Sempre (Sempre 1)

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.”

“You’re lying,” Vincent said. “You wouldn’t go along with something unless you knew why. Where did he take her?”

“You have to believe me, Vincent. I can’t tell you!”

“You can tell me, you just won’t! There’s a difference, and that difference is as vast as life and death.”

“Please!”

He shook his head. “Don’t beg! It’s unbecoming of you.”

“You have to understand—”

“No, you have to understand. They’ve taken something important from me, and I’m not going to stop until I find her. If you want even the slightest chance of making it out of this room alive, you’ll tell me what I need to know.”

“If I tell you anything, they’ll kill me.”

“If you don’t tell me, I’ll kill you,” he said. “And I won’t take mercy on you. Every minute she’s out there, you’re going to be right here, and I’m not going to end your suffering until she’s back where she belongs.”

* * *

The tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Carmine had heard the phrase so many times, but it wasn’t until that moment, sitting in that immaculately clean car and fighting back nausea at the stench of fresh leather, that he finally understood what it meant. It was stifling, the hostility rolling from the man beside him too much to take.

Carmine had a fractured rib, a broken nose, and a mildly sprained wrist on top of the concussion. Vincent had called in a favor, and one of his colleagues agreed to see him off the record. Despite Carmine’s insistence he didn’t need any doctors, Vincent demanded he go, and when Vincent DeMarco demanded something, even Carmine couldn’t say no. So when Corrado arrived in town, the two of them had set out for a clinic while his father stayed back to deal with the devastation.

“You’re not gonna kill that doctor I saw, are you?” Carmine asked, the heavy dose of morphine in his system clouding his thoughts.

Corrado said nothing, and Carmine wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad.

“I don’t think you should,” he said. “He’s just a doctor.”