The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter by Linda Scarpa

Linda didn’t come back, so I figured she must have made it home okay.
    But when I got home, my parents were on the phone with Linda’s parents. They were pretty much going at it on the phone. I found out that Larry had picked Linda up at Argie’s and took her home.And her father pinned her out, just as I thought he would. So I got in trouble. I was pretty pissed at Linda because I was convinced that she had ratted me out to her father.
    The next day my friends and I were supposed to meet at the indoor Avenue I Flea Market in Brooklyn and then play a game of softball. I was a huge baseball player.
    We used to go to the flea market and party in the basement. We used to get in through this staircase that was pretty much broken down. We used to squeeze through the fence and go back there. We were crazy. We would party in places where nobody would even think of going.
    My friends and I got wasted and then we decided to go upstairs to the flea market. While we were there, I saw Linda and her mother shopping, but Linda didn’t look too happy. Linda’s mother and I got into an argument. She called me a pothead and said I made her daughter do this and that. But that wasn’t the case—I didn’t make her do anything. And that’s just what I told her mother.
    â€œWho are you calling a pothead? I didn’t make her do anything. She got the weed from you guys, so look who’s talking.”
    Big Linda was pissed because I pretty much embarrassed her in front of all the people at the flea market. That’s when she grabbed me by the arm and started shaking me. I sort of pushed her arm off me, but I didn’t push her. She took a couple steps back and started screaming at me. “You just wait,” she said.
    We were yelling back and forth. I never started any fights, but I wasn’t a guy you wanted to pick a fight with. Then Linda and her mother left.
    My friends and I started walking around the flea market. We were stoned as hell. Then next thing I knew, these two guys came out of nowhere and one of them hit one of my friends in the face. He just jabbed him out.
    These guys weren’t dressed like us; they were dressed like gangsters. It was a Saturday or Sunday morning and we were in softball gear and they were wearing Capezios—and when I think about it now—looking like Don Johnson in Miami Vice. So I was thinking these guys weren’t just street thugs.
    We started to retaliate and we ended up chasing them out of the flea market. When we got outside, the guys ran over to their car and I saw Linda and her mother in the backseat. My friend Stephen threw a baseball bat at the guys. It hit the back window of the car, shattering the glass. The last thing I heard before the car took off was Linda’s mother screaming at me out the window, “You wait until tonight!”
    After that, we went to play softball and everything seemed fine. Later on that night, I was at our apartment building hangout with my group, and we were partying as usual. We ran out of pot, but we knew some guys who used to sell weed at the bowling alley on Avenue I, about two blocks away. It was raining that night; so since I was the most athletic and the fastest, I said, “I’ll go get it. I’ll run.”
    So my friends gave me the money. I’m trucking myself along, and about a block or so away, I see three cars with a lot of guys in them—there must have been ten or twelve guys—on the other side of the street. It didn’t look right, but I kept running and didn’t think any more about it.
    Then, all of a sudden, a car pulled up next to me. There was a used-car lot on the other side, and there was a big fence. Behind the fence were Dobermans and other guard dogs, so I couldn’t escape that way.
    Then one car pulled up behind me and one in front of me. They pretty much boxed me in. I tried to jump over the hood of the car, but it was raining. I made it, but when I