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

Damian Cruz did not go to Texas.

And Bruno did not stay in Chicago.

We left three days before the wrecking balls arrived. The snow had turned to gray slush along the edges of the interstate, and the sky over the plains was the color of a wet zinc tub.

Damian drove an old International Harvester Travelall that had been sitting in the carriage house since 1984. It had four-wheel drive, a tailgate that dropped down like an iron ramp, and a heater that smelled like roasting walnuts and made a noise like an old furnace every time we climbed a hill.

Bruno rode in the back on two down comforters that I had taken from the master bedroom with Damian’s permission.

Every fifty miles, we had to stop.

Not for gas—the Travelall had two tanks that held forty gallons between them—but because Bruno’s shoulder would stiffen up until he began to whine, that tiny, high-pitched whimper that sounded so ridiculous coming from a head the size of a pumpkin.

When we stopped at a rest area outside of Des Moines, Damian didn't let the men at the pumps help.

He got out, his left arm still bound to his ribs with the black linen sling, and used his good arm to lower the tailgate.

"Come on, old man," he said.

Bruno didn't move until Sophia reached into the back and took his collar.

"Come on, Bruno," she said. "We have to pee on Iowa."

The dog grunted.

He rolled his weight onto his left side, brought his good front leg under him, and scrambled down the ramp with a clumsy, three-legged hop that ended with his nose buried in the frozen grass of the median.

Damian stood by the front fender, a paper cup of black coffee in his hand, watching them.

He didn't look like the man from the study.

His hair had grown out over his ears; the neat, razor-sharp edge of his sideburns had turned soft and gray. He was wearing an old canvas coat he had bought at an army-navy surplus store in Davenport, and his boots were ordinary leather work boots that had salt stains across the toes.

"They're going to build a golf course where the west garden was," he said as I walked up beside him with two paper cups of tea.

"You'll miss it?" I asked.

He took a sip of the coffee. He grimaced; it was cheap diner stuff, boiled three times in an urn that hadn't been descaled since the Carter administration.

"My father died three miles from that house," he said. "My mother died in the front parlor when I was four. She had consumption, but the old man told everybody it was her heart because consumption sounded like something that happened to people who lived in tenements."

He looked across the highway, where the cornfields stretched out toward the horizon—miles of dry, gray stalks sticking through the crust of snow like broken teeth.

"There was nothing in that house," he said. "Just furniture that belonged to dead people and papers that told me which alderman was taking twenty percent on the asphalt contracts."

"And the docks?"

"The docks belong to the union now," he said. His mouth twitched in that old, dangerous way, but the eyes stayed quiet. "The union thinks they belong to Miller. Miller thinks they belong to the Greeks. By the time they figure out that the leases were held by an offshore shell registered in the Caymans that dissolved on Tuesday, I’ll be three states away."

Sophia was running in circles around the picnic table.

Bruno was following her—not running, but doing that strange, rhythmic hobble that made his heavy hindquarters sway like a cow’s. He had a yellow plastic cup in his mouth that he had stolen from the floorboards of the truck, and he was refusing to give it back with a series of muffled, guttural grunts that made Sophia shriek with laughter.

"Where are we going, Damian?" I asked.

It was the question I hadn't asked when I packed our three bags in the carriage house. It was the question I hadn't asked when he handed me a set of keys to a vehicle that didn't have a single computer chip in its dashboard.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a key.

It wasn't a modern key. It was long, made of heavy brass, with four square teeth at the end—the kind of key that belonged to a mortise lock in a door made of solid cedar.

"My mother had a sister," he said. "In the Sandhills. Outside of a place called Valentine."

"Nebraska?"

"There's nothing there, Rosa," he said, turning his dark eyes toward me. The wind off the cornfields was lifting the gray hair at his temples. "Just grass and sand and wind that comes off the Rockies without hitting a tree for four hundred miles. There's a house with six rooms, a well that works with an iron pump, and eighty acres of pasture that hasn't seen a plow since the drought in thirty-four."

He paused.

"A dog like that needs room," he added, looking at Bruno, who had just dropped the yellow cup into Sophia’s lap with the dignity of an ambassador presenting a treaty. "His hips are going to go in three years anyway. The cold off the lake would have finished him by next winter."

"And us?" I asked.

Damian Cruz looked at me for a long time.

He didn't look at my apron—I wasn't wearing one. He didn't look at my hands, which were rough from twenty years of other people's floors.

He looked at my eyes.

"The house has an iron stove," he said. "I don't know how to work the damper. Every time I tried to light it when I was nine, I nearly smoked the bats out of the eaves."

A small, slow smile touched the corner of his mouth—the first real smile I had ever seen on that face.