Reno Gabrini: A Family Affair (17 page)

Trina closed her eyes in anguish.
 
This was fast becoming a nightmare of epic
proportions.
 
“Okay,” she said into the
phone, and ended the call.
   

“Boss just drove up,” one of Reno’s men said to the
others as they stopped playing cards and stood to their feet.
 
They were in the safe house, with two
detainees, and Debrosiac had already warned them that it might be a new day,
but Reno was in a foul mood.
 
But when
the door opened, they didn’t see the foulness.
 
Reno was all business.

“Where and where?” Reno asked as soon as he entered
the house.

“Chap is in the basement,” Debrosiac responded.
 
“Quinn Chan is in the room over there.”
 
He was pointing toward the room to the right.

Reno made his way to that room, with Debrosiac
following him.
 
Quinn was sitting on the
bed in the small, windowless place.
 
When
she saw Reno walk in, she stood up.
 
“Reno, I swear I didn’t---”

“Shut the fuck up,” Reno responded.

“Sit down,” Debrosiac ordered her.

Quinn, angry herself, sat back down.

Reno pulled up a chair and sat in front of her.
 
He crossed his legs and stared at her.
 
The room reeked with the muskiness of her own
sweat.

She was trying to cry, but her eyes were as dry as
Reno’s.
 
“Why am I here?” she asked with
a whine in her voice.
 
“I didn’t
blackmail Jimmy.
 
I was just doing what I
was told!
 
I was just trying to hold onto
my job!”

“My wife,” Reno said calmly, “has nothing to do with
this.”

“I knew you wasn’t going to believe me.
 
You think she’s this angel when she’s not!”

Debrosiac stood straight from the wall he was
leaning against.
 
Was she nuts?
 
Nobody talked about Trina Gabrini that
way.
 
At least not in front of Reno.
 
He looked from Quinn to Reno.
 
But Reno remained calm, and continued to
stare at Quinn.

And Quinn continued her Trina-bashing.
 
“She treats me like I’m beneath her every
time she sees me,” she said.
 
“I try to
be friendly to her.
 
I try to get along
with her.
 
But she doesn’t want to have
anything to do with me.
 
What did I ever
do to her?
 
Yeah, I slept with Mick
Sinatra when he was in town, but she was a married woman.
 
Why should that bother her?
 
I can’t help it if I’m classy.
 
I can’t help it if I’m beautiful!”

Debrosiac was stunned.
 
Was that fool implying that she was
beautiful, but Trina was not?
 
Was that
the implication she was trying to suggest?
 
Debrosiac, again, looked at Reno.
 
This time Reno spoke.

“You wouldn’t know beauty if it rammed down your
fucking throat,” he said.
 
“You wouldn’t
know class if it sat on your fucking face.
 
You aren’t gorgeous.
 
You’re
grotesque.
 
You think beauty is only skin
deep and class is how wide you can open your legs and still pretend to be
dainty.”

Quinn was surprised by his harshness.
 
He was behaving as if he loved Trina so much
that it hurt him to his heart to hear anything negative about her.
 
He acted as if he really loved that woman!
 
It made Quinn hate Trina even more.

But Reno wasn’t finished with his attack.
 
“Forget not being in the same ballpark with
my wife,” he said to her.
 
“Forget not
being in the same league with my wife.
 
You aren’t even in the same country with my wife when it comes to beauty
and class.
 
You’re just an easy piece of
ass to men and a pain in the ass to women.
 
You do your job well.
 
That’s the
only reason I kept your ass around.
 
You
knew what you were doing.
 
But to try and
implicate Trina in your bullshit?
 
To try
and denigrate her and think I’d take your word over hers?
 
To think that you can put daylight between me
and my wife?
 
Reno and Trina
?
 
You must be
out of your
got
damn mind.”

Quinn knew she had to clarify her position.
 
“I wasn’t trying to put any daylight between
you and her,” she responded. “I was only trying to tell the truth.”

But as soon as she said that last word, Reno quickly
stood up.
 
Quinn, terrified that he would
strike her, leaned back.

“Come with me,” he ordered, and headed out of the
bedroom.

Quinn was too terrified to move, but Debrosiac
prodded her on.
 
“Didn’t you hear the
man?” he angrily asked her.
 
“Get up!”

Quinn stood and hurried to follow Reno out of the
bedroom.
 
Debrosiac followed behind
her.
 
But when they made their way back
into the living room, Debrosiac was accosted by another one of Reno’s men who
had intel for him.
 
Reno continued to
head downstairs, to the basement, while Debrosiac motioned for yet another man
to take charge of Quinn and follow the boss.
 
The man grabbed Quinn by the arm, and forced her downstairs too.

When they made it downstairs, and Quinn was able to
see her brother strapped in a chair in the middle of the damp room, beaten so
badly that both of his eyes were completely shut and his face looked twice its
normal size, her knees buckled.
 
She couldn’t
believe Reno could be this harsh!
 
She
looked at him.

But Reno wasn’t bullshitting anymore.
 
He grabbed the steel bar one of his guards
downstairs held, and walked up to Chap.
 
Without attempting to get anything more from the stubborn thug, Reno
swung that steel bar against Chap’s head as if his head was a baseball, and
knocked him out of the park.
 
The blood
gushed out as if it had suddenly been unplugged, and Chap fell over dead,
taking the chair to the floor with him.

Quinn screamed her own blood curling scream as she
witnessed her brother’s brutal murder.
 
Reno tossed the bloody bar aside and headed over to her.
 
She backed up until she was backed against
the wall.

“What else you want to say about my wife before I
kill your ass?” he asked her.

“Nothing,” she said forcefully, shaking her
head.
 
“All that stuff about beauty and
class, I was just talking.
 
I was just
jealous of Mrs. Gabrini.
 
I was just
jealous that she had somebody who loved her so much.
 
Please don’t hurt me.
 
I was just jealous!”

“Who wanted to blackmail my son?” Reno asked her.

Quinn was crying real tears now.
 
“I told you who.
 
But you won’t believe me.”

“I’ll believe you when you tell me the truth!” Reno
responded.

But Quinn was looking at her brother again.
 
“It’s all my doing,” she said.
 
“If I would have never called him here, he
would be alive today!”

“Fuck him!” Reno said.
 
“You’d better start worrying about your own
life.
 
Now who set this shit up?
 
Who got you to recruit your brother?
 
Who, Quinn?”

Quinn knew she was done for.
 
She knew her life was going to go the way of
her brother’s life just as surely as she stood in that basement.
 
Unless he really did love Trina as much as he
claimed.
 
“Trina told me to find
somebody,” she said as if she was resigned to her fate.
 
“You don’t want to hear it, but Trina is the
one.
 
She’s the only one I was dealing
with.”

“You’re a fucking liar,” Reno said, and began moving
closer to her.
 
But just as he was about
to lay a hand on her, Debrosiac hurried into the basement.
 
“Boss,” he said as he ran downstairs, “you’ll
want to see this.”

Reno looked at Debrosiac as he held a cell phone in
his hand.
 
Reno, perturbed but certain
Debrosiac would not have interrupted if it wasn’t vital, walked over to
him.
 
“What?” he asked.

“A few nights ago you told me to put a couple men on
your wife again.”

“So?”

“You told me to make sure they were super discreet
and if she ever found out she was being tailed that they would lose the gig.”

“Get to the point, Dee.”

“They got something.
 
Something major.”
 
Debrosiac said
this, and then handed Reno the cell phone.

Reno at first frowned.
 
Because it was a video of his wife knocking
on the door of a motel room.
 
She wore
sunglasses and was looking from side to side as if to make sure nobody had been
following her.
 
When the door opened, a
big guy stepped out, a white guy, and ushered her inside.
 
He looked around too, before he closed the
door.
 
End of video.

Reno looked at Debrosiac.
 
“Who the fuck was that?” he asked him.

“We didn’t know at the time.”

“What do you mean you didn’t know?”

“We’ve never seen him before, Reno.”

“What was he doing with Trina?”

“We don’t know that either.
 
All we know is they stayed in that motel room
for half an hour, and then she left.”

“Did you send somebody to the motel’s office to find
out who that character was?”

“Sure we did, boss.
 
But we got nothing.
 
According to
the manager, nobody stayed in that room in weeks.
 
So apparently they paid under the table for a
couple hours get together.
 
It’s a hooker
motel.
 
That’s what they do.”

“And let me guess: no cameras?”

Debrosiac shook his head.
 
“None.”

Reno exhaled.
 
Quinn was now very much interested in this conversation.

“That’s not all, boss,” Debrosiac said, and played a
second video.
 
“This was the next day.”

Reno watched.
 
It was Trina again, this time knocking on the door at a different
motel.
 
But the same guy answered, looked
around, and let her in.

“They spent another thirty-forty minutes together,
and Mrs. Gabrini left,” Debrosiac said.

“They tailed the guy?”

“They were ordered to tail her.
 
They tailed her.
 
And since it wasn’t their job to spy on her,
just keep her safe, they didn’t tell.”

Reno exhaled.

“But this is the kicker, boss,” Debrosiac said, as
he played video number three.

“What is it?”

“This is why they brought it to my attention.
 
A totally different guy meeting with her at
yet another seedy motel.
 
This meeting
just took place this morning.”

Reno frowned as he watched Trina knock on the door
of the motel room and get ushered in by yet another man.

“But this time,” Debrosiac said, “they stayed over
an hour together.
 
And this time,” he
added, “they left together.”

Reno looked at him.

“The guys called me when they left together,”
Debrosiac said.
 
“I told them to tail the
guy after the drop off.”

“She dropped him off?”

“Yeah.
 
In the
parking lot at Target.
 
So our guys
followed him.
 
But guess where they
followed him to, Reno?”

“Where?”

“The FBI office.”

Reno’s heart dropped.
 
“What?”

“And they checked him out,” Debrosiac
continued.
 
“He’s an FBI operative,
Reno.
 
He’s Fed.
 
We ran a check on the other guy too.
 
The first guy she met with twice?
 
He’s Fed too.
 
We didn’t want to come to you with it, until we had an ID on both guys.
 
We confirmed them both as FBI agents.
 
It was just confirmed.”

Reno couldn’t believe it.
 
“Why would Tree be meeting with the
Feds?
 
This doesn’t make any sense.”