"Tony, I appreciate you giving me a lift back to the house."
"Sure thing, Carmine, just grab a few things though, We have to put you in a safe-house until this blows over, okay?"
"Yeah, I understand, Tony, I'm just gonna tell Mama that I'll be away for a few days, otherwise she'll worry."
"You do that, Carmine." That will delay the search for a few days longer at least.
Carmine walked to the door but paused a moment when he realized it was wide open. The inside had been tossed and there were gang tags spray-painted on all the walls. There was no sign of his Mama.
Carmine ran upstairs and still didn't see any sign of her. He grabbed his bag and threw in some shirts and underwear. He raced downstairs to the street and out to the nice sedan parked there.
"Tony, something's happened to Mama!"
"You better get in the car, Carmine. It might not be safe. I'll go inside and look." Tony took a handgun out of his jacket and screwed a silencer onto the muzzle. He slipped into the apartment and looked around. He recognized the gang sign as New West Berlin - sort of, it was sloppy and NWB prided itself on the quality of its tags - there were clearly valuable things here that had been left in place as well. This had been staged to induce fear and to frame someone else.
He put his gun down and placed a call. Balthazar wasn't answering his phone, but Tony knew he was in a meeting, he'd leave a message, it wasn't that urgent, "Tony here, Carmine's mom's place has been trashed and someone is trying to frame New West Berlin for it. I Thought you should know. I'm going to see that Carmine isn't around to report it, but if someone finds her place like this they might go looking for him."
Tony left and locked the door behind him. Carmine was in the back seat looking fretful. "Carmine, listen, there isn't anything you can do about this. I've told Mr. Romano and he is going to look into it. He's a powerful man and he's looking out for you."
Carmine nodded and wiped his cheeks. Tony felt bad, but this was the job. He drove into Brooklyn. He pulled into an alleyway and got out. . Carmine got out with his bag. "Head down to the end of the alleyway, there's a door down there that opens into the safe-house. I'll be right with you."
Carmine got all the way to the end before he turned back to Tony. Tony was pointing the silenced gun at him. "I'm sorry, Carmine, Mr. B. said to make it quick and painless."
Two shots went through Carmine's head. One of them dislodged his recently-fixed eye. This, more than anything else that had happened that day is what pissed him off.
Tony fired a half-dozen more shots into Carmine before Carmine could wrestle the pistol from him. Tony took only one shot to drop. Carmine wished he knew how to drive. But Tony had a lot of cash in his wallet so he took that and planned to ride the train. As soon as he got cleaned up. Again.
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