When Nick Bracco was just 16, his parents were gunned down
by gangbangers in their hometown of Baltimore.
We learn about this event in the short story, In the Beginning. Nick ends up living with his cousin Tommy and
they become inseparable. They spend lots
of time at Pimlico Race Course, hanging around the stalls and picking up
information about lame horses and crooked trainers. This is where their childhood accelerates
into adulthood.
Around this time, Tommy gets mixed up with a bookie who offers
them the identity of the two kids who murdered Nick's parents. Both kids want revenge. The bookie offers the boys the resources to
get the murders alone and Nick and Tommy get their chance to retaliate.
This is the very moment that defines the two cousins. Tommy wants to kill the boys and he’s ready
to put them down and move to Florida to escape prosecution. Nick is onboard, but something stops
him. Maybe guilt from his Catholic
background. Maybe the ethics engineered
into his system by his father who was a Baltimore Police Officer. A man who reeked of integrity and
fairness. A man who insisted on having a
black partner so he could better understand the plight of inner city kids and
their challenges in a white world.
So when it came time to fire his weapon and change the fate
of their lives, killing the two souls who took away his father, Nick
hesitated. Tommy urged him on, but Nick
could feel his father looking down on him.
It must be understood that Nick had no interest in following
his father’s footsteps and joining the Baltimore Police Department. It never even occurred to him, until that
defining moment when Tommy insisted that Nick didn’t follow him into a life
with the Mafia.
You can learn exactly how Tommy prevented Nick from other
bad choices and how Tommy acquired the colored toothpick habit and much more in
the very first Nick Bracco short story: In the Beginning.
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