Luke Calido’s Existential Crisis

WHAT’S IT ALL MEAN?

He has it all, but something is missing

“Who’s that over there!?!”

Instinct taking over, Luke tells his fellas to stay out while he rushes to where the sound came from. If it’s one of Roman’s crew, Luke wants to handle it himself.

As he slips through a pile of gore, he hears a voice, a woman’s voice.

“I saw nothing, I swear!”

She’s laying on the floor leaning against the body with its throat cut and a smile comes to Luke’s face.

“Wadiya mean you saw nothing? You’re laying in the middle of it. C’mon, get up.”

Luke helps the young woman to her feet as she babbles, but something clicks in Luke’s mind. He knows he has to get rid of her because she’s the only witness. Looking at her, an unfamiliar feeling washes over him.

He hasn’t felt this in a long, long time. Luke has done the best he could throughout his adult life to repress it, but he remembers an old pet dog he felt empathy for when he was a kid. The animal had to be put down and Luke was so attached to it that the thought of it dying made him feel weak.

When his dad caught him with a tear in his eye, he slapped Luke and told him to quit or it was going to get worse. That was the beginning of Luke fighting that emotion.

It all came back to him in a flood as he felt the tingle in his nose as his eyes welled up. What the hell was this? Luke froze for a second. He came to when he looked in her eyes, as she was begging him to let her go. There was no way he could, at least not in front of his boys.

“You want me to handle this, boss?” Luke’s right-hand man, Cisco, asked.

Luke’s first thought is to say yes and take the easy way out. He usually chose the path of least resistance with witnesses. He could just turn her over to Cisco and never think of it again. Luke looked at her one more time and from somewhere, a voice told him to say that he’d take care of her himself.

“Nah, I got this.”

“Are you sure, boss?” Cisco asked.

Luke looked at him with the ‘Are you questioning me?’ look that always sent a chill through Cisco. He nodded to Luke and turned and went back to the others. Cisco smiled and winked at the crew and said that the boss was going to take care of her himself.

They all laughed and smiled. The cleaner that Luke requested threw some towels at the crew and the girl. Luke told her to wipe herself up as best she could because they were leaving. Plastic covers were being placed in Luke’s SUV for the ride away from Roman’s now former hangout.

He told his fellas to meet him at their clubhouse tomorrow and to be ready for any blowback from this evening’s proceedings. The gang massacring their competition was going to make enormous waves in the organization that would send ripple effects far and wide.

“Wadiya going to do with me? I swear I won’t tell anybody.” the young woman said.

Luke asked her what her name was. Brittany, she said. She took that as a good omen and relaxed a little. He was treating her as a person. This guy is mammoth, she told herself. He looked like he could snap her like a number 2 pencil if he wanted to. She had no control if he went berserk.

“Let me ask you a question, Brittany. Do you think there’s anything after this? I gotta admit that I was just gonna hand you off and someone was gonna make you disappear. But I have been feeling lately like there is this emptiness. Oh, what am I telling you this for? It’s all fucking pointless.”

“No, wait! I know exactly what you’re talking about. There is something after this. I believe it. That you feel like there is something is proof. If there wasn’t, you would just go through life and not think of anything like an unfeeling animal. We’re all connected by something we know is there, but just don’t understand yet.”

Luke’s eyes widened as he looked at Brittany. This young tattooed goof with the pierced nose and dreadlocks actually made sense. The old Luke from before he got the high school reunion invitation wouldn’t have given her a second glance or even a first. But now she was making total sense as she confirmed word for word what he was thinking.

Now what in the hell was he going to do with her? She was a witness to mayhem. Brittany was the biggest threat to him, his family, and his organization. The others might not remember her a couple of days from now, but Cisco got a good look at her.

It would be against everything his father had ever taught Luke about being a family member. To keep her around would reflect negatively on his judgment as boss of the organization.

But that’s was the thing. He is the boss. Like Julius Caesar or Napoleon, Luke Calido runs this show. Now that Roman and his crew were history, it’s all Luke’s game to play as he sees fit. If Cisco, or any of the others, has a problem with whom he wants to have around, it is not Luke’s problem, it’s theirs.

“I’m going to do you a favor, Brittany. It’s the biggest gift anyone is gonna give you. I don’t know why, but something tells me it would be a bad thing if something were to happen to you or I were to let you get away. You’re gonna work for me as an advisor or something. A guru or a shammy or something like that.”

“A shaman? I am a shaman! I’ve been studying and living it my whole life. What’s your birthday? Do you know what time and where you were born? I can totally help you with everything. It’s what I came here to do this time around.”

“Good. Because you make sense right now and I need all the help I can get.”

Luke was going to have to tell his wife Aurora about who this young woman was. She was into all that new age crap and had an affection for artist types.

Whatever was going to happen, Luke Calido was in uncharted territory.