Mob Boss 4: Romancing Trina Gabrini (6 page)

“I’ll be back,” Trina said as she stepped out
of the car.

“Be quick about it, Tree.”

Trina wanted to shake her head.
 
If Reno was that concerned he would have been
there to pick her up himself.
 
But, as
usual, he was too busy.
 
Some emergency meeting this time.
 
And to send Dirty of all
people.
 
That kind of pissed her
off.
 
She just returned from her uncle’s
funeral in Detroit, hadn’t seen her husband in a week, and he couldn’t take a
few minutes away from some meeting to come and pick her up?
 
She absolutely had expected to step off of
his plane and see him waiting for her.
  
She’d missed him terribly, and assumed he’d missed her.
 
But he wasn’t there.

His neglect of her in the name of getting his business
affairs in order was beginning to become a problem.
 
But she wasn’t going to let it worry
her.
 
She and Reno would have more time
on their hands after they left Vegas.
 
At
least that was Reno’s plan.

She entered Boyzie’s thinking about Reno and
feeling like it was déjà vu.
 
All of the
old faces recognized her and ran up for hugs, and many of the new ones knew her
by reputation.

“She used to strip here, too, y’all,” one of
the newbies could be overheard saying.
 
“Now she’s married to the owner of the PaLargio!”

“
Whaat
?”
another one said in a dragged-out way.
 
“She’s married to the owner of the Pa-Lar-gi-o?
 
Her
?
 
Goes to show it
ain’t where you start, but where you finish.”

“And there’s hope for us all,” the first
newbie said.

“I didn’t know the owner of the PaLargio was
black,” said a third stripper, causing the other two to look at her.

“Why he got to be black?” the second one
asked.
 
“You never heard of interracial
marriage, dummy?
 
The point is
,
she was a stripper in a dump like this who’s now married
to the owner of one of the biggest hotels and casinos in Vegas.
 
She got up out of here.
 
That’s the point.”

Trina smiled and kept walking toward the back,
where she was told her old friend Jazz would be.
 
Although those newbies had the first part wrong
- Trina used to wait tables at Boyzie’s, but was never a stripper there - she
didn’t bother to correct them.
 
Like the
newbie said: she made it out.
 
That was
the point.
     

“Hey, girl,” Trina said when Jazz finally
looked up from that smartphone she was pecking away on.

At first Jazz was surprised to see Trina’s
face again.
 
They didn’t exactly part on
great terms the last time she saw her.
 
But she smiled anyway.
 
“Look who
the wind blew up in here!”

Trina slid onto the booth seat across from
Jazz.
 
Jazz was always surprised at how
easily Trina now fit into that high class world they both used to dream
about.
 
Now Trina was the personification
of class, as she sat down in her bright red Versace pantsuit, with the short
jacket that highlighted every curve of her fine body.
 

And although Jazz was smiling, that feeling of
being left behind began to reemerge.
  
She and Tree used to wait tables together right here in Boyzie’s for
crying out loud.
 
Now Trina was married
to that hunk of hunks Reno Gabrini, and Jazz was once again stuck at Boyzie’s.

“How you doing, Miss Thang?”
Trina asked as she sat her Dior handbag on
the tabletop and slid the bangs of her long hair out of her face.
 

“I work in this beautiful palace,” Jazz
said.
 
“How you think I’m doing?”

Trina smiled and started looking around.
 
“It hasn’t changed a bit.”

“And with Boyzie in charge, it never will.”

“I hear that.”

“So what brings you down this way?
 
Boring at the top?”

Trina looked at her friend.
 
“I wanted to see you before I head for the hills.”

Jazz put on that
smell a skunk
face of hers that always made Trina smile.
 
“Before you head for what hills?”

“We’re moving,” Trina said with some
trepidation.
 
She wasn’t quite used to
the idea herself.
 
“We’re leaving Vegas
tomorrow.”

“Leaving it?”

“Yup.”

“You and Reno both?”

“Of course me and Reno both!
 
Why
would I consider leaving without my husband?”

“Well,” Jazz said in that way Trina knew meant
gossip was coming.
 
“Word on the street
is that it ain’t all hugs and kisses in Reno-and-Trina-land.”

“For real, girl?”
Trina asked as if she was surprised by the
rumors, although she wasn’t.

“For real,” Jazz said and looked her large
eyes up at her friend.
 

The thing about Jazz wasn’t so much her beauty
as her uniqueness.
 
She was a full-figured
gal with smooth dark skin and big eyes who knew how to draw you in.
 
When she and Trina first met, they hit it off
right away.
 
Now Trina wondered how two
people who were so different could have been friends at all.
 

“I hear everything up in here,” Jazz went
on.
 
“And what I’ve been hearing has
concerned me.”

“Really?”

“Big time,” Jazz said.
 
“I mean you wouldn’t believe some of the
stuff these girls be saying.”

When Trina didn’t take the bait by asking for
details, Jazz gave them anyway.
 
“Some of
the girls know people who work at the PaLargio, and they declare Reno’s been
straying.”
 

Still, Trina said nothing.
 
Jazz continued.
 
“They say he’s got his eye on some tall
blonde who works over at Caesar’s Palace, and she ain’t the only one he’s been
eyeing, either.”

“He’s been eyeing her,” Trina felt a need to
explain, “
because
he’s been looking to bump her up to
general manager at the PaLargio.
 
He’s
going to bump Lee Jones up to CEO.”

“Yeah, well, I’m just telling you what I
heard.
 
I heard he’s been bumping her all
right.”

Trina felt defensive, and she hated feeling
that way.
 
Because defensiveness often
meant
insecurity,
and Trina was never that girl.
 
And never planned to allow
anybody, not even Reno, to turn her into that girl.

“Anyway,” she said, changing the subject.
 
“I just wanted to say goodbye.”

Jazz knew Trina would never believe anything
negative about that asshole Reno, so she went along with the change.
 
“So it’s official then?
 
You’re leaving Vegas for good?”

“I don’t know about for good,” Trina
responded.
 
“We’re leaving for now.”

Jazz looked at her.
 
“But why leave at all if y’all coming back?”

“Because Reno feels, after all that’s
happened,
that we need a slower pace for a change.
 
At least for now, anyway.”

“So where y’all going?”

“Georgia, girl.
 
A
small town called Crane.”

“You guys chose Georgia and it’s not
Atlanta?
 
I ain’t mad at ‘cha.”

Trina smiled.
 
“Actually, it kind of chose us.
 
Reno has this nice restaurant he inherited from his father, and it’s
located in Crane.
 
So he
figure
why not.
 
He’ll
at least be running a restaurant, which is right up his alley, and we’ll be out
of the limelight.
 
And besides that, I’ll
be much closer to my folks.
 
Reno bought
them a retirement home in Miami.
  
So we
saw it as a win-win all around.”

“Good for y’all,” Jazz said as if Trina was
bragging.

Trina considered her old friend.
 
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you at the
PaLargio, Jazz.
 
Truly I am.”

“Yeah, I am too.
 
But it’s not your fault.
 
You gave me a chance.
 
Two chances, if truth be
told,
and I blew them both.
 
My ass was the one
who kept sleeping with the guests and messing up.
 
Reno was right to fire me.”

Trina continued to stare at Jazz.
 
“But that wasn’t the part that hurt?”

“After I was fired you could have recommended
me for employment at one of these other casinos around here.
 
But you wouldn’t even do that.
 
That’s what hurt.”
 
She looked Trina dead in the eye.
 
“That’s what really hurt.”

Trina knew her friend harbored resentment
about it, and she understood the resentment on some level.
 
But what did she expect her to do?
 
The PaLargio could have been sued behind some
of Jazz’s foolishness.
 
She wasn’t about to
pretend she was a great worker so that she could bring down somebody else’s
business.
 

Jazz, in truth, became one of the most
unreliable workers Trina had ever known.
 
She tried to give her a chance and get her out of Boyzie’s.
 
She tried to show her another way of life.
 
But Jazz just couldn’t handle it.
 
She still wanted to lie and cheat and do all
of that slick, immoral stuff responsible people just didn’t do.
 
And she would often use the fact that she was
Trina’s friend to do some of her dirt.
 
Those antics might work with a clueless guy like Boyzie, but Reno was no
Boyzie.
 
They weren’t going to work with
him.

And just as Trina was thinking about all of
those underhanded, bright ideas Jazz used to come up with the short time she
did work at the PaLargio, Jazz came up with another one.

“You think the PaLargio could give me another
chance?” she asked.
 
“Since Reno won’t be
there, I mean.
 
He won’t even have to
know I’m working there.”

“But he still owns the place, Jazz.
 
Nobody there is going to hire you back
without Reno’s approval.”

Jazz shook her head.

“What?”

“He ruined our friendship.”

“
He
ruined
it?”

“Hell, yeah, Reno ruined it!
 
We used to be tight, but ever since you met
that man it’s been all about Reno all the time.
  
That man has taken over your life.
 
Everywhere you go he’s got to know where you
are.
 
Why he got to know your whereabouts
all the time?
 
You don’t have
no
GPS on his ass, why he got to have one on yours?
 
And from what I’m hearing, Tree, he’s the one
who needs the GPS.
 
I’m still amazed you
don’t realize that.”

Trina knew where Jazz was coming from.
 
Because she used to be all sanctimonious and
certain just like her.
 
She used to
declare up and down how she could never be like those love struck females who
were clueless about their men cheating right up under their noses.
 
She used to wonder what was wrong with those
sisters, and why would they stay with a cheater like that.
 
Now her old friend Jazz was trying to act as
if Trina was clueless, too.
 
Let her tell
it Reno was sleeping around right under Trina’s nose and because Trina didn’t
believe it, she was now no different than those same women they used to
despise.
 

“Don’t sweat it, Jazz,” Trina said, to end
that line of conversation.

“I’m not sweatin’ it.
 
I’m just trying to tell you what I know,”
replied Jazz.

But Trina never gave an inch when it came to
her marriage.
 
“All I can tell you,”
Trina said, “is that you worry about what your man is doing, and I’ll worry
about mine.”
 
Trina looked her friend
dead in the eye when she said this.