She went to bed, pulling the covers up to her neck and turning her body sideways as not to be facing me. I quickly undressed, snuggled up beside her in bed, gingerly swept aside her hair, and gently kissed the nape of her neck. "Come on, sweetie, don’t be like that. I did it all for you and the kids"..."Do you take me for a fool, Jimmy?”. She kept her gaze for a short while, then got out of bed and disappeared into our walk-in closet.

How and why I ended up working for the C.I.A. is a mystery in and of itself...My sole assignment till this very day is to delve into and dissect the mind and motives of the terrorist, specifically those of Middle Eastern descent.

I think too many people are taking themselves a little too seriously these days. If the ego was a muscle, hell, we'd all be forced to say that we have really been putting in some long hours at the gym... But after more then a few Johnny Walker's in him, he was kind of waiting for an opportunity like this to let it all out. So he quickly gets up out of his chair and lands one hell of an uppercut to Billy's chin, sending him crashing to the floor.

George smiled, a little too maniacally for Thomas's comfort. He detected a gleam of utter madness in his old friend's eyes.

George stood up, and produced an old, large, Colt 45 revolver from his jacket pocket. He pointed it straight at his old friend's head.

"You mind if I blow your brains out, right here, right now?", he asked, in all seriousness.

"Go, go, they're coming", Frankie says, as he shoves me forward with his right hand, a sack full of jewelery in the other. We run down the stairs, and we can hear a woman's voice as she opens the front door. Me and Frankie make a B-line for the rear exit, which were sliding glass window doors in the den. We open them and, not bothering to close em, keep running, running through backyards, running till we reach a secluded place 'bout half a mile away.

Aggravated assault. What a frigging joke. I personally knew two guys that Bobby whacked some years ago. And I was never even close to their circle. But the newspaper wanted someone to interview him, which wasn't an easy thing to do. The man was as tight lipped as they come. They figured since we were about the same age, and had grown up in the city during the same era, I stood about as good a chance as any of getting him to open up. But no one was really counting on it.

So I arrange a meeting with him at a local hangout in Hell's Kitchen, Sloppy Joe's.

How much free will did he truly have? For some reason, Steven had been obsessed with this subject for as long as he could remember....What they discovered at the scene shocked even these seasoned veterans of the Police Force. What Steven had taken for a man's screams were those of a youth in his late teens. He was naked..... His body was beaten to a pulp.

It really didn't make much of a difference, the reasons why. The fact remained that he walked around with an intense anger raging within. He was literally a time bomb, ready to explode.

He had known the two since childhood. In grade school, people in the old neighborhood took to calling them the Three Musketeers... From the streets of Hell's Kitchen to the quiet restaurants of Little Italy, though quite close geographically, they might have well been located on distant continents... All they knew is that the revenue from their part of town had been steadily declining. Someone was going to have to take the fall. One or more of them were definitely going down. There was no doubt about it.