The Exceptions

SEVEN


And on it continued. Year after year, town after town. Throughout my childhood I so wanted to visit the places I read about in school, to travel the landscape of the United States with my family and see all those mysterious and unusual places. My family ended up giving me that gift, in the form of an endorsement to locate Melody Grace McCartney and put two bullets in her head. My life returned to normal in New York. I embraced the love of cooking I’d found, that my mother had instilled in me in the sweetest way as a child, always offering a warm place to hide when tensions would rise in our household, when uncles and friends would arrive home cut and bloody and doubled over in pain, when arguments were so loud I could not find a place out of earshot, when reticent looks were passed around the room from a question like, “What happened to Mario? I haven’t seen him in ages.” My mother could read it in my eyes—it was the thing missing from my brothers’—and would pull me to her chest, tell me she needed my help in the kitchen. She diverted my attention by teaching me how to make homemade ravioli, pinoli and all, by letting me coat the pork and steak in the salmoriglio sauce before grilling, by explaining how the less spice you add to a dish, the greater the flavor. Her ability to distract me from the chaos in our house created a baseline for my life. I was the only one willing to learn her lesson: You’ll be happier if you use your fists for the dough.

I scraped up marginal cash to buy an old storefront in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, right off Wythe Avenue. The place was worth a fortune until it mysteriously burned up two days after I mentioned to my father I had my eye on it; I bought the shell for almost nothing, was swamped with free labor and materials for the next nine months. The details of what made the place so special, like a chandelier dating back to the early 1900s and parquet floors from an even earlier age—all gone. But this is how the Bovaros acquire things. Why bother loosening a bolt with a wrench when you can whack it off with a hammer? But they meant well, in their felonious way. It’s amazing the things family will do for you sometimes.

In the hidden hours of the schedule of my life, between the enforcement of contracts and delivery and removal of money to those clients requesting financial help and help for those requiring our protection, I rebuilt the restaurant from the ground up. The late nights and random free moments were all absorbed by the tasks of hiring electricians and plumbers and designers; I quickly learned the other end of the restaurant business, an area to which I’d had little exposure growing up. As a result of everything in the building having been replaced—virtually a new facility—I took the restaurant to the other end of the spectrum. Instead of trying to recreate the natural history that had burned away, I refurbished and redesigned the place in a cutting-edge, trendy way that could not have been mistaken for anything other than intentional overcompensation, a style just arriving in Williamsburg. Gone were the discs of Sinatra and his peers, in came a twenty-four-hour satellite feed of trance, a barely audible track of what seemed like one song that started in March and didn’t end until November when the power dropped. The menu, originally intended to replicate Country Italian, the food of my youth, turned into an Italian fusion with more contemporary flavors and unexpected elements; a feast of food as you’d expect from an authentic Italian restaurant, with the twists in flavor and presentation you’d expect from places whose menus defied categorization. I spent the last of my available cash on a restaurant sign designed by a local artisan, a wood and metal creation that spread across the brick surface above the awning—SYLVIA. I named the restaurant after my mother, the woman who taught me not only how to love food, but how to understand it, who after a miserable life of nurturing a crime boss and her hoodlum sons, died of ovarian cancer before she would ever see me complete its restoration. And as the staff was assembled, the tablecloths draped on the wooden tables, and the bar stocked, my father told me we’d be laundering money through the back end of the business, how we’d be bringing in more than vegetables and meats through the back door.

It’s amazing the things you will do for your family sometimes.

Even at the time, while working through long nights of spackling and painting and nailing down hardwood, I knew the reconstruction of the restaurant served as a massive distraction, a means for occupying my mind and keeping it off of Melody. I worked myself to exhaustion every day, so that those moments before I fell asleep, even as I slumbered on a discarded couch in the unfinished kitchen, I’d not have a chance to think of her, be one step closer to forgetting her.

But just before Sylvia opened its large wooden doors to the public, around the time the head chef and I started experimenting in the kitchen and assembling the menu, Melody returned to my head because of the distance of time I forced between us. The first few months after finding her in Kentucky weren’t so bad; I’d just seen her, and though her existence seemed uncomfortable and unsafe, it was fresh. But as the same season approached one year later, those warm early summer days, the thoughts of her became nearly impossible to push away, and the memories of my experience with her became vivid again, even the slightest reminders—the smell of cut grass or greasy, stale convenience store hot dogs—would send me into a tailspin. And as those memories rose in my mind, so did my concern for Melody, my wonder of what had happened over the last year, whether she had dived into promiscuity in a search for temporary connection, or if she had retreated into herself, destined to hide from the rest of the world, watch life pass from behind a family room window.

My memory of her no longer made sense; she was changing, and I began to once again ascend the fixation of finding out how.



There are two hidden benefits to running your own restaurant: abundant food and easy access to booze. Of course, the greatest downsides to running your own restaurant are all that abundant food and easy access to booze. On the food side, the kitchen crew had to come to terms with various guys from the Bovaro crew hanging out in the kitchen, feasting for free, most commonly my youngest brother, Jimmy, who by twenty-one was piling on the weight with monthly regularity, began to take the shape of a tackle, with all the violence and dexterity built right in. That first year, though, I began to pack on the pounds as well, gained ten before the restaurant had paid its third round of bills.

But what really got me was the alcohol.

It became harder and harder to get to sleep. The control and influence from Pop played a part, my having taken a restaurant I had designed and renovated with my own hands and whoring it out to my family’s money laundering, allowing it to be pimped by my older brothers. The resentment began to age me. But the real stress was something else entirely. The more successful Sylvia became, the more the guilt kicked in; it seemed unfair that I could have the life I was given while having cast Melody into the darkness, then leaving her there. The worry returned, could only be quieted by a small glass of Glenfiddich at the close of the day. The problem is, as any alcoholic will tell you, liquor is a pretty effective way to get rid of that leak in your ceiling; cover it in a thin layer of paint after each storm. Soon, you may as well start a little earlier so by the time bed is in view, you’re already there. And if it serves you well at night, why not dilute the guilt and shame and worry anytime you feel their burden? Works equally at lunch as it does at dinner.

Took about three months for me to get to the point where it became noticeable—“Anybody seen Johnny?” “Check in the bar”—and one more for it to have become an official part of my day. The pressure of running a restaurant is immense—like putting on a high-profile stage production day after day—but the alcohol wasn’t diluting my stress, in fact made that part of my life worse, slowed my ability to multitask. Its only purpose was to cloud, to erase. It did that well in a temporary capacity, so I kept it flowing.

My father eventually took me aside and performed a well-planned intervention, went like this:

DAD: “Johnny, c’mere.”

ME: “What’s up, Pop?”

DAD, violently slapping a glass of whiskey out of my hand: “Knock it off, kid.”

It’s amazing the things family will do for you sometimes.

And there it was, as I stood before my father, Peter, and a few of the crew: that look. The same look of dishonor and disappointment covered in a ganache of we’ll get through this that burned to my memory from when I was ten years old. The look that told me I’d screwed up again. I was becoming weak, not unlike the addicted scumbags we dealt with and their never-ending needs for gambling and drugs and prostitutes. In our family and crew, a glass or two of wine with a meal or a pair of beers was nothing, but the third would always raise an eyebrow, and if it became a pattern, guys were dropped down—or off—the list of trust. Like Louis Salvone; one day you party a little too hard, a year later you’ve got a coke habit and prison cell and a shiv in your gut.

I surrendered the alcohol with relative ease, for it wasn’t serving the purpose it did for most alcoholics. One of the guys who supplied Sylvia with quality meats was a recovering alcoholic and very distant cousin of my father. I hardly knew him, but you could tell by looking at the guy that he was living a new rendition of his former self, that his once heavy body had been drained and thinned by alcoholism, his face left sagging, his belt hidden by a spare tire that had lost its air. He lived a sober existence, but with every delivery I could see him watch the bar through the kitchen door, where if someone was cooking with vodka or wine his movements would slow and his nostrils would flare and undulate like a frigging dog. He once told me he couldn’t walk past a bar without wanting to go in, that the smell of any booze at all would make him salivate, that he could actually taste it before the bartender had finished the pour. His story never resonated with me; I couldn’t even understand it. I never developed a flavor for alcohol as much as I used it to get rid of the bitter taste of regret I woke up with each morning. In my case, drinking had become a casual way to dilute my guilt and concern, like taking Tylenol every day to assuage the pain of a headache that lasted a year.

I needed no help screwing the cap back on the bottle; I knew there was really only one way to make my headache go away.



Once I’d sobered I looked around and realized the fusion cuisine and the trendy restaurant were a natural fit for me, a breath as fresh as that Kentucky air. For all my armchair analysis of Melody and the people around me, it took me some time to realize—or admit—that the restaurant was a way to break out. I believe contemporary flavors and unexpected elements were the terms I used to describe the food, but they might have been better used to describe me. Everyone on staff at the restaurant always called me Jonathan, and for whatever reason I never corrected them, learned to like it, helped me to live my alter ego. I was the Bovaro on the fence, perched high and looking down on the two worlds of my life, not stuck there because I could not decide which way to go, but trying to figure out how to exist in both equally. I wanted to live the fusion, too.

I started taking my health more seriously, started working out—to build muscle but mostly to release tension—and eventually got an on-again/off-again personal trainer who operated out of the gym near my apartment, a talented gal constantly distracted by my last name. Nonetheless, the training worked, and in my family gaining additional strength would never have gone unutilized.

Over that initial year of developing the restaurant, my appearance began to change, and not just from filling out my sweaters across the chest. While in my mildly drunken stupors I had started noticing that almost everything I read was getting blurry, though once free of the booze, things remained blurry. I took a trip two blocks away to an optician who’d had a storefront in Brooklyn since the 1950s and was told I was myopic. Translation: I can’t read jack from any real distance. The optometrist, so old I feared his final breaths would be wasted on me, handed my file over to his great-granddaughter to help me select frames. The whole time this girl stared at my face like she knew me, except she didn’t. I’m not much for self-assessment, but for whatever reason this gal was taken with me. And as I perused the wall of frames all I really wanted was her help in finding something suitable. Can’t explain why, but not many people in our household or crew ever wore glasses; I had no starting point. The only two guys who did were in their eighties; one had frames with lenses the thickness of petri dishes, the other had frames with an opening for one big lens and inside was the windshield of a mid-seventies Chevelle. On the other hand, my sous-chef wore glasses, blue and bold and providing a welcome distraction from the plague of acne his face had once fought and lost.

So, the great-granddaughter, eyes still stuck on my face, reached up and pulled down a set and handed the lensless frames to me. I studied them—as trendy as my restaurant and as expensive as its repairs—and as I held them in my hand, they were so light, so delicate that all I could think was, These are gonna break in less than a week. I slowly put them to my face, felt as odd wearing them as if I’d slipped on a dress.

“Oh, yeah,” great-granddaughter said.

I studied myself in the mirror, glanced at her sideways.

Then she smiled and laughed a little. “Oh, yeah.”

I returned to the restaurant, wobbling a bit from my newly sharpened vision, amazed at how far away I could read things; apparently, my sight had been on its way out for some time. And as I walked in the back door of the restaurant, Peter was coming out. We stopped a few feet apart from each other, hands in our pockets.

Peter stared at me for three seconds. “Seriously?”

I shrugged, he walked past.

But for the first time in my life—started in culinary school, really—I started being around people unlike myself, unlike my family, for extended periods of time. Once the restaurant turned into a full-time job, the people involved in its operation and success became full-time acquaintances, people of a (non-mob) culture who brought something to the table, no matter how bland or understated, that rubbed off on me. The changes were subtle, things as unnoticeable as wearing a different kind of pullover—“You look different, Johnny”—to a marginally different haircut to those glasses; I knew there was a small audience that would accept these changes. No one on either side could single out what the difference was, and rightfully so, no one really cared, either. The point is the change was there.

Two worlds, on a slow path toward collision.



I found Melody in Kentucky when I was twenty-four years old. I found her there again when I was twenty-five—twice—with the visits spaced apart by the distance between each of my headaches, the same point in every cycle of making sure she was all right and making sure she was still all right. And as always, each and every trip fell under the guise of knocking Melody off. I might’ve even tried to spy on her more than I did, except my excuses for either not finding her or not being able to take her out became flimsier with each return home.

On my fourth trip to Lawrenceburg, Kentucky—I was now twenty-six years old, she was twenty-two—Melody disappeared. I waited for two days, the greatest length of time I could leave Sylvia alone, but her car never moved. More alarming was the appearance that it hadn’t moved in a long time. Dead leaves and tiny branches were strewn across the roof, trunk, and hood, debris that would have blown away from regular driving. The front passenger tire had gone partially flat and there were stains on the bottom quarter of each tire where rainwater had washed away the grime from the wheels—wheels that had not turned in a great while.

Having originally planned on returning home by Friday evening, I waited out that second night, went to the Lawrenceburg post office as soon as it opened on Saturday morning, carried in an empty envelope with Melody’s—Shelly Jones’s—name and address scribbled on it in handwriting purposely written to appear unlike my own.

I handed it to a middle-aged postal clerk and gave him my story:

“Hope you can help me. Got a letter I’m trying to get to a friend of mine but I forgot her apartment number. I was wondering if you guys could get this to her on my behalf.”

I handed over the letter with her last known address.

Shelly Jones

901 New Frankfort Road

Lawrenceburg, KY

40342

The clerk studied the envelope, squinted a little, and said, “Umm, one second.” And as he walked out of sight, he yelled, “Hey, Ron?”

The clerk disappeared for a minute, then returned with my empty envelope.

“I can put it on her stack, f’ya like.”

“Stack?”

“Box at her building filled up a month ago. We’ve been ’cumulating her mail here in back.”

“Why aren’t you forwarding it?”

“Got no forwarding address. She just stopped picking it up. Soon we’ll have to start sending back any new mail f’her.”

I started cracking my knuckles. “You guys call the police?”

The clerk paused before answering, like he was waiting for me to deliver a punch line. “Not picking up your mail ain’t no crime.” He shrugged a little. “Should be.”

I leaned on the counter, pointed at him. “Not to have her arrested. To see if she’s okay. She could be dead in there.”

“F’real? People stop picking up their mail all the time for who knows why. Folks leave the country, take extended trips out of town, get called for military service. Sometimes they just leave and don’t worry about having their mail forwarded. Cops don’t care about that.” He shrugged again. “Should, though.”



As I drove back to New York, I tried with all the ingenuity my mind could offer to come up with more than two scenarios, but the only possibilities to emerge were the obvious ones: Melody had been killed or Melody had been relocated. And if she’d been relocated… why?



I didn’t drive back to my apartment. I did not go see my father and my brothers. Sylvia? Not on my mind. The doorbell I was ringing at seven-thirty that Saturday evening belonged to Randall Gardner.

His wife answered the door of their stately colonial in an apron, looked at me like the stranger I was.

“Randy around?”

She paused, wiped her hands slowly on her apron. “What’s this in reference to?”

I sighed, pinched my nose as I conjured up an answer. “It’s got to do with work. We’re having a problem at Justice that only Randy can fix.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh! One sec.”

Randall came to the door with a near-empty glass of red wine, all dim-eyed and flushed as though that glass had not been his first. When he recognized me he cursed under his breath, glanced around the house checking for family, then pulled the door behind him as he stepped out onto the stoop.

“Come on, man. You come to my house with no warning? You lost your freaking mind? We’ve got friends coming over in an hour and—”

“Go back in, put the glass down, explain there’s a problem with the computers.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see a couple walking their Pomeranian.

“You sound like an imbecile, Bovaro. You know nothing about what I do! My work is serious stuff, man. Guy like you could never understand the first thing—”

Blah, blah, blah was all I heard. As the couple looked our way, I nodded and laughed like I loved the story Randall was telling. I let him continue his inebriated tirade, then as the couple disappeared around the corner, I slapped his face like the woman he was.

“You think I’m gonna ask again?” I grabbed him by his collar and shoved him into his door, nailed the back of his head on the hub of the knocker. “Go back inside, make up whatever excuse you like, and be back out here in sixty seconds, or I’m coming in armed and angry, capice?”

“All right!” He waited a second, rubbed his head. “I hate you freaking people.”

Got to hand it to Randall: He returned in under twenty seconds, his jacket half on already. We walked to my Mustang in silence. I started the car and backed out of his driveway. I drove two blocks, still not a word between us. Then just as I approached the fringe of his neighborhood, I pulled over to the side of the road under a pair of massive sycamores and grabbed him by the back of the neck, twisted his head so we were eye to eye.

“Don’t ever make the mistake of doing that to me again, Gardner. Next time I stop by you invite me in, treat me with respect, offer me a glass of your boxed wine, and introduce me as a friend. I don’t care if it’s three in the morning. And I don’t ever want to hear your grumblings about me showing up on your doorstep, because I remember when you showed up on ours, tears pouring down your face and slobber running out of your mouth as you begged my family for mercy, then begged us for more money. Know what Pete wanted to do? Wanted to cut you loose. Said you were a loser. Asked my father if we could drag your ass out to the alley, beat you, and toss you in the Dumpster like the piece of trash you are. Know who prevented that? Me, Randall. I did. I said we shouldn’t, that you might serve some purpose for us in the future. Sure enough, you did. And you still got your nice family and nice place out here in the burbs. But understand, Gardner, you need to keep serving that purpose. Because once you don’t anymore, I’m gonna let Pete get some exercise on you, you friggin’ minchione. I’m telling you right now—and this is a promise—you will not outlive your usefulness.”

Randall yanked his head from my grip. “You ever think about what I have on you guys, huh? You think you’re impervious to punishment?”

“Don’t let that wine do the talking for you, Randy, or we’re gonna end up taking a different ride in a minute.” I could feel the rage building; I needed fast information and he was impeding my ability to get it. I considered taking the quickest way to making my point, but I really wanted to avoid getting his blood all over the interior of my car.

“Think about who I work for!” he yelled. “I make one phone call and—”

“Randy, let me tell you how we’ve handled gamblers who’ve troubled us in the past. We had this guy, let’s call him Chuck, lived maybe fifteen miles from here, started getting mouthy on us, considered biting the hand that fed him. Drove Peter out of his mind. We gave Chuck a real-life lesson on how odds worked. We took him to a low bridge over the Passaic River in the middle of the night, loosely tied cinder blocks to both of his feet, made him clutch the blocks to his chest as we forced him to jump off.”

Gardner finally shut up. Two cars passed us, kicked up gravel that dinged against my door.

“If Chuck panicked,” I continued, “those cinder blocks would keep him at the bottom of the river no matter how hard he tried to swim up. If he had presence of mind, he could try to hold his breath and undo the knots and free himself to swim to the surface.”

Randall wiped his mouth as he stared past me, lost in the imagery. Then he asked so quietly that I barely understood the words, “Where’s the lesson in odds?”

“My brothers and I stood on the bridge, betting on whether he would live or not.” I looked in my rearview, then back at Gardner. “Odds were ten to one he’d survive.”

Then, louder: “You killed him?”

I stared out the window as the couple with the Pomeranian walked up their driveway. “He would have killed himself, Randy. All he had to do was get control of his mind and think about what he needed to do.” I turned to him. “This is an opportunity for you to do the same. Presence of mind, my friend. Think, and make the decisions that will save your life.”

Randall faced forward and rubbed his face so hard it looked like he was kneading a massive ball of dough.

As I put the car in gear and had us back on our path to the highway, I said, “As for our gambling friend, he beat the odds. He survived. He was underwater for over ninety seconds, but he eventually surfaced. We picked him up at the shoreline, threw him in the back of our car, and drove him home.”

Randall began sniffling, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

“Next time you think for even a split second that you can play us, Randall, I want you to imagine what was running through Chuck’s mind for those ninety seconds he was at the bottom of the Passaic.”

Gardner sighed, stared at his lap, whispered, “I hate you freaking people.”

It took significant restraint to avoid turning to him and sounding like a disgruntled child: I hate you, too! Guys like Gardner are the ones you toss into the Passaic tethered to an engine block instead of a cinder block. When he came to us in hysterics, at that time in debt by five figures, he made the mistake of thinking all crews in organized crime had interests in pornography; we did not, found no need to infringe on turf already so well covered. Gardner was desperate for money, and for something to make him worthy of our help, he offered boxes—boxes—of videos of he and his wife engaged in their bedroom activities that he had accumulated over a period of several years, all filmed via hidden cameras and high-tech equipment, all without his wife’s knowledge, filmed with his face away and hers to the camera. This is the way you must understand Gardner, as willing to give up any shred of dignity for his addiction.

Here, Peter and I saw eye to eye. All four Bovaro brothers would have taken turns on him, would have kicked and smashed those demons into submission. But I saved Randall’s life, seeing him for what he was, as having one value that would provide more to our family than the release and rush of delivering his punishment: He would do anything to continue gambling. Even if it meant surrendering the pride and trust of his wife, turning her into an amateur porn star. Even if it meant exposing his own intimate moments to the world. Even if it meant his wife and children could be forced into a lifetime of embarrassment.

Even if it meant potentially jeopardizing the entire Federal Witness Protection Program.



As we arrived at his office building, I parked in a distant space; the lot was mostly empty on that Saturday night. We both emerged from my car at the same time.

“Where you going?” Gardner asked.

“With you.”

“You crazy? You can’t get into the building, never mind the room where our systems are. I mean, c’mon, the place is loaded with cameras.”

It just looked like any office building to me, a fifteen-story glass and concrete structure designed by an architect with little imagination, a small metal sign at the foot of the building marking it as property of the U.S. Department of Justice. Could have been a building full of filing cabinets for all I knew.

He started walking toward the facility and said, “Gimme a half hour.”

“To get an address?”

He turned around, took a few paces back in my direction. “Look, I gotta run some diagnostic procedures on the servers, make it look like there’s a reason I’m badging in on a Saturday night.”

“What are you talking about?”

Gardner held up a hand to signal he was abbreviating the conversation. “What do you know about Oracle?” My answer never arrived. And as he turned and walked away, he said, “Gimme a half hour.”



I sat and waited patiently—for about twenty-eight of those thirty minutes. But when the half-hour mark came and went, I made the mistake of falling into paranoia the way I did in the convenience store in Kentucky. I imagined Gardner calling some contact in Justice, my car being surrounded by unmarked vehicles, guns aimed at me from too many positions to identify, red dots from lasers swirling in loose circles over my forehead and chest as I exited my car with my hands in the air. I could only hope that Gardner’s addiction to gambling was a ruling force, or better, that my lesson on presence of mind would be enough for him to make the right decision.

At the forty-five-minute mark, I started my car, ready to abandon Randall at the facility along with the opportunity for being captured. A few minutes later, I had the car in motion and aimed for the exit when I saw Randall appear at the cluster of glass doors at the bottom of the building. I drove over to pick him up as though it had been my original intention.

Randall jumped in the front seat and slammed the door, his face covered in sweat as though it was the first time he’d gotten us this particular information.

“Go,” he said.

“What did you find out?”

“She’s been relocated. Just go.”

I felt a rush of relief, from not only knowing she was still alive, but being on the cusp of getting her new location.

As we left the lot and returned to the freeway, my mind started spinning a tale of what might have caused Justice to move her, jammed up on the obvious conclusion: I’d not been as careful as I thought while staking her out. I struggled with which questions to ask first.

“How long ago?”

“Little over five weeks.”

It had been almost a year since I’d last seen Melody. I couldn’t imagine what would have prompted Justice to relocate her again just a month earlier. Unless someone else was trying to kill her.

I raised my voice, hoped it might bring a more detailed answer. “Why’d you guys move her?”

“Who knows.”

“It didn’t say?”

“You asked for an address.”

Gardner would never serve as my partner in crime.

“Gimme what you do have. Where is she?”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “once you’ve driven me home safe and sound.”

I didn’t say another word, not because I was obeying Gardner’s demand—I could have gotten the answer out of him while still keeping one hand on the wheel—but because the flood of potential answers to the question why had me clawing for the surface to get some air. Just like Chuck.

I replayed every conversation I’d had with my father and brothers over the previous few months, attempted to reread their words and signals and facial expressions. Their disappointment in my inability to complete the mission of knocking off Melody was not exactly hidden; maybe they thought it was time to get it done no matter what. On the other hand, there was really no compelling reason to have her killed immediately, other than to tidy up that loose end and to make a point to our peers that eventually we eliminate everyone who would dare to testify against us.

We pulled in front of Randall’s house, his driveway now full of cars, guests visible through the first-floor windows.

“Great,” he said, “everyone’s already here.”

“Where is she?”

Gardner stared at his house, had a look on his face like he was starting to wonder if this was all worth it. He never turned my way, mumbled, “Four twenty-five Sunrise Road, Farmington, New Mexico.”

I closed my eyes and dropped my head back to the headrest, thought, Man, that’s a really, really long drive. All along I’d been fortunate enough to have Melody within a single day’s drive. But New Mexico meant overnight stops. I knew I could never utilize airplanes or trains or anything that would log my name to a ticket purchase, anything that could be used as proof I’d been traveling with the intent of locating her. And with the demands of Sylvia, I wasn’t really sure how I could ever pull it off; those trips would require a significant time commitment.

Gardner turned and stared at me as I blanked out and gazed down the tree-lined street of his neighborhood. “You’re welcome.”

I kept my eyes on the street. “Get out of my car, you friggin’ scumbag.”

Once he’d left, I broke my trance, watched him stroll to his front stoop, running his hands through his hair, straightening out his clothes, wiping his face. He put his hand on the doorknob and paused a few seconds like he was trying to get his breath instead of his composure.



With data not flowing from the government side, I tried to paint as full a picture as possible by draining my family of whatever information and intentions they had—though they offered not much more than Randall. Over the course of three days, I casually asked my father and brothers and a few of the capos in our crew if they’d had any change in plans or interest toward Melody, but I could read the honest indifference in their demeanor, in their words:

POP: “Geez, kid, I got other things on my mind right now.”

PETER, with a wave of his hand: “She’s your little project. Clean up your own mess.”

TOMMY FINGERS: “I thought you took her out four years ago.”

ETTORE: “Not me, Shonny. No way. Not a shansh.” (These were Ettore’s last words to me. He would die, bullet to the neck, a terribly slow way to perish, in an alley in midtown five days later. My father turned the other way and allowed it to happen, a payback for a mistake Ettore had made against another family, a price paid to keep peace. No one thought to mention it to me until he’d been gone nearly a week.)

I slowly came to terms with the idea that her move might’ve had nothing to do with me or my family at all, that it could’ve been something as benign as a budgetary issue within Justice where they wanted to consolidate witnesses to regions, or that Melody had developed an allergy to some native Kentucky weed, or that some health issue required her to live in a more arid environment. No matter the excuse, I found no serenity in it. Something wasn’t right. And now my guard was raised, the paranoia so well sharpened that I’d become afraid I’d get cut and not even feel it.

I finally told myself it had to end, eventually convinced myself of it. The craziness served no purpose. And I’m sure the tapes I played in my head were similar to ones Chuck and Randall played, the wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat type where you decide today is the day you come to your senses. You’re never doing it again.

But like all addicts and people weakened with obsession, with the passage of enough time the cycle begins again, and you can’t do anything to prevent that; the only control you have is your reaction to it. The fantasy of feeling the rush (Randall’s issue) or the weight of concern (my issue) comes on full force, and you fight it for a while—a few hollow victories—until the cycle coincides with some other overwhelming impulse—like the notion that this time will be different, or that this time will be the last—and you give it all a second thought. And then a third. And then it runs through your mind with an uncomfortable rhythm.

And then you think, I could probably get to New Mexico in two days if I drove really fast.