Chapter 89
FOUR O’CLOCK ON A COLD, rainy morning, and his two younger boys were crying their eyes out in the backseat of the car. So was Caitlin up in front. Sullivan blamed Junior Maggione and La Cosa Nostra for everything, the huge, ugly mess that was happening now. Somehow, Maggione was going to pay for this, and he looked forward to the day of retribution.
So did his scalpel and his butcher’s saw.
At two thirty in the morning he had piled his family into the car and snuck away from a house six miles outside Wheeling, West Virginia. It was their second move in as many weeks, but he had no choice in the matter. He’d promised the boys they would return to Maryland one day, but he knew that wasn’t true. They wouldn’t ever go back to Maryland. Sullivan already had an offer on the house there. He needed the cash for their escape plan.
So now he and the family were running for their lives. As they left their “Wild West Virginny Home,” as he called it, he had a feeling that the mob would find them again ? that they could be right around the next bend in the road.
But he rounded the next curve, and the curve after that, and made it out of town safe and sound and in one piece. Soon they were singing Rolling Stones and ZZ Top tunes, including about a twenty-minute version of “Legs,” until his wife put her foot down about the nonstop high-testosterone noise. They stopped at Denny’s for breakfast, at Micky D’s for a second bathroom break, and by three in the afternoon, they were somewhere they had never been before.
Hopefully, Sullivan had left no trail to be followed by a crew of mob killers. No bread crumbs like in “Hansel and Gretel.” The good thing was, neither he nor his family had ever been in this area before. It was virgin territory, with no roots or connections.
He pulled into the driveway of a shingle-style Victorian house with a steep roof, a couple of turrets, even a stained-glass window.
“I love this house!” Sullivan crowed, and he was all fake smiles and hyperenthusiasm. “Welcome to Florida, kiddos,” he said.
“Very funny, Dad. Not ,” said Mike Jr. from the backseat, where all three boys were looking grim and depressed.
They were in Florida, Massachusetts, and Caitlin and the kids groaned at another of his dumb jokes. Florida was a small community of less than a thousand, situated high in the Berkshires. It had stunning mountain views, if nothing else. And there were no Mafia hit men waiting in the driveway. What more could they ask for?
“Just perfect. What could be better than this?” Sullivan kept telling the kids as they started to unpack again.
So why was Caitlin crying as he showed her their new living room with the sweeping views of big bad Mt. Greylock and the Hoosic River? Why was he lying to her when he said, “Everything is going to be all right, my queen, light of my life”?
Maybe because he knew it wasn’t true, and probably, so did she. He and his family were going to be murdered one day, maybe in this very house.
Unless he did something dramatic to stop it. And fast. But what could that be? How could he stop the Mafia from coming after him?
How could you kill the mob?