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Masked Don

Page 105

by K.C. Crowne

Most of them do. Two don’t.

The one by the laptop swings his rifle toward Stevie. I shoot him through the chest over Luca’s shoulder. The second one fires at me, and Luca jerks in my grip, and something punches into my left side low down, hot and then cold. I shoot the second man twice, and he goes down across the strip of tape where I was kneeling.

The doors at the far end of the warehouse bang open.

Vasari’s men come in fast, forty of them, every one holding a gun Luca Santini paid him to carry tonight, and they do exactly what Vasari promised. They don’t start anything. They finish it. Inside of ten seconds, every one of Luca’s men is face-down on the wet concrete with his hands laced behind his head.

I let go of Luca. He drops to his knees on his own tape, in the good light, cradling his ruined wrist.

My side is wet. I can feel it running down into my waistband. It doesn’t matter yet.

“Wait,” Luca says. His face is wet, and his voice has gone high and young. “Wait, Enzo, no. We can talk. I’ve got money, I’ve got the whole operation, you can have it, all of it, you can have her, I’ll never…”

“Five years ago, I asked her which part of you to remove first,” I say. “She said none. She was being kind. I swore this time I wouldn’t ask.” A beat. “I’m not asking. Tonight she decides.”

I walk to the center tripod and turn the camera off. Then the other two. The little red lights go out one by one. Whatever happens next belongs to us, not to a lens.

I look at Stevie.

She’s ten feet away with blood on her lip and the chair still in her hands, her chest heaving. I turn Luca’s pistol around and hold it out to her, grip first.

She sets the chair down. She looks at the gun for a long time. Then she looks down at the man who called her fat into a microphone. Who blacklisted her and hunted her and carried our son out of his bed, and told her what he’d do to that boy if she ever ran again.

She takes the gun.

“Stevie.” Luca is crying now. “Stevie, please. Baby, please.”

She doesn’t move. And I watch the begging curdle in his face, the way it always did when pleading stopped working.

“You won’t,” he says. “You never could.” His eyes slide past her to the office, to the dirty glass, to the shape of the boy behind it. “And when you don’t, I’ll find him. Wherever you hide him. I’ll find that boy, Stevie.”

“You wanted to see who begs,” she tells him.

Her hand doesn’t shake. I watch it not shake.

She shoots him once, in the good light he paid nine hundred dollars for, and he goes over backward and doesn’t move again.

For a moment, nobody in the warehouse breathes.

Then she holds the gun out to me, grip first, the way I gave it to her. I take it. She turns and walks to the office and doesn’t look back.

Genevieve shoves the desk aside and opens the door. She has both hands clamped over Matthew’s ears, and she keeps them there until Stevie lifts him out. He comes up into his mother’s arms with the rabbit crushed in his fist and his face buried in her neck.

“Take them outside,” I tell Vasari.

He falls into step at Stevie’s shoulder, and Genevieve takes the other side. They walk her the length of the warehouse, past the cameras and the men on the floor, out into the night.

Then it’s just me and the body on the tape and three dark cameras.

I lift the three phones off their tripods, one by one, and put them in my pocket. Whatever is on them belongs to me now.

Then I wipe the grip of Luca’s gun with my handkerchief, close my own hand around it, and put it in my coat. If anyone in this city ever asks who killed Luca Santini, the answer is me. Luca’s men on the floor saw what happened. Every one of them owes me their silence now, and every one of them knows what it costs to forget a debt to an Accardi.

When I turn around, the elders are in the doorway.

Manfredi in a long camel coat, Greco at one shoulder and Dellucci at the other, and behind them, leaning on his cane, my father. They take in the room. The men on the floor. The two I shot. The thing on the tape. Last of all, they look at me, standing in the middle of it with blood soaking through the left side of my shirt.

They came to watch a verdict. They’re too late. It has already been handed down.