Sempre (Sempre 1)

Halftime began as he finished fixing the boy’s wound, and Carmine ran over. “Dad! You came!”

Intense guilt hit him. “I did.”

Carmine threw his arm around the boy’s shoulder. “This is my best friend, Nicholas.”

Those words caught Vincent off guard. Carmine’s teachers all reported the same thing—he was closed off and shut down, so much so that it was as if he weren’t there.

Vincent’s pager went off as he stood there, the moment lost in that split second as the beeps rang out. The sparkle in Carmine’s eye dissipated, the child Vincent had grown accustomed to returning without a single word spoken.

But all hope was not lost, Vincent realized, because Carmine had someone. Someone he could be Carmine around—the young, innocent boy, haunted by demons others couldn’t see.

After their fallout, he watched his son spiral out of control. He was walking down the one path Vincent wanted him to stay far away from—the path leading straight to Chicago. But then she happened. The girl who had never been able to call her life her own taught a boy who had the world at his fingertips exactly what it meant to live. He wasn’t alone anymore.

Nicholas, however, was.

Vincent never forgot the joke he had told him that first day, because Nicholas was a lot like the invisible man. Drifting his way through life, unnoticed by most. Vincent saw him, though, even if he couldn’t fix him. And as he stood on that pier under the cloak of darkness, he wished he would have done something more to help.

He gazed down at the water, fixated on the spot where Nicholas’s body had disappeared moments before, and felt nothing but disgust. He had watched the boy grow up and had now sent him to a watery tomb like many of his adversaries.

“Oggi uccidiamo, domani moriremo,” he said, his gloved hand making the sign of the cross. Today we kill, tomorrow we die.

Vincent headed to his car hidden in the trees, and he drove away from Aurora Lake without looking back. He had already cleaned up the house, having hosed down the driveway and redistributed the gravel to hide all signs of the incident, but he had bigger issues he needed to deal with.

* * *

As soon as Vincent made it home, he slipped inside the room under the stairs and headed down into the basement. The place was cleaned out, the crates relocated elsewhere, so he had no problem navigating the room. He reached the large bookcase along the back and opened a metal electrical box on the wall beside it. He slid a section of panel down, revealing a small keypad, and punched in the numbers 62373.

There was a loud click. He slid the panel up, closing the electrical box as the bookshelf shifted a few inches. The door led into a safe room, or what his youngest referred to as the dungeon. The room, not much larger than a prison cell, had steel reinforced walls layered with bulletproof Kevlar.

It was the kind of room few men went into and even fewer came back out of alive.

He flicked a switch along the side, and fluorescent lights lit up the small space. He squinted and blocked out the blinding glare with his hand. Groans rang out from the corner where Johnny lay shackled to a table on the concrete floor.

“Vincent.” The voice was barely audible. “Help me.”

“I will,” Vincent said, “but first you’re going to help me.”

“I can’t move. I can’t feel my legs.”

“I know. The bullet hit your spinal cord.”

“A bullet? I’m paralyzed! Oh God, my legs!”

Vincent sighed with annoyance. “Toughen up.”

“What happened?” Johnny struggled to move. “My fucking legs!”

“What happened is I got a call that someone was at my house, so I came home to investigate and found my son unconscious, his girlfriend missing, an innocent kid dead in my front yard, and you injured. You, at the scene of an attack on my family. So how about you tell me what happened.”

“I, uh, I don’t know . . . I got shot, and I don’t know how or who . . .”

Vincent said, leaning against the table and crossing his arms over his chest. “I understand how this life is. We get drawn into things that get out of control, but it’s not too late to fix it. I need you to tell me what Nunzio wants with the girl.”

“I can’t!”

Vincent could sense his panic and fought to keep his expression calm so as not to alarm him further. “You have to be in pain, and you need your wound cleaned before infection takes hold. It’s your only option.”

“I can’t tell you anything,” he said. “I don’t know anything.”