Free The Burning Day by Timothy C. Phillips

head.
    “No. Go get some coffee or a drink somewhere. Leave Mr. Longville and I to talk alone. He is an old friend, after all.”
    The room was silent for a few moments as Don Ganato waited for his henchmen to get lost.
    “Please, Mr. Longville, sit down.”
    I sat down in a leather upholstered chair and Ganato seated himself across from me.
    “If this is about me talking to Longshot—”
    Don Ganato gave me a strange look, as if I had brought up something embarrassing at a dinner party.
    “I assure you I would not waste my time addressing such trivial matters, Mr. Longville. Your private conversations do not concern me.”
    Okay, I thought, that leaves just one thing.
    “You are seeing my niece, Beatrice.” It was a statement, quietly given, with just the faintest suggestion of a question trailing behind it. There it was at last, out in the open. Ganato let it hang in the air.
    “I am.” I started to ask if there was a problem with that, but I stopped myself. I knew very well that if Don Ganato had a problem with that, I was about to know all about it.
    “Beatrice is very dear to me, Mr. Longville,” Don Ganato said, in a quiet voice, his eyes growing distant. “You see, when my sister died she left her children in my care. She had only two, Anthony—Little Tony they called him—and Beatrice. Now, Anthony is dead, and Beatrice is all that I have left.”
    I nodded, but I didn’t know where he was going with his story. I figured he was going to tell me to stay the hell away from his niece, or get a couple of his mooks in there with a blow torch, I didn’t know what, but something in his tone was off. He went on.
    “I am a man who has always taken care of his own. In the old days, this was a simple matter: an eye for an eye. So perhaps now, I am an anachronism. I am a man of principle. I am a man of values. I do not believe in unnecessary violence. But the blood of my family is mine to avenge.”
    I knew what he was getting at; I knew he wasn’t finished.
      “Now, the world is turned on its ear. You know the details, I am sure. Longshot Lonnie and his boys are coming for us. Coming for me, Mr. Longville. Little Tony, Angelo, Rocco, Geppetto, so many others, all dead already. So, here it is. If anything should happen to me . . . I would prefer if Beatrice lived a life that was closer to normal than the one I have chosen. I would ask you to protect her, Mr. Longville, if you can.” I saw a tear in the man’s eye, and for some reason I tried to look away, and not let him know I had seen it.
    Don Ganato nodded solemnly at his own words. He was a criminal, and had always been one, and by choice. I didn’t pity him his fate, because as far as I was concerned, he’d gone out of his way, for a very long time now, to bring it down upon himself. We both knew what was coming, and that the odds against him were pretty heavy. So, for a minute, looking at him there, he was just a man—one that was pretty sure he was going to die. So I gave him what I could, which was: “I’ll take care of Beatrice, Mr. Ganato. That’s something that you don’t have to worry about.”
    He was quiet for a long moment, and then he said, “I never doubted that. Then, Mr. Longville . . . Roland . . . if you will allow me, I leave her in your care.”
    I nodded and turned and left him there. And that was the last time we ever saw one another.  
    It had been a long time since I had seen Don Ganato, and under some very different circumstances. His fatalistic attitude put a weird thought in my head, one that I decided to act on. So I drove across town, leaving the cushy environs of Mountainbrook behind me, and passed into the North Side, to markedly less opulent homes. I was going to see the most dangerous man in Birmingham, Longshot Lonnie O’Malley.

 
    Chapter 13
     
    I knew Longshot Lonnie wouldn’t shoot me. He owed me, and he was the kind of guy who, twisted and psychopathic as he might be, lived by a code. You see, long ago