Son of the Mob Read Online Free PDF Page B

horrified. “You mean we’re not going together?”
    â€œI promised Tommy I’d drop by his apartment before the party.” Tommy has a place in Greenwich Village, not far from NYU, although Mom keeps his room as if he never moved away. Part of her will never accept that he has.
    â€œA single boy should live with his family until he gets married,” she always says. It’s not really that she misses Tommy, because he’s home practically every day for business. She just has this fifties TV view of what a family should be. Mira married her high-school sweetheart, and Tommy and I are required to be Wally and the Beaver. This casts Anthony Luca as Ward Cleaver. The mind boggles. I could never get a handle on why this is so important to her until I first read Hamlet my junior year: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
    Alex is distraught. “Why does it have to be tonight ?”
    I shrug. “He feels bad about the Angela O’Bannon disaster, and he wants to make it up to me. I think he’s taking me out to dinner or something. We have to do that in secret or Mom thinks we’re dissing her cooking. Anyway, I figured since I’m going to be in the city for this party—”
    â€œYou decided to blow me off at the most crucial moment of our love lives,” he finishes.
    â€œWe don’t have love lives,” I remind him. “Don’t worry, I’ll be right by your side for every humiliating strikeout. Just try to hold off on embarrassing yourself until I get there, okay?”
    No one in my father’s business pays for parking. Ever. They just leave their cars any old place—expired meters, school crossings, next to hydrants. They get piles of tickets, and they don’t pay those either. Tommy is proud of his. It’s like the organized-crime version of collecting stamps— Hey, I’ll trade you an expired meter in Brooklyn for a Port Authority bus-loading violation.
    The amazing thing is I can’t ever remember anybody getting in trouble for it. It’s hard to explain, but look at it this way. When normal, law-abiding Joe Shmoe does something illegal, he gets caught. But people who live entire lives outside the law are somehow immune, as if the criminal code doesn’t even apply to them. How could you get tripped up by something that’s as alien and irrelevant to you as the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead?
    Moral of the story: If you’re considering breaking a law, break all of them.
    Great lesson, huh? Mobsters, like Charles Barkley, are not role models.
    Since I’m a civilian, I aim the Mazda straight for the garage. Thirty bucks for the privilege of parking under Tommy’s high-rise. Expensive, sure, but it seems appropriate for the only Luca who paid for his car using actual money.
    Tommy’s astronomical rent leases a smallish one-bedroom apartment on the twenty-third floor of a luxury doorman building. In the elevator I’m hoping he doesn’t have anything too fancy planned. I’m wearing jeans and a short-sleeved button-down shirt. It’s late September, and the days are still hitting seventy-plus.
    I ring the bell of suite 23B.
    â€œHang on,” calls a voice. Definitely not Tommy’s.
    How do I describe the individual who answers the door? Not stunning exactly, but hot. You know how supermodels are gorgeous, but there’s an unnatural perfection to them? Well, this girl is about as good-looking as you can get and still be a real person. She’s a little younger than Tommy—early twenties, I’d guess. She’s dressed casually, but her sexiness packs an atmospheric wallop like walking from air-conditioning into a hundred-degree day. Her sweater almost but not quite reaches the waistline of her low-rise jeans, revealing infinity sit-ups’ worth of rock-hard abs. Words fail me, except these two: Oh, my.
    She holds out her hand. “I’m Cece. You must