a couple bedrooms in
back, and a living room and kitchen up front.
 
Mick and Roz were in the bedroom.
 
When Mick ended his conversation, he sat on the edge of the bed beside
her.

“Have they
found him?” she asked.

“No,” Mick
said.
 
“I’m probably going to have to get
out there myself.”

Roz
frowned.
 
“You?”

“Yes!
 
We’re shorthanded.
 
We lost a lot of men today.
 
And Shane,” Mick said, with pain in his
voice.

Roz’s heart
fell.
 
“Shane?
 
What about Shane?
 
They got him too?”

Mick looked
at her.
 
Took her hand. “Yes,
Rosalind.
 
They got him too.”
 

Roz was
shocked.
 
“Oh my God,” she said.
 
“That poor child!
 
Who would kill a ten-year-old?”

“Carp
Bianchi, that’s who!” Mick said angrily.
 
“Rat bastard!”
 
Then he stood up
again, and began pacing again.

Roz was
distressed.
 
Just the thought of little
Shane caught up in all of this had to tear Mick apart.
 
And then to find out that somebody in his
inner circle was behind it all.
 
Roz knew
he was a devastated man.

“What about
the gunman you captured?
 
What if he’s
lying?”

“He’s not.”

“But how do
you know?”

“Leo and
some of our experts tortured him, just to make sure.
 
He stuck to his story.
 
It’s Carp.
 
The rat bastard!
 
Wait until I get
my hands on him.”