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away.”
    â€œSo what are we supposed to do if we don’t have it?”
    Sal shrugged.
    Frank Fortunato simmered as his eyes drifted to the hockey game playing quietly on the TV hanging in the back room of the grimy office they worked out of. The Rangers were down by three in the second. Star goalie Glenn Bozlinski was doing his best impression of a sieve. Like he had been told to do. Good. Frank would make a killing on that game. At least something good would come of Glenn’s raging gambling addiction.
    But still, the guy with the other other thing was away.
    Sal’s shrug was not the answer Frank was hoping for. He was looking for a nod. Or a wink. Some definitively positive movement or grunt that indicated the affirmative. Some tic or hand motion that meant “Don’t worry about it. I’ll go to Plan B.” Instead he got the shrug. To an outsider, that might mean “Gee, Boss, I don’t know what to do. What do you think?” But to Frank and Sal and anyone else affiliated with This Thing of Theirs, it meant someone was about to get some bad news. News whose headline would probably read something like You’re dead . There was no other way around these things. If the guy with the thing had come through, then maybe something could have been worked out. At the place. By the guy with the other other thing. Frank had given very specific instructions that the thing had to be at the place. And it wasn’t.
    â€œYou want me to take care of it, Frank?”
    â€œNo, I’ll do it myself.”
    Sal gulped. Frank could see his associate’s simple mind spinning. This was big. Frank Fortunato hadn’t lifted a finger in the last twenty years unless it was to pick a piece of stray lint off his brand-new suit. He had people for the real dirty work.
    Of course, Frank had put his time in early on. He didn’t get to the top of the Maraschino crime family by being lazy. Legs had been broken. Judges had been bribed. Piles and piles of money had been stolen. A couple of dirtbags had been sent to a better place, but that was part of the game. Frank knew very well that he could have been one of those dirtbags had he made one misstep. But he hadn’t. He was too smart. He quickly rose to the top of the heap and never looked back. There was no longer any mention of his former self, the working thug. No, Frank Fortunato had reinvented himself to become more than simply the phony head of the Corona Sanitation Transportation Corporation. He was the head of one of the most powerful crime families in New York.
    One of the most powerful. That distinction never sat well with him.
    With so many layers of secrecy among the Mafiosi, it was difficult to quantify for the purpose of rank exactly which was the most powerful crime family in New York City. It was pretty reasonable to presume there were five very powerful crime families along with assorted minor wannabes. So after much debate and feather-ruffling it was decided among the top five bosses that they, along with the reporters they paid off, would refer to themselves individually as “one of the most powerful.” The hope was that this way maybe they wouldn’t feel the need to shoot each other over a matter of pride. What they also agreed on (at least four out of the five) was that Frank could not change the name of his crime family.
    It had been Maraschino for almost a hundred years and the general consensus had been that to change the name would be not only an undignified breach of Mafia etiquette but possibly confusing to lower-tier mobsters and mainstream media, perhaps even leading some people to believe that an entirely new gang had become One of the Most Powerful Crime Families and encouraging the idea that there was potential for competition. There wasn’t. So why make trouble?
    After grudgingly accepting their decision, Frank came up with a new plan. He set out to make his own name bigger than the family name. He