Amelia Sinatra: Hammer Time Read online

  “And another thing, sir,” DeSousa said.

  “What?”

  “I called for backup during the assault. They came too late to help us, but they were on the streets, searching for Miss Sinatra. They used the GPS of her phone and found her Bentley.”

  Hammer’s entire body went still. “Damage assessed?”

  DeSousa knew what he meant. He wanted to know if there were any bullet holes in her Bentley, or any blood. “No damage,” he said. “But they had apparently forced her to leave her cellphone with her Bentley, so we couldn’t track her.”

  Hammer exhaled again.

  “They were pros, sir. Without question. They had a layered scheme. And the guys we iced? We never seen any of them before.”

  Hammer closed his eyes. Not good. Not good at all. “Get every man on the streets,” he ordered. “I want them to get me intel, and I mean I’d better have it by the time my plane is off the ground.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And Ken? I don’t mean get every available man on the street. I mean get every fucking man I have on my payroll on the street.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You stay at Amelia’s with my son. I’m already sending backup over there, too.”

  “Yes, sir. And I am so sorry this happened, sir.”

  “You ought to be,” Hammer said angrily, and ended the call.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The door opened and blinded her. She held up her hand to the sudden intrusion of light and looked at the short man who had entered the dark, windowless room. Two additional men that she assessed as his protection, entered too, and stood behind him. He was smiling oddly, as if they weren’t in some dank room somewhere and she was his captor, but they were on a cruise ship somewhere and he was the captain. Amelia had never bothered to go on a cruise before, but she knew it didn’t look like this.

  “Good to see you’re awake, Amelia,” the short man said. “How are you feeling this fine evening? You’re well, I trust?”

  Amelia sat against a wall covered in graffiti and Lord only knew what else. Her fur coat was gone, and so was her gun. Other than her once tucked-in silk blouse now hanging out over her flare-legged trousers, her clothing had not been breached. And Amelia knew her body well enough to know that her body had not been breached, either. Which meant, she inwardly decided, that the man standing before her was not the boss and he nor his men could do whatever they wanted with her. They needed intel, she decided, before they killed her.

  “Why didn’t you eat your lunch?” the short man asked. “You wouldn’t eat your breakfast. Even though we cooked it specially for you. But you spat in it. Now we bring you dinner.”

  He looked like a weasel, Amelia thought, with his long neck, his tiny face, and his big, bug eyes. So that was the name she gave him: Weasel. But she didn’t underestimate him like real weasels were. She kept her eyes on him.

  He smiled at her. “Won’t eat, and won’t answer, will you? But don’t worry. You know why? Because when we get through with you, you’ll be singing like a canary.” His look turned hard. “Either that or you will die.”

  He continued to stare at her. “We have questions for you,” he said. “We need you strong to answer those questions. But it’s up to you. You can do this easy, or you can do this hard. But either way, you will answer to us.”

  “Maybe she’s waiting for the Hammer to show up,” one of the men in the background joked. Which was further reason, Amelia thought, that Weasel was not the boss. The leader of a crew maybe, but not the boss.

  Weasel laughed. “Is that it, Amelia? Waiting for the Hammer to show up? Or maybe Mick the Tick. That’s your brother, right? Mick Sinatra? But guess what? Around here, we ain’t scared of neither one of those motherfuckers. So if you think they’re your ticket out of here, you can forget about it. You’re all ours, Amelia. We’re all you got right now.”

  He waited, as if his words had convinced Amelia to cooperate. They hadn’t convinced her to do a damn thing but plot and plan her escape. How in the world was she going to get out of this, was the only thing on her mind.

  Weasel continued. “Besides,” he said, “you might be Sinatra’s sister, but you’re just his half-sister. That mean asshole don’t give a fuck about you. And the Hammer?” He shook his head. “When we finish with you; when we finish fucking you up the way we plan to fuck you up if you continue to be uncooperative? He won’t want you, either.”

  Then he motioned to one of the men behind him. The man placed a bowl of food at Weasel’s feet. Weasel then kicked the food up to the cot where Amelia sat. Half of it spilled out of the bowl. “You act like a dumbass dog, that’s what we treat you like. Now eat,” he said with bite in his voice. Then he smiled again. “Or don’t. But we’ll get what we’re after.”

  And then all three men left out of the room that only locked from outside. They locked it back.

  Amelia didn’t give that “food” a second look. She, instead, leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. She thought about her two half-brothers, mob boss Mick Sinatra and Big Daddy Charles Sinatra. They would kill her if they found out she was still in the drug trade. She never told them she had gotten out of the trade, they just assumed she had because she was now a Sinatra and Sinatras didn’t go out like that. Although, if truth be told, Mick used to sling drugs in his younger days and Teddy Sinatra, Mick’s oldest living son, used to be one of her biggest buyers. But truth was always relative in their world.

  She thought about her beloved son, Hannibal Joey Reese, or JoJo as they called him, and her exasperating son’s father. She knew she had to quit this shit for JoJo’s sake, but it wasn’t as if she was all about the money or had some other frivolous reason why she did what she did. She was all about her independence. She did what she did because she’d been doing it most of her adult life.

  Back then, she had no choice in the matter. Her husband made her do all kinds of illegal shit. Now it was all she knew how to do and she did it to maintain her independence. Now she did it because she was never going to depend on a man again. Not her brothers. Not her nephews. Not even her baby’s daddy, the man they called the great Hammer Reese, as if he were some circus act.

  But she knew what they meant.

  She opened her eyes as she thought about Hammer. The room had plunged back into darkness with the closing of the door, but she barely noticed it. She was too busy thinking about the man who became her baby’s daddy, and the man she felt was her best chance of ever knowing what true love was all about.

  JoJo was born Hannibal Joey Sinatra, but Hammer went to court to have his last name changed to his name: Reese. It was the first thing he did that made Amelia know he was a fighter. He was the kind of man who fought for those he loved, and that was a good sign to her.

  But he still had that reputation. Every man supposedly feared him, and every woman supposedly wanted him. At least that was the legend. But when Amelia first met Hammer, she didn’t know a thing about any legend or his reputation. She feared him, alright, that was the damn truth. But she certainly didn’t want him.

  It was the day of her first illegal act. She was tapped by her old man, Angus “Bulldog” Valtone, a big-time crook disguised as a successful businessman, to be the getaway driver. He was going over final details for all of his men involved, but he was also giving Amelia a last-second warning.

  They were at the full-sized bar inside his home. He poured himself another glass of wine and pointed the glass at her. “Fuck this up,” he said, “and I’ll fuck you up. You hear me, Mill? This ain’t no game this time. This grown-folks shit this time. You do what you’re told. Do everything Sonny tells you to do.”

  Amelia sat on the swivel bar stool, her legs barely reaching the stool rail, as she twirled side to side and listened to Bulldog. Sonny and the boys were packing their arsenal of weapons and their ski masks. Bulldog handed Amelia a baseball cap. She wasn’t surprised that it was an Baltimore Orioles cap.

  “Put it on,” he
said.

  She put it on.

  “Pull it down on your forehead as far as it can go.”

  She did that too.

  “Fuck up,” he said, pointing his glass at her again, “and you’ll be sorry. I’m not playing with your ass this time, and I mean that. This is your first job, and it’s an easy job. Don’t make it your last.”

  Then he added yet again: “Do everything Sonny tells you to do.”

  But Amelia didn’t get the memo that said her thoughts didn’t matter. “What if they take Sonny out?” she asked Bull.

  Bulldog slapped her violently across her face. She rocked sideways, against the wall, jamming her small shoulder. “What the fuck is that your business?” he yelled at her. “Asking me a question like that! You do whatever Sonny tells you to do, and if he can’t tell you then you listen to the others and do what they say. What are you stupid? You don’t ask me about no what if. Forget about what if! What if I kill your ass if you blow it? What if I cut you into little pieces and feed you to my fucking dogs? What if that happens?” Then he dismissed her with the wave of a hand. “Get your dumbass out of my face and do whatever Sonny tells you to do. About time you get some dirt on you, too.”

  Amelia didn’t say anything else. She was barely nineteen at the time and that mean asshole was her “husband.” She always used air-quotes in her mind because she never consented to marrying him. But her “mother”-another lie because she knew that woman wasn’t her real mother- had given her to him, to save her real daughter from a debt she owed, when Amelia was only fourteen. He faked her age with fake documents and married her. The fact that he had more than likely killed his first wife to make that marriage happen was just a myth, according to him. But Amelia knew him too well. Myth her ass.

  But they didn’t call him Bulldog for the hell of it. He was a tenacious, nasty piece of work who loved her and hated her and was creepily obsessed with her all rolled up into one big ball of confusion. And when that ball burst, like the many times she tried to run away from his ass, the pain of his beatings lasted for months. At nineteen, she was older than she had been when she first hooked up with the joker, but she was far more cynical too. She knew what he was capable of. She did what she was told.

  She kept on that stupid cap, got behind the wheel of the car Bull had designated for this job, and drove those five men -three in the backseat, and two upfront with her, including Sonny- to their destination. They were heavily armed and all had full-face ski masks with holes for their eyes and mouths. They would put them on once inside. Amelia wore that baseball cap pushed down on her forehead as her only facial concealer. But she wasn’t going inside. She was just the getaway driver.

  And then, with bags in hand and their guns concealed, they prepared to exit the car. But then a sportscar pulled up behind them.

  Amelia was the first to see the car, and to see the tall, muscular man, a man in blue jeans and a bomber jacket, get out of the car. “Wait,” she said just as her men were about to exit. Bulldog taught her to make sure all was clear, and that she made sure they entered the bank when traffic was low and eyes were few.

  Sonny looked through the side mirror and saw what Amelia was cautious about. They waited, until the man had walked across the sidewalk, and entered the bank.

  Then Sonny looked at Amelia. “Good looking out,” he said. “But you still better be here when we get back. Don’t pull your running away shit today. You know Bulldog. You know he has a man watching your ass. So watch out.”

  Amelia didn’t know what she had to do to convince these fools that she had their back, and wouldn’t dream of leaving them out to dry like that, so she gave up trying.

  Sonny was used to her silence, so he didn’t exactly expect her to respond anyway. So he let it go too. Then he nodded at his men in the back. “Let’s go,” he said, and all of them got out of the car.

  Inside the bank, young Hammer Reese, the muscular man who had gotten out of the sportscar, was a man going places. As a former special ops agent with a reputation for producing actionable intelligence his fellow colleagues could never match, he had just been tapped as one of the youngest station chiefs in CIA history, and was being groomed to climb even higher than that. He, in fact, was on his way to meet with one of his snitches on an international money laundering cell that nobody else had been able to infiltrate.

  There was only one problem: the snitch would only give up intel if the price was right. A cash price. But Hammer Reese was broke. He needed major cash fast, and, like always, he wasn’t waiting for approval from the brass. People who waited for the bureaucrats to act never got results. Bureaucrats delayed for too long, had to go through too many channels, and then the opportunity was missed. That was why he was at the bank. That was why he stood at the center counter and pulled out his checkbook to quickly write a big check, cash it, and get his ass to his destination.

  As he wrote his check, Sonny and his men walked in. The bank was sparsely occupied, with no more than a half-dozen customers inside. This was what they had expected, and were pleased that what they saw days earlier, when they cased the bank, had paid off. Now they were ready for the real payday.

  As soon as they cleared the threshold, they pulled the ski masks over their faces, pulled out their concealed weapons, and hurried into the body of the local bank. One man placed his gun to the throat of the guard on duty, and Sonny hurried to the center of the room.

  “Everybody down!” he yelled, “or get your heads blown off! And every teller back away from their windows now. Now!”

  The patrons and the tellers quickly complied. Hammer Reese didn’t hesitate, either, and went down as soon as the order was given. But unlike the other patrons, Hammer had a concealed weapon of his own, and he was already looking for the right time to use it.

  “Stay down, lady!” Sonny yelled to one nosy patron. “Don’t play no fucking hero!” Then he looked at two of his men. “Do it now!” he yelled to the two men responsible for filling the bags, and both jumped over the teller counters and ordered the tellers to open the drawers. They knew the drill. No marked money. No alarm-presses. No funny business. And they ordered the tellers to fill the bags.

  Two other men ran to the bank manager and forced him into the back of the bank, into the vault. But then, within seconds, and as Sonny continued to order everybody to have their hands where he could see them and to not talk, and to keep their faces face down, a gunshot was suddenly heard from the vault.

  Hammer knew this was his chance. He looked at Sonny, the obvious leader. And as soon as Sonny looked toward the vault, and the other robber guarding the guard at the entrance looked in that direction too, Hammer reached for his gun.

  He shot Sonny first, and then rolled beneath the center counter for cover, and shot the man at the entrance. Then the two men behind the teller counter began firing back, and got into a gun battle with the Hammer.

  Outside, as soon as Amelia heard the gunshots roaring, her heart dropped. Something had gone wrong! Bulldog preached to them that there was not to be any violence. Get in, get out, he ordered them. If they did it right, there would be no reason to fire a shot. Not one shot! They had gotten in, but now it appeared as if they were firing several shots.

  But just as she was considering what she should do, a side door opened, and three of the men ran out. She cranked up. They jumped in the car, yelled for her to go, go, go, but they didn’t have to say a word. She was pulling off before they were barely in and the doors weren’t even shut.

  But as she was pulling off, Hammer Reese was running out of the front of the bank, calling for backup on his cellphone as he did, and jumped into his own car.

  And the chase was on.

  “He’s following us!” Amelia yelled as she kept glancing through the rearview. “That man in that sportscar is following us!”

  “Then lose him, idiot!” one of the robbers yelled. “Lose his ass! He’s the one who took Sonny and Frank out! Lose his ass!”

  Amelia was determin
ed to lose him. She was in this craziness up to her neck now. She was the getaway driver in a bank heist that claimed casualties. She could tell those cops all day long how she was forced to participate. She could tell them all day long how her abusive husband was a crazy fuck who made her do unspeakable horrors, and this was her initiation into his other job: robbing banks. But she knew they weren’t going to believe her. They’d have her black ass under the jail by nightfall, even before they arrested the men. She drove all-out.

  Hammer kept up; he’d been in a few highspeed chases in his life, but she was a challenge. She drove through busy streets with the precision of a pro, he could tell that, and through narrow streets with the nerve of somebody not afraid to push it. But she wasn’t a pro, and Hammer could see that, too. He could see her shortcomings. She almost always lost control around curves and corners. One time, she almost landed in a ditch. Another time, she went on two wheels. But she kept hustling. She kept pushing the envelope. He shifted gears and kept up. They drove like death-wish daredevils through the busy streets of Baltimore.

  Until she blew through a busy intersection, almost colliding with a taxi, and he nearly slammed into a truck. He was forced to slam on brakes and skid to a halt, shift in reverse, and then speed around the truck with the efficiency of the expert driver he was. His years in the field, with close call after close call, had taught him how to maneuver. His years at the CIA had taught him how to never give up a chase of a high-target suspect. Bank-robbing killers, in his opinion, were as high as it got.

  But Amelia and the robbers were relieved the near-crash had given them some distance. They just might get away after all! Until Amelia’s lack of experience showed itself again, when she turned a corner too quickly, and her car, instead of going on two wheels, lost all traction and went airborne. The men screamed. It was odd to her that hard men like her passengers would be so fearful, until the car hit ground again on all fours. But Amelia had already lost control, and the car jumped a curb and slammed into a concrete bench, stopping with such abruptness that they all nearly flew out of the windshield. The entire front end was smashed.