The Prosico Brothers
I wipe my brow again. Sweat drips heavily from the back of my hand but my mouth is bone dry. I can feel the breath rattling around my chest, but my head feels light and starved of oxygen.
It's funny the effects the barrel of a gun staring you in the eye can have on you.
I risk a look into my brothers eye. He's more scared than I am. And so he should be, he knows where the knife is hid. Lucky for me I kept well out of all that business and now, just as long as he tells them, I'll live guilt free.
"George. I ain't gunna ask you again. Why'd you hide the knife George."
"I don't know what you're on about Dan. Honestly."
"No George. See, I know you took it, same way that I knew where the diamonds were." Danny Fareli. That son of a bitch dares to talk to my big brother that way. Now if the tables were turned. Well. He'd be dead, and so would his idiot brother. Of course, I don't say this, I just grit my teeth and try and ignore it. I did have a gun pointed at my face after all. "No Heorge. We can't have you running around with incriminating evidence of my brother can we. Not when every copper is looking for the bugger that stabbed Alex. So, let's do this again. You're going to give us back the knife, or else I will kill your brother, go cross the road and kill your sister and your Ma and the I'm going to kill you."
George whimpered. My brother the two bit gangsta reduced to years by a foreigner with a gun.
I find my self staring a little too much at Danny and he notices.
"Sorry about this Steve. I know it's a hard time paying for siblings mistakes.
Cleaning up after this one," he gestured to Jim, "for days!"
"Oh eye" is all I can summon without it being companied by a torrent of abuse.
"But you understand. Family comes first."
I break eye contact with him, something about his open mockery of
Alex's death rattles me more than any gun threat could.
"Got nothing to say Dteve? I thought you were the chatty Prosico?"
"No," I mutter. "That was Alex."
Danny takes a powerful step towards and suddenly he is clutching the folds of my shirt. "Don't mock me, boy."
He aims the gun at my head, ramming it into the side of my head. "George!" He shouts at the top of his voice. "No more games, where is the ducking knife!" George didn't say anything for a long time and then his voice cracked a word. The another.
George walked over and bent down at his rivals ear and heard his last ever words. In less than thirty seconds time my only surviving brother would be dead.
George raised the gun and fired, one, two, three, four, five, six, empty.
"Danny! Com'on." I beg him, "please with everything's that's going on, we're all under attack! It's not us against you, it's us against them. The attackers. We need to work together and fight back!"
"No Steve. Family comes first." Danny raises the gun, aims down the sights and gently squeezes the trigger.
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