TOMMY GABRINI 2: A PLACE IN HIS HEART Page 13

  As her moans increased and her body began to stretch to that wonderful feel of his sex, however, he closed his eyes and kept it steady. He wanted to keep it easy. He stroked her, and fondled her breasts, and massaged her deep within her cunt, fucking her long and hard and easy. And instead of climaxing them, it relaxed both of them. Grace couldn’t stop stretching her body, and moaning even more, as he fucked her. It was so relaxing, in fact, that both of them eventually drifted off as if they had no cares in this world. They drifted off with the warmth of his dick lodged deep inside of her. And slept the sleep of the truly exhausted.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A few days later and Grace found herself walking into the Ekland shooting range with Tommy at her side. It was a gun range primarily frequented by police officers, former and current, and everybody in the building seemed to know Tommy from his own days on the force.

  “Captain Gabrini, hey!”

  “How are you, Captain Gabrini?”

  “Good to see you again, Cap.”

  “Tommy, long time no see,” the man Tommy had selected to train Grace said as he walked up to them. He was a short Italian, well built, and he and Tommy shook hands.

  “How’ve you been, Coop?” Tommy asked him.

  “I’ve been great. Still above ground, that’s saying something.”

  Tommy laughed. “I know you’re right.”

  “And this must be the little lady you told me about.”

  Tommy put his hand on the small of Grace’s back. “Yes, this is Grace McKinsey. My fiancée.”

  “Fiancée? Well,” Coop said as he extended his hand. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

  “And this is Coop, babe,” Tommy said. “One of my all-time cut partners.”

  “Yeah, we messed up a few joints in our day, Tommy, didn’t we?” They both laughed.

  “Nice to meet you, Coop,” Grace said with a smile of her own.

  Coop looked at Tommy. “Sure you deserve a nice, beautiful lady like this?”

  “Hell no,” Tommy said in that laidback way of his that even men loved.

  “Well, we’d better get started,” Coop said. “Come with me, please ma’am.”

  Grace began walking side by side with Coop. Tommy followed behind them.

  “So you wanna learn how to shoot a firearm?” Coop asked her.

  “Something small and simple, yes, sir.”

  “Small and simple? Why small and simple?”

  “Because I don’t want to kill anybody,” she said, and Coop stopped walking, causing Grace and Tommy to stop too.

  “So you’re saying to me,” Coop said, “that if some motherfucker break into your house, pull a gun out on you, you don’t wanna kill his ass?”

  Grace smiled. “What I mean is, I would rather debilitate him long enough so that I can get away.”

  “Even though he may still be able to shoot you down while you’re getting away?”

  Grace looked to Tommy.

  “A twenty-two, Coop,” Tommy said.

  “That’s it? That’s all? You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” Tommy said. It was bad enough that Grace had to even be there. He certainly didn’t want her growing any appetite for violence, or violent responses. He had enough for both of them.

  And it worked out for her. Coop turned out to be an excellent trainer, certainly far more patient than Tommy knew he would have been, and Grace was getting the hang of it well. Tommy stayed back, walking the plank, which was a long corridor inside the shooting range. He fielded phone call after phone call as he walked, handling business even at the gun range.

  While Coop went to answer a phone call of his own, Grace continued to practice. She was terrible, only occasionally, maybe even accidentally, hitting her target, when someone tapped her on the shoulder. Thinking it was Coop, or maybe Tommy, she turned with a smile on her face.

  “I’ll get better,” she said as she turned. Until she realized it wasn’t Coop or Tommy. It was, however, a Gabrini. An older, attractive man who looked like Sal, but she could see some Tommy in him too. She removed her headset.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hello there. I’m Ben Gabrini.” He extended his hand.

  “Grace McKinsey,” she said as they shook. “Nice to meet you.”

  “I understand you came with my son.”

  “I did, yes. So you’re Tommy’s father?”

  “I am. And you’re one of his lady friends, I take it.”

  “I’m his fiancée actually.”

  There was a definite change in expression in the man. “His fiancée?”

  “Yes, sir.” She should have been surprised that Tommy never told his own father about their engagement, but she wasn’t surprised at all. Tommy’s relationship with his father was very strained. Almost nonexistent.

  In fact, when Tommy looked over and saw his father talking to Grace, he at first couldn’t believe it. Then his heart pounded against his chest.

  “Let me call you back,” he said into his cell phone, and began moving without waiting for an answer. He killed the call as he headed for Grace. Benny Gabrini, the chief of the Seattle police department, might have been a beloved man at Ekland and around the entire city. But he was despised by Tommy.

  When he made it up to his father, Benny smiled that charming smile of his. He was a politician first and last, with ambitions of one day becoming governor of the state. “There he is,” he said to his son as if they were close like that.

  “What do you want?” Tommy asked him. Grace always knew there was a serious rift between Tommy and his father. She had hoped that it would mend. But the way Tommy looked right now made that highly unlikely. Coop also returned, and was just as surprised as Tommy to see Chief Gabrini there.

  “I was introducing myself,” Benny said. “This girl here is running around claiming to be your fiancée.”

  Grace looked at Coop, who shook his head as if he knew how nasty Benny Gabrini could be too. Then she looked at her future father-in-law. “I’m claiming to be his fiancée?” she asked. “Is that what you just said?”

  “Is there something wrong with your hearing?” the father asked her, still smiling. “Of course that’s what I said. I’m stunned you’re his fiancée. That’s my point.” He looked at Tommy and had the nerve to smile even grander. “Come on son,” he said. “Her? You’re going to marry her? You can do better than that!”

  As soon as those words dripped from his tongue, Tommy took his fist and decked his own father. Grace looked on in horror, stunned that Tommy would have done such a thing, and Coop immediately pulled Tommy back.

  Tommy jerked away from him, even as others assisted his father off of the floor. Tommy reached his hand out to Grace. “Let’s go,” he said to her.

  Grace wanted to remind Tommy that she wasn’t finished with her lessons yet, but she saw that look in his eyes. And it wasn’t a look of anger, or even of hate. It was a look of great sadness. There were old, deep-seated issues Tommy had with his father and Grace wasn’t about to minimize that pain.

  Without voicing a word of complaint, she took his hand, and left.

  When they got into his car, however, and he began driving away, she turned to him. “What was that all about?” she asked him.

  “I don’t want him around you,” Tommy said. “He doesn’t deserve it.”

  “Why doesn’t he?” she asked, but Tommy, like every time the topic of his father ever came up, changed it.

  “I’ll have Coop set up some additional days to meet with you early next week,” he said. “You’ll get your lessons.”

  “He’s going to be my father-in-law, Tommy. Even Sal took Gemma to meet him.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not Sal,” Tommy said. “My old man is a sadistic bastard who will not be tainting you.”

  Grace looked at him. He said it with such finality. Then she looked straight, at the road ahead of them. Denial never worked. But Tommy, she knew, had to learn that for himself.

  Two weeks later and h
e was in his office, going over stat sheets, when Sal rushed in. “You need to watch this,” he said to him.

  Tommy didn’t look up at his baby brother. He was too engrossed in the work before him. “I need to watch what?” he asked.

  Sal hurried over to Tommy’s desk and pressed a button. The doors to a cabinet high up on the wall opened and a flat screen TV was revealed. He clicked another button that turned on the TV, and then he pressed the channel he wanted to see. A local news channel. He pointed. “This,” he said to his brother. “A reporter friend of mine gave me the heads up that this was about to air. You need to see this.”

  Tommy looked at Sal and then looked at the television he had all of a sudden turned on. A black man seemingly in his thirties, a man he had never seen before, was speaking to a local reporter.

  “I didn’t want to do it,” he said. “I really didn’t.”

  Tommy frowned. “What is this?” he asked, but Sal shushed him.

  The man continued. “But when I saw her a few days ago on your newscast, and you were saying how she was turning Trammel around, and she was giving back to the poor in the community, and how wonderful she was, I knew I had to speak up.”

  “So you saw our report on Grace McKinsey,” the reporter asked, “and how she, as a young executive, was attempting to do great things at Trammel?”

  “Right.”

  “But you’re now saying we had it all wrong?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” the man said. Sal glanced at Tommy. Tommy was staring at the man.

  “We were college friends, Grace and I,” he said, “and everything was always cool between us.”

  “You were her lover?”

  “No. Nothing like that. We were just friends. And as friends we went out partying a lot. Well, not a lot, but we partied like most college kids did. But on this particular night we got pretty well stoned. Me and her both. Grace had a new car her daddy had given to her and she wouldn’t let me drive it. Not that I was sober, I wasn’t. But I wasn’t as stoned as she was. But she still insisting on driving the car. And that’s when things went really wrong and Grace crashed into this Van. We both were thrown from the car and passed out, and Grace ended up in a coma. We were nearly killed. But the pregnant lady in the Van, that innocent lady, was killed.” Sal again looked at Tommy. But Tommy still stared at that man on that TV screen as if he couldn’t look away from him.

  “It was horrific,” the young man continued. “But when I woke up, Grace’s father and this white man was at my bedside. They paid me to say that Grace wasn’t the driver of the car, but that some other guy was. They paid me to say that this mystery guy had fled the scene and I only knew his nickname, not his real name. They paid me thousands of dollars to say that. Since the DA couldn’t prove I was lying, and they couldn’t find this other guy, and since this white guy had connections in very high places, nobody was ever arrested for that lady’s death. Grace came out of her coma remembering zero about that night. But later, when I told her what her father and that white man had paid me to say, she didn’t do anything about it. She didn’t try to reach out to the family of that woman, she didn’t try to go to the DA and set the record straight. But she was the driver of that car that night, and she knows she was. She was the real murderer.”

  Tommy’s heart dropped through his shoe. Sal even had to sit down on the desk. “What the fuck,” he said, and looked at his brother again.

  This time Tommy did look away from that TV screen, and returned his stare.

  While the story was still breaking, Grace was in her office meeting with Nayla. Nayla was still reeling from her demotion, but only now had calmed down enough, she claimed, to finally address what she considered to be a blatant betrayal.

  Grace looked across her desk at her longtime friend as soon as she used that word. “Betrayal, Nay? Seriously?”

  “Yes!” Nayla said firmly. “Absolutely! We were friends. Close friends. But you backstabbed me, Grace, I’m not going to act like that’s not what it felt like. It felt like a backstab. Like a betrayal.”

  Grace couldn’t put her hand on what exactly was going on here, but it felt strange to her. Nayla’s demotion happened weeks ago, but all of a sudden she was in Grace’s office questioning her about it? And using such incendiary language? It all felt kind of staged to Grace. Kind of forced.

  “Let me get this straight,” Grace said, to make sure she wasn’t missing something here. “You’re saying I betrayed and backstabbed you because I refuse to let you show up for work unless you do some work? Is that what you call a betrayal and a backstab?”

  “Don’t get it twisted, Grace. You know that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that my work ethic wasn’t an issue at all before you took over. Jillian never said I wasn’t doing my job.”

  Grace frowned. “But you wasn’t doing your job, Nay, whether Jillian said anything about it or not.”

  “But yet in still she never mentioned it. Wonder why? But a sister gets the gig and suddenly I’m the problem? I’m the issue? When I’m no worse than anybody else around here? But you pick on me?”

  Grace could not believe that comment. “I’m picking on you now?”

  “Yeah, you’re picking on me!”

  Grace had far too much to do already, but she couldn’t let that one slide. She stood up, walked over to a file cabinet, unlocked it, pulled out a folder, a thick one, and then walked back to her desk.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” Nayla asked her.

  “Your department’s dossier,” Grace said. She didn’t sit back down, but stood behind her desk as she opened the file.

  Nayla looked at her. “So you’ve been checking up on me, is that it?”

  “Actually this was compiled before I took over,” Grace said and looked at her. “While Jillian was in charge.”

  Grace then opened the folder. She flipped through pages to the back of the stack of pages. “In summary,” she said, looking at the page, “your department, under your leadership, had the lowest productivity ratio of any other department in this company. Your department, under your leadership, had the lowest worker satisfaction index. Your department had cost overruns every single month that you were in charge.” Grace again looked at her. “The only department to ever have month after month overruns.”

  Then Grace looked back down at the dossier. “Your workers complained that you were never there. Drivers complained that you never returned their emails or phone calls. You were cited numerous times for being disrespectful to your support staff.” Grace looked at her. “And I can go on. If it had been anybody else with a report like this, Nay, anybody else, I would have fired them without batting an eye. And they would have deserved to be fired. But I demoted you instead, and gave you a chance to redeem yourself.”

  “To redeem myself?” Nayla asked, astounded by the nerve of her former friend. “Who are you to talk about redemption? You’re the one who needs redeeming! You’re the one who got a little power and started acting like some slave master. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  Grace was done. She was sick and tired of these so-called friends treating her like some dog just because she wasn’t taking their bullshit. “I’m the CEO of Trammel,” Grace said firmly. “That’s who I am. I’m the lady, or the bitch if you prefer, who just fired you. That’s who I am.”

  Nayla stood up. “You just fired me?” she asked. “Is that what you just said? I’ll tell you what you can do with your firing. You can take your firing and stick it up your black ass, since no real man wants to get up in it anyway! They gave you a little power and it immediately went straight to your head!”

  “No, Nay. It wasn’t my head. It was my eyes. My eyes finally opened and saw you for who you really are. That’s what really went down. Now get out of my office.”

  Nayla stared at her, as if she had the option to stay, and then left Grace’s office, slamming the door nearly off of its hinges as she did.

  Grace was about to drop to her s
eat, to regroup, but within seconds her new secretary, Renee, hurried in.

  “Are you all right, Miss McKinsey?” she asked, her young eyes wide with concern.

  “Yes, Renee, I’m fine,” Grace said, although she knew she wasn’t fine at all.

  “She slammed the door and looked so angry.”

  “Yes, she was definitely angry.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Grace thought about this. Then she decided. “I want you to contact Security,” she said. “Tell them to go to Nayla Santiago’s office, allow her to get her things, and then I want them to escort her off of the premises.”

  “Escort her off?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Renee said.

  “And then contact the Human Resources Director, will you? Tell him I want him in my office ASAP.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the secretary said, and then hurried to do Grace’s bidding.

  Grace, weighed down by the burden of that emotional outburst with Nayla, plopped down in her chair.

  Fifteen minutes later and the news of Nayla’s firing, along with that car crash allegation, began spreading like wildfire around Trammel. Jared was at the reception desk on the top floor, having one of his daily gossip sessions with Carol, and he could hardly contain his glee. Although Carol couldn’t stand Grace now either, she nonetheless believed you reaped what you sowed. She wasn’t about to be happy about another person’s downfall.

  “Have you seen her?” Jared asked her.

  “Not since that newscast, no,” the receptionist said. “She hasn’t come out of her office yet.”

  Jared nodded his blonde head. “She’s in hiding,” he said as if it were a fact. “She’s too ashamed to show her face.”

  “I don’t know about all of that,” Carol said. “But I haven’t seen her.”

  “Why don’t you go in there and ask if there’s anything you can do for her,” Jared said in a coaxing voice. “And then report back to me.”