“Don’t Touch the Dog!” — The Mafia Boss’s Little Girl Walked Up to His Most Dangerous Dog… Then Everyone Froze

The cold came down from Canada like an iron door swinging shut.

By the second week of December, Lake Michigan was a field of jagged gray plates, frozen five miles out from the beach. The wind came off the water at night with a scream like a circular saw hitting a pine knot.

The Cruz mansion groaned under it.

The old rafters in the attic snapped in the frost; the pipes behind the butler’s pantry hammered like prisoners in an iron cell.

Sophia was sick.

It wasn't the bad sickness—not the hospital kind—but her skin was hot as a fresh loaf of bread and she had the hollow, whistling cough that comes from too many damp nights in basement apartments. I had her in the small library off the south gallery, the only room with a working flue that didn't smoke into the curtains.

I had laid four blankets on the leather sofa near the hearth.

Bruno had not left the hearth rug for thirty-six hours.

He lay with his ribs pressed against the base of the couch, his giant head propped on the wooden frame so that his nose was six inches from Sophia’s ear. Every time she coughed, his ears twitched forward and his tail gave a single, anxious thump against the carpet.

At two in the morning, the door opened.

Damian Cruz was holding a glass of amber liquid with two cubes of gray ice floating in it. He wore an unbuttoned waistcoat over a white shirt that was grayed with the soot of old paperwork. He looked older. There were deep lines cut from the wings of his nostrils down past his mouth, and the hand that held the glass had three fresh abrasions across the knuckles.

"She still hot?" he asked.

"A little," I said. I was sitting on an ottoman with a bowl of vinegar-water and a rag. "The fever broke around midnight. She drank some broth."

Damian walked over to the fire. He didn't look at me; he looked at the flames.

"Victor’s people are in Cicero," he said.

The ice in his glass clinked.

"He went to the Greeks," Damian continued, as though he were reading an inventory of shipping crates. "He told them I was losing my nerve. He told them the house on the lake was being run by a woman and a child and an old dog that couldn't see out of his left eye."

"Mr. Cruz," I said, "we can go back to the city. My cousin has a flat on 19th. It’s small, but—"

"No," Damian said.

The word was hard, like a nail driven into oak.

"Your cousin’s flat has three windows facing an alley," he said. "A man with a thirty-dollar rifle could take you off the sink while you're washing her cup. Here, I have fourteen men with automatic weapons between the gate and the front porch."

"They're your men, Mr. Cruz. Not ours."

"They do what they're paid to do," he said.

He looked down at Bruno.

The dog didn't lift his head, but his tail thudded once.

"When I was twelve," Damian said, staring into the red hollow of the logs, "my father took me to a barn outside of Elgin. There was a pit. Three feet deep, lined with cedar boards so the blood wouldn't run into the dirt."

I stopped wringing the rag.

"There were men from the stockyards there," he went on. "Men with rolls of twenties held together with rubber bands. They brought dogs with their ears cut down to the bone. Terriers. Mastiffs. Things that looked like they had been born in an abattoir."

He took a sip from his glass.

"Bruno’s mother was down there. She was eight years old. Blind in the right side from an old tear. She had six puppies in a crate behind the scales. The man who owned her—a bastard named Hauer who ran meat trucks for my uncle—told my father the bitch was done. Said he was going to drown the litter and put a bolt through her skull to save on kibble."

Damian’s hand tightened around the glass until his knuckles turned the color of lard.

"The old man didn't say anything. He just pulled three hundred dollars out of his pocket, threw it on the sawdust, and took the crate. He left the mother."

"Why?" I asked, the word escaping before I could check it.

"Because the old man didn't keep anything that had stopped winning," Damian said. His voice was terrible in its stillness. "He told me that if you keep an animal that can't fight, you're just paying for its funeral. He drowned five of them in an oil drum behind the garage because he said their shoulders were too narrow."

Sophia coughed in her sleep—a small, ragged bark.

Bruno’s nose moved closer to her cheek.

"I kept Bruno in the coal cellar," Damian said. "For three months. I stole milk from the pantry and bread from the kitchen. When the old man found out, he broke my arm with a piece of iron pipe he kept behind the furnace."

He looked at me then. For the first time, his eyes weren't the eyes of the man who owned the south docks. They were the eyes of a boy who had spent twelve weeks in the dark, listening to a puppy whimper against his ribs.

"He told me that pity was a disease that killed men like us," Damian said.

"He was wrong," I said.

Damian looked at the fire again.