Ezra isn’t the name Ezra was born with. He has all the papers and documents that say he’s Peter Ventimiglia. That’s how his family knew him and it’s what he answers to at work. Ezra is the name he chose on entering the business and he considers it his “real” self. He took the time to get all the papers in order to be Ezra while working as a way to hide his paper trail.
Ezra grew up surrounded by a large Italian family. He had aunts, uncles, and cousins by the dozens. Everyone was related somehow, or assumed to be so because they were from the same part of the boot. They were working class stiffs, but money was never a real problem. You didn’t ask questions or you got smacked. His father did business trips all over the country, sometimes even overseas. That’s just how it was, just like how his Mom knew that his old man had a woman on the side. You kept your mouth shut.
Ezra was his Pop’s kid from the start. He caught a squirrel with his bare hands, then cut it up in his bedroom with some of the steak knives. Mom wasn’t too happy with that. She screamed and screamed. Then she took everything, locked up the knives and as soon as Pop got back from his business trip she had a big argument with him. Then Pop came to talk to Ezra.
That actually scared him. Pop always had a temper and he didn’t take anything from anyone. Ezra was ready for a good beating, maybe worse. He might not be able to take Pop, but he’d give it a good try. Half a dozen things in his room would make a good weapon.
It didn’t go like Ezra thought. Pop sat him down and explained that his mother was becoming a problem. If they didn’t do something, she was going to take things outside the family. What did Ezra think they should do about that? It was important that he be honest right now, man to man.
Ezra shrugged and described the gruesome ways he’d thought about cutting her up. Pop smiled, then frowned. He was a good kid, but there’s no way they could do it with her screaming like that. Neighbors would hear and that would bring it all to an end. It would be the same as taking things outside the family.
It was frustrating, but Ezra understood that. For the next three months he kept iron control of himself. The line was that Pop had a talk with Ezra and he was very sorry about everything. It would never, ever happen again. All the while, father and son planned things out. Ezra learned the family business step by step, loving every second of it. Pop was even right about the delay making it all so much better when he finally stuck a knife straight into Mom’s guts. They had to drug her and cart her off to a storage barn out in the woods first so it wasn’t quite perfect -still no screams- but as he made his first cut Ezra knew he’d found his calling.
The most important thing was to not get caught. If you got caught, you could never kill again. Not getting caught meant not looking like there was anything different about you. But you also had to be able to take someone down, so Ezra adopted a dual path. Pop acted like a jokester, but that was never his thing. Instead, Ezra consciously remade himself into a retiring, introverted boy who strived for invisibility. He was no one, a harmless, soft-spoken nerd.
And Ezra worked out a lot. He told people that his Pop made him join sports because it was good cover for building his strength and other skills. He was there out of obligation and didn’t like it, but he tried not to be bad. That he ended up doing pretty well, though not as well as he could have, went down to Ezra’s dogged determination rather than a natural killer instinct or visceral thrill in triumphing over others. No one knew that he came home and drilled himself for hours more and oversized, ill-fitting clothes helped him look skinnier than he was. So did the glasses he doesn’t really need.
In his spare time, Ezra was always studying with Pop. They went together on business trips. They hunted. They talked knives and guns. He got a taste of the money Pop got for doing his jobs and that cash made everything easier. But they were two predators who knew each other better than anyone. Pop was old and getting slow. Ezra was young and hungry. Pop didn’t make it, but Ezra thinks he was proud when he felt the knife go in.
Ezra knew how things worked. He made sure he had an understanding with Uncle Michael before he did it. Pop wasn’t going to be up to the job forever and Ezra was the future. His unassuming personality made him blend in in a way that a boisterous Italian guy couldn’t. He even went to school and became an accountant to complete the picture. No one was going to think the skinny kid with the spreadsheets, the one that hated the sight of blood, didn’t swear, didn’t talk about bodily functions, and seemed afraid of women could harm a fly.
Now that he works on his own, Ezra takes both jobs for the family and independent contracts that come to him through the right channels. When he’s on a business trip, he likes to stake out the place and occasionally do a little extracurricular killing far from home. He’s finished his El Paso job and thinking about doing an extra one there, but he’s at the bar because it’s where he gets the payment.
