House Reckoning Read Free Page A

cross—and then he ended up crossing almost all of them.
    The first time he killed a man, it was basically the same sort of thing.
    He’d been working for Carmine for nearly three years and by that time he could no longer pretend to himself—much less his wife—that he wasn’t one of Carmine’s hoods. He drove more trucks filled with things he knew were stolen. He was part of a crew that emptied out an appliance warehouse in Danbury, Connecticut. One night, he and Jerry went with a guy to a dealership on Long Island and stole twenty brand-new Buicks off the lot because the guy had keys for all the cars. Gino always acted calm when he did these things but on the inside he was quaking. He realized after a while that he wasn’t really afraid of going to jail; he could handle jail. What terrified him was the way Maureen would be humiliated if he was arrested. And what would she tell Joe when he was old enough to wonder where his father was?
    He just sort of slipped into it. It wasn’t like he made a conscious decision to become a criminal. He told himself he didn’t have a choice—that he had to take care of his wife and kid—but the truth, if he was honest with himself, was that he’d taken the path of least resistance. He tried finding legitimate work, but after beating his head against a wall, getting rejected time and time again, it was just easier working for Carmine than to keep looking for a straight job.
    It didn’t take long before Carmine and Enzo Marciano, the underboss, started giving him more responsibility and it wasn’t hard to figure out why. A lot of the men Carmine employed weren’t all that reliable and some were just plain stupid. They drank too much. They got into fights in bars. They gambled. They ran around with women who weren’t their wives. Jerry Kennedy, he had to admit, was basically that kind of guy. Carmine appreciated the fact that if he needed Gino, all he had to do was call his house; if he called Jerry’s house, Jerry was likely to be out at the track or sleeping with a cocktail waitress he’d met in some joint.
    Carmine started to use him as a bodyguard when he felt he needed one. Gino paid attention, he didn’t lose his temper and let things get out of hand, and he didn’t run his mouth. But he suspected maybe the main reason Carmine used him was the way he looked. Gino DeMarco had a face that could back people down; he looked like a guy that would shoot you if he had to. And when he was Carmine’s bodyguard, he had to carry a gun. Carmine insisted on that—and another line got crossed.
    But there were things he wouldn’t do, like beat up a witness who saw one of Carmine’s thugs break into a jewelry store. The witness was a baker and his shop was across the street from the jewelry store, and he arrived at about four in the morning to start making his dough. When Carmine’s guy, so drunk he could barely walk, broke the jeweler’s window and grabbed a bunch of cheap stuff that was on display, the baker heard the window break. He saw Carmine’s guy stumbling back to his car and got the license plate number because the idiot had parked right under a streetlight.
    Everybody agreed some time in the can might be good for the thief, but he was related to Enzo Marciano. Everybody seemed to be related to everybody else in Carmine’s crew. Enzo told Gino and Jerry to go see the baker, a man in his sixties, and rough him up so he’d get the message that he wasn’t to testify. Gino refused to do it.
    “He’s a nice old guy who runs a bakery,” he told Enzo. “My mother buys her cannoli from him. I’m not gonna beat him up.”
    “Hey!” Enzo said, puffing up like a rooster, “you’re gonna do what the fuck you’re told.”
    “No, I’m not,” Gino said and left, figuring he would soon be unemployed again.
    In the end, Jerry and someone else smacked the baker around a little, not too bad, and Enzo chewed Gino out but kept him on the crew. Enzo said the only reason he