A Mob Boss Christmas: The Pregnancy (12 page)

He saw her as he ate.
 
And he did find her attractive in her pale gray pantsuit, although the
older woman with her was even more attractive.
 
But that was as far as it went with Reno.
 
He was exhausted, after another crazy day of
putting out fires around the casino, and all he wanted to do was eat, relax
with his family, and then get back to work.

“Who on earth are you looking at?” Thelma asked her
daughter after they were seated, their drink orders taken, and the manager left
their side.
 

Cheri felt a flush of embarrassment.
 
She had not realized just how often she was
glancing over at Reno.
 
“I just noticed that
my boss was here,” she replied to her mother.

“Your boss?
 
Oh, really now?
 
Where is he?”
 
Thelma began looking around.

“He’s over there,” Cheri said with some reluctance,
nodding toward the top booth in the back of the room.
 
“He’s the white guy.”

Thelma Dallas looked at Reno, looked him up and down,
and then looked at Cheri. “Very attractive,” she said.
 
Then she smiled.
 
“Am I going to get to meet Mr. Gorgeous?”

Cheri felt a surge of jealousy when her mother put it
that way.
 
Her mother was never above
taking men away from Cheri.
 
She, in
fact, had done so even when Cheri was in high school.
 
“He’s married mother,” she said.

“I’m sure he is.
 
Those are the best kind.
 
No
commitments.
 
Just
sex.”
 
Thelma said this with such
a smile that Cheri looked away in disgust.
 
Some mother, she thought.

“Who’s the woman with him?” Thelma asked.
 
“Is that his wife?”

Don’t even
mention that witch
, Cheri thought to
herself
.
 
“Yes,” she said out loud.
 
“That’s his wife, and his son.”

Thelma nodded, looked Trina up and down.
 
“Not bad,” she said.
 
“But he could do better.”
 
She looked at her daughter.
 
“Does this wife deserve a man like him?”

“Of course not,” Cheri said as if that went without
saying.

“But of course you feel that you, on the other hand,
deserve him,” Thelma said with a smile.
 
“Am I correct?”

Cheri thought about that comment.
 
The fact that she was dating the owner of the
PaLargio would impress her
mother,
she was willing to
bet it would.
 
So she went with it.
 
“Of course,” she said with a sly smile.

Thelma laughed.
 
“Good girl,” she said.
 
Cheri was
now smiling too.
 
It was the closest
thing
 
to
an approval
she’d had from her mother in a long, long time.
 

“But I would love to meet him,” Thelma said.

“We’ll see,” was all that Cheri would say about
it.
 
Not because she didn’t want her
mother to meet Reno, she did.
 
But she
knew Reno would not take kindly to her just walking up to him when he was with
his family.

But when Trina stood and began heading their way,
presumably to go to the restroom, Cheri saw her opportunity.
 
She would impress her hard-to-please mother
no end if she could get her mother an audience with Reno.
 
But she knew, to her consternation, that she
had to go through Queen Katrina first to get anywhere near Reno lately.

“Hey, Trina!”
Cheri decided
to politely yell as Trina walked near their table.
 

Trina looked her way.
 
Cheri waved her over.
 
Although
Trina was feeling a little queasy, and needed to get to the restroom, she went
over just the same.

“I want you to meet my mother, Thelma Dallas,” Cheri
said.

“Oh, Miss Dallas,” Trina said, shaking her hand.
 
“Nice to meet you.”

“This is Katrina Gabrini, Mother.
 
The owner’s wife.”

“Yes, you told me,” the mother said bluntly.
 
“Nice to meet you, too, Mrs. Gabrini,” she
said to Trina.

“I take it you’re not from Vegas?” Trina asked.

“Oh, no,” Thelma said as if she had just been asked
if she was from prison or the hood or some other equally less gratifying
place.
 
“I have a country estate in New
Hampshire, although I consider myself a citizen of the world.”

“She’s in town for tonight only,” Cheri
explained.
 
“She’ll be off for Malta
tomorrow.”

“The Mediterranean,” Trina said.
 
“How romantic.”

“Romance or death,” Thelma said with a laugh.

“Well,” Trina said, finding something off about the woman,
“I’m glad I got a chance to meet you.”

“I was wondering, Trina,” Cheri said cautiously, “
if
Mother could possibly meet Reno.”

As Cheri expected, Trina was hesitant.
 
“He’s having dinner,” she said.
 
She knew Cheri wouldn’t understand that.
 
She was always finding ways to disturb Reno.

“No, I fully appreciate that,” Cheri said.
 
“But this is my mother.
 
Surely he could take a minute of his time to
meet the mother of his general manager.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen tonight,” Trina
said firmly.
 
“I want him to have his
dinner in peace.
 
In the morning, before
she leaves, she’s welcome to go by his office and say hello then.
 
But not tonight.”

Cheri could barely suppress her anger.
 
The nerve of this chick, she thought.
 
But Cheri knew how to keep it under
wraps.
 
“Tomorrow then,” she said with a
tight smile.

“Have a nice evening, Mrs. Dallas,” Trina said.

“You, too, hon,” Thelma replied, and Trina continued
her trek to the bathroom.

“That’s a tough broad,” Thelma said.
 
“But I like her.”

Cheri looked at her.
 
“You like her?
 
What’s there to
like?”

“She’s tough.
 
She looks out for her man.
 
Yes, I
like that.”

“She’s so ghetto, what are you talking about?
 
Like how would
introducing
you to him be disturbing him?”

“Because she knows the game.
 
She knows every one of you bitches.
 
You want to get in her man’s pants and I’m
sure every pretty girl around this place wants in, too.
 
She knows what she’s doing.”

But Cheri begged to differ, as Thelma knew she
would.
 
Cheri wouldn’t understand how a
woman was supposed to treat a man if her freedom depended on it.
 
Men were just objects of sex to Cheri, and
rungs on that ladder to success.
 
And
Thelma should know, she thought as she looked at her daughter, who was, once
again, staring at Reno.
 
Then she shook
her head.
 
She taught her daughter well,
she thought sadly.

A week before Christmas and the annual Christmas
party was being held at the PaLargio.
 
All employees were invited to come in shifts and most of them came.
 
Reno, they knew, knew how to throw a party.
 

The party was held in the grand ballroom and Reno
stood back and enjoyed the view.
 
All of
their friends were there, and many of the senior management staff, too.
 
Even some of the headlining lounge acts with
weekly shows at the PaLargio made the commitment to come.
 
The band was live - playing solid Christmas
tunes, the food was good, and Trina, it seemed to Reno, was radiant.
 

She wore an ocean-blue sequined dress that stuck to
her perfectly curved body like a second skin, and every man in the room kept
eyeing that smoking body of hers.
 
Reno
saw those roving eyes himself.
 
And he
delighted in it.
 
This was his woman, but
he loved that others saw at least the physical part of what he saw.
 
This woman, this African Queen, was soon to
become the mother of his child.
 
The
first child Reno himself would have the pleasure of rearing.
 
He could not have been a happier man.

Not that he wasn’t still worried.
 
He was.
 
He had to know where Trina was every moment of the day or he suddenly
felt uneasy.
 
And it was tricky, too,
because Trina hated for him do any of that hovering, or any of that mother hen
behavior she despised.
 
So he had to be
crafty.
 
Everywhere she went, he had six
different guys following her, all rotating an incredibly complicated security
scheme worked out by Reno himself.
 
Trina
was too smart for one or even two guys to get away with tailing her, and Reno
knew it.
 
So when his security chief
mentioned some routine tail, Reno balked.
 
They might not think they were tailing somebody as special as, say, the
president’s wife or the queen of England, but Reno begged to differ.
 
They were tailing Mrs. Gabrini, he made clear
to them.
 
The First Lady and the Queen
combined had nothing on her.
 

Besides, Trina made James Bond look like a second rate
spy.
 
She knew how to sniff out a tail a
mile away.
 
But with
six guys on her trail, no.
 
Even
she wouldn’t be the wiser.

“Nice party, Reno,” Dirty said as he walked
over.
 
Reno wore a white tux.
 
Dirty wore a black one.
 

“Yeah, it is nice,” Reno said as he sipped more wine
and watched Jimmy Mack whisper one of his undoubtedly lame jokes in the ear of
one of his friends, the guy they called Mikey.
 
Reno sometimes wondered about that boy’s sexual orientation.
 
He didn’t seem interested in females at
all.
 
And he was always all up in Mikey’s
pale face, like that was his woman.
 
Even
Lee had mentioned the same thing.
 
But
Trina told him to stop worrying.
 
Jimmy
was a great kid with a good heart.
 
In
the end that was all that mattered.
 

 
“So Trina
didn’t have the abortion after all,” Dirty said.

Reno’s jaw tightened.
 
If he mentioned that abortion again!
 
Every time they talked lately, he mentioned that abortion.
 
“No,
Dirty
, she
didn’t go through with any abortion, okay?
 
So you need to let it go.”

“Hey, whatta you mean?
 
I was just stating a fact, Reno.
 
I mean, Fran told me what the deal was.”

“Yeah,” Reno said as he looked across the room and
saw his sister running her mouth with a group of ladies Reno didn’t even
know.
 
“She’s always telling everybody’s
business but her own.”

“I’m just repeating what she told me,” Dirty said
again.
 
“You wanna be mad at somebody be
mad at her.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Reno said, looking around the room.

“But so . . .
 
does that mean that you’re like, that you’re sure then?”

Reno looked at Dirty.
 
“Am I sure?
 
Sure about what?”

“The baby.”

Reno hesitated.
 
No this asshole wasn’t going there.
 
“What are you talking about,
Dirty
?”

“I’m talking about the baby.
 
And why Trina would want to abort it in the
first place.
 
I’m just asking if you’re
sure the baby Tree is carrying is yours.”

As soon as
Dirty
said those
words Reno lifted his fist and slammed it into the side of Dirty’s face,
causing Dirty to fall backwards and flip over a nearby table.
 
Everybody in the room looked their way,
including Trina, whose heart began to pound.
 
The live band stopped playing.
 
Fran hurried to her husband’s side.

“What happened?” she asked as she fell on her knees
beside Dirty.
 
“Richie, what happened?”

Dirty began to get up.
 
Fran tried to help him but he snatched away
from her grasp.

“What happened, Richie?” she asked again.

“I slipped, nothing happened,” Dirty said as he stood
up, although the blood trickling out of his nose indicated something slightly
more contact-like than a slip.
 
Fran saw
it too.

“But you’re bleeding,” she said.

“Fuck it,” Dirty said.

“But what happened?”

“I said fuck it, Fran,” Dirty said to his wife and
then smiled at the staring guests.
 
“I
need a drink.
 
Where’s that bartender
anyway?”
 
Dirty said
this as he began staggering for the bar, in search of a place to hide.
 
He didn’t even look again at Reno.