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“Just one pair, Lucci. One pair. Does it look like I’m playing with your ass?”

In the Foot Locker at the Vegas mall, Salvatore Luciano Gabrini, Junior, called Lucky by most people that knew him, and Lucci by his father, wanted two pairs of Jordans rather than the one pair his father had promised him.

“But I can’t decide, Daddy.” Lucky had frustration in his voice as his eyes kept darting from a red pair to a black pair. “I don’t know which one to pick.”

“You’d better figure it out right quick and in a hurry,” his father said snappishly, “or you won’t get either one.”

“But it’s hard.”

“Hard? If you don’t get away from me! What you know about hard? Life is hard. This shit is nothing.”

While his father was talking, a beautiful teenage girl with deep-dark-chocolate skin and a perfect figure-eight body brushed past Lucky and glanced back at him with a smile. Lucky forgot those shoes and followed her every movement with his large, admiring eyes.

When Lucky returned his attention once again to the tennis shoes, his father was shaking his head at his biracial son. “That’s your problem. You know that’s your problem, right? Can’t focus on anything but girls.”

“Boss!”

Sal Gabrini, Lucky’s father and the head of the Gabrini Crime Family syndicate, always felt antsy when he heard sudden loud voices around him.

His bodyguard, who was always nearby even if unseen most of the time, felt the same way.

Even though they both knew the voice, they turned around quickly just in case.

Robby Yale, Sal’s second-in-command, was standing further back from Sal and waved him over. It was to be a conversation Robby didn’t want Lucky to hear.

“I need my own money,” Lucky said as he lifted one shoe and then the other one as if he were weighing them. “That’s what I need. My own dough.”

“Then get your ass a job,” said Sal as he began walking away. “Get off of the football team and get off of the baseball team and quit all those other extraterrestrial activities you’re engaged in and get your ass a job.”

Lucky smiled. “It’s extracurricular, Daddy.”

“What ever ,” Sal said, already distracted, as he walked over to Robby. The bodyguard knew to stay with Sal’s son. “What we got?”

“Big Dan’s in town, Boss.”

“So when is that news? He owns a club here. He’s always in town.”

“But that ain’t all. Guess who he’s gonna meet with?”

“Who?”

“June Consalvo.”

This got Sal’s attention. “What he wanna meet up with Junnie Consalvo for?”

“Word on the street is that June’s in the running too, and that it can go either way: you or Consalvo.

Smart money’s saying it’s Consalvo because Big Dan knows he’ll have more power if he merge with Junnie instead of you.

He’ll be the boss if he merges with Junnie.

You’ll remain the boss if he merges with you. ”

Putting some second rate like Junnie Consalvo in the same conversation with Sal was insulting to him. And besides that, Danny was the one begging to merge. “If that’s who he wants, then let him have him. What you want me to do about it?”

“Meet with him ahead of his meeting with Consalvo. Hear him out. You’re the one he really wants, but he feels as if you’ve got him twisting in the wind. He feels like you’re stringing him along.”

Sal wasn’t at all sure if he even wanted the merger, but he knew it would gain him even more power than he already had. More power or more problems, one of the two. Big Dan wasn’t as big as Sal, not by a long shot, but he was big. “Set up a meeting.”

“It’s set. I called his underboss, who prefers to merge with us rather than Junnie, and he got his boss to meet with you first. He’s at the club now, which will keep the meeting private, but we have to hurry because Consalvo’s already on his plane and on his way to Vegas for their meeting.

I pulled a group together and we’re ready to roll. That is if you are too, Boss.”

“What I look like going to him? Why can’t his fat ass come to me like everybody else?”

“Because his ass is fat and that arthritis got him bad, Boss. Real bad today especially. He can barely move.”

Sal leaned his head back. “You know this is my day off, Robby. This is my day with my son. I’m just getting out of the doghouse with Gemma and you wanna put me right back in it?

If she finds out I took a meeting today instead of giving Lucci one hundred percent of my time, I won’t hear the last of it. ”

“I know that. You know I know that, Boss. But this is the window of opportunity. This is what we got. Either we meet with Big Dan now, or risk losing out to Junnie Consalvo. Because if the two of them merge, they still won’t be as big as you, but down the road they could give us a serious run for our money.

They could give us problems we don’t need.

Besides, the very thought of you losing out to Junnie is crazy to me. ”

Sal nodded. “To me too,” he said as if that one line settled it for him. He looked back at his son. “We gotta go, Lucci,” he said, and began heading towards the exit.

“But you haven’t purchased either one!” Lucky said anxiously.

“That’s what you get for volunteering to play my chaperone. Getting your mother to buy into that I can keep an eye on Daddy bullshit. Bring your chaperoning ass on!”

Lucky frustratingly put both pairs of shoes down and he and the bodyguard hurried behind his father just as Robby was doing. It was never a question of doing what Sal said or not doing it, it was doing what he said or die. Lucky moved even faster.

Outside, the dead of winter hit them all like sledgehammers.

Sal wrapped his long coat around him and waited for Lucky to catch up to him.

Two big Ford Expeditions were waiting at the entrance into the mall and Sal put his son inside the first SUV, and then he and Robby got in behind him.

The bodyguard got in the second SUV with the rest of Sal’s capos, and then both SUVs sped away.