by C. D. Reiss
“She texted me to meet her there. In the bathroom. To tell me.” I lurched for the phone, and he shifted it another inch. “I’ll show you.”
He paused, standing above me, considering.
“I have no idea what she sees in you,” I said. “So don’t ask.”
He smiled down at me. “If I see one tap on that glass I don’t like…” He moved his foot. I grabbed the phone and pressed the home button for one, two…
Three seconds.
Four.
Five.
Paulie tilted his head, watching.
Six seconds on the home button.
Nothing exploded.
On seven, he knew there were no texts, and I knew there was no bomb. He kicked the phone from my hand.
“Worthless.” He dropped on me, knee first, knocking the wind out of me, and wrestled the gun into my hand. He pointed it at Antonio. I tried to wiggle away, but he had me under his weight.
Antonio gasped and heaved, getting up on his elbows. I croaked his name and he turned.
“Say goodbye.” Paulie squeezed my hand around the trigger.
Antonio rolled, and as if consciousness was equivalent to utter situational awareness and agility, he was on his back with his gun at Paulie’s head as the pressure on my hand became enough for the trigger. A bullet lodged itself into the floor where Antonio’s head had been. Every surface on my body got red hot as I realized I’d almost shot him.
“You’re aiming over my head,” Paulie said, taking my moment of surprise and using it to shift the gun back to Antonio. His hands were hot on mine, and once Antonio rolled, the sweat poured off them despite his cocky words. “You got blood in your fucking eye.”
“Let her go, Paulie.”
“When you’re dead, brother. When you’re out of my way. You been a drag on me from day one, and I’ve had it.” He squeezed my hand. My palms were dead dry. How did I do that? How was my body an icebox in the face of so much menace?
But Paulie’s hands were greased, strong and slick with sweat. I fought against him, and he tried to force me to shoot Antonio, moving the barrel across the room when his target moved. The pressure was too much. The trigger snapped, Antonio rolled, and a bullet landed in the wall in a pop of plaster dust.
Antonio’s gun went flying and a line of blood opened up on his arm. The bullet had grazed him before hitting the wall.
I screamed, and an ice-cold, thoughtless panic took hold, because that man was my only chance at life, my one last gift of happiness and intimacy, and I’d shot him. I couldn’t feel myself breathing.
Paulie moved me with Antonio, so the gun stayed pointed at him. But he had to move his elbow off my shoulder to do it, and I yanked myself away. His hands slid over mine, and I twisted, the pressure on the trigger still hard enough to discharge the gun. I took out a lamp.
Paulie and Antonio dove for Antonio’s fallen weapon, and Antonio lost, rolling away as Paulie stood and pointed his gun at him.
“How do you like this, you fucking dago wop motherfucker?”
Antonio had his hands up, sitting akimbo, one shoulder to the wall. “You do this, you’re going to have to answer for it.”
“Fuck you!” he moved the gun when he spoke with his hands, pointing at his ex-partner with his unladen hand. “You leave us, you leave me, for her, and who answers for it. Huh? You don’t. You dropped everything we had for a little pussy.”
“We had business.”
“Business? I loved you!” He blurted it out, and before he even got to the third word, I saw the shock and horror on his face.
He wouldn’t let Antonio live after admitting that. It was all over his face. And after half a heartbeat, his body responded, leveling the gun at Antonio and pulling the trigger.
“No!” I heard my voice but didn’t feel the shout in my breath. I swung to Paulie and squeezed my weapon. And after the very raw memory of almost shooting the man I loved, I did something in the ice-cold emotionless place I dwelled in.
I knew what I was doing.
It was not an accident.
And as if he saw my intention on my face, Antonio yelled my name.
But it was too late. Of my volition, I squeezed my fist more tightly, by an infinitesimal amount, and shot Paulie in the head. A bloom of red broke out under his wide-open eyes, and his head thunked down.
Sweat broke out in my palms, and the gun clanked to the floor, splashing in the growing, comma-shaped pool of blood.
My corruption was complete.
forty-six.
antonio
moved, and he missed. And when he went down, it took me a second to realize why.
I played at standing straight, but my eyes had fog in front of them, and my balance was uneven. Even with my senses at fifty percent, I knew what was happening, and I gathered what dexterity I had to stand. To yell her name. Then, I had to hope she’d missed, even at a meter from his face.
Theresa, my Contessa, who stood straight and aimed her words like arrows, didn’t miss. I didn’t know it from the drop of Paulie’s body because I wasn’t looking at that. I was looking at her, only her. My grace. My sweet olive blossoms rotting on the branch.
She dropped the gun, and the sound cleared my mind.
I scooped it up.
“Capo,” she whispered. Whatever cold, collected woman had shot Paulie was gone, and she shook from elbows to fingertips, eyes wide, lips parted. She had a sentence to finish, but apparently not the breath to do it.
“Get back to the truck,” I said, putting my hands all over the gun. “Be seen. Wait. Just wait. For once…”
I sounded angry. Maybe I was. I grabbed the gun by the trigger and pointed it at Paulie, who looked like a mannequin. A bleeding one. The blood still poured out of him. He wasn’t dead.
Gesù Cristo; that man was always thick. I used to think it was funny. I used to think it was good to be the brains of the operation.
He was impulsive. Stupid.
And I was muddled.
He’d helped me. He had a big heart that hurt. He’d helped me do wrong and right, and of course, he’d made everything balanced in an unbalanced world for a little while.
What was happening to me? I straightened my arm to finish him off. Behind me, Theresa sniffed. I turned. Her face was wet with tears, and the careful makeup she’d done for the wedding was smeared down her cheeks. She pressed her lips together.
Would shooting him save her? Would it make her happy and bind her to me, or would it break her?
That was my only concern: how it would affect Theresa, her heart and her life. I didn’t even care if it would make her love me less, because it didn’t matter anymore.
“Don’t leave me,” she whispered, her mouth wet with tears. “Please.”
I wanted to say I’d never leave her, to hold her shoulders and say the thought had never crossed my mind. I wanted to say I’d never lied or snuck around or given up on her. But I had. In the guise of making her life easier, I had.
“I have to.” I dropped the gun on the floor. It was stained with my prints. The whole mess would land in my lap, but I’d be dead, gone, and she couldn’t step in the way of it. “Tell them you were hit in the head. Unconscious for the whole thing.”
“Don’t.” Her voice was no more than a breath.
“You probably have a concussion.” My voice was hard and distant. I didn’t know how else to speak to her. She’d shot a man. She’d swung her arm to aim at him and squeezed the trigger. Her face had been as cold and hard as my voice, and she made no mistakes about the gun being loaded. She knew, and she’d shot to kill. Would I see anything else from now on?
“Were you seen coming in here?” I asked.
“Maybe? Probably? I don’t know.”
“Go back to the truck. They’ll be here soon.” I didn’t want her to see me go to the closet. She knew where the tunnel was better than I did. “Go.”
“There was no C4 under the chassis.”
“Just go!”
> “You think you’re leaving without me.”
“I was, I am…” I looked over Paulie’s slow bleed then back at her.
We had to move.
No. I had to move.
I was leaving to protect her. She didn’t have so much thrown at her that she couldn’t manage. Daniel would never prosecute her if I were out of the picture. I was the one with the problems. I was the man with the baggage, and she was…
She wasn’t innocent. Not anymore. Not with her running mascara and red eyes. Not with the bruise bubbling above her ear, or her grass-stained dress, or the powder burns on her hand.
I prayed God would forgive me for loving her, and feared only the devil would answer.
I picked up the gun and put it in my waistband.
“Antonio, no. I—”
“Basta,” I said, opening the closet door. “I love you, Contessa. Your madness is silent and your sanity makes a racket. Now is time for madness.” I pushed the hangers out of the way.
I found the false wall where she and her brother had described it. I ran my fingers over the edges but couldn’t find a way to open it. She came up behind me, reaching between my legs and wedging her fingers into the corner between the floor and the wall.
“You have to go where children can reach.” She pulled, and the false wall shifted. I took the edges from her. We were hit by a blast of air that should have been stale and dusty but wasn’t. I knew she noticed from the deep breath she took.
She opened her mouth, and I sensed an objection coming out of it.
“Listen to me. I bought it the way I bought everything. It’s not traceable. And yes, I was going down this tunnel. Alone. And I was never coming back. That was the plan, but it changed. I have to get something, and I will come back in a few seconds.”
I put my finger to her lips. We had no time for explanations. “Be mad,” I said. “Your sanity is there.”
I ducked into the tunnel and down the stairs.
forty-seven.
theresa
must have been crazy. I’d intuited that he was leaving me when I was under the truck and couldn’t lift the grate. No one could. It had been locked or bolted since I was a kid. And the C4 smelled like Play-Doh, which was made of wheat. C4 couldn’t smell the same. Wheat didn’t explode.
Stupida.
Standing in front of the tunnel with the fresh air coming from the other side, probably the result of Antonio reopening the basement, his plan became clear. He was going to leave me there and escape through the tunnel across Ludwig without me. But Paulie intervened. Damn Paulie, and bless him, because without him, I’d be under the truck, waiting like a good girl.
Paulie bled in the other room. I steeled myself against the horror of what I’d done. If I stood in that dark closet another minute, the steel was going to melt, and my madness wasn’t going to be so silent.
I stepped into the abyss. It led to a wooden stairwell with steps higher than they were wide. I remembered that.
I put my other foot on the step.
He’d said to wait under the truck, and I hadn’t done it.
I should wait now.
God, please let him come back to me.
Let.
Him.
Come.
Back.
Please.
I waited, and because I waited, I heard them coming. Maybe someone had heard shots, or maybe they’d seen the break-in of the florist’s truck without a loving couple rocking the back. Maybe Daniel’s minions went looking for me to thank and, discovering I wasn’t there, came looking. I didn’t know. But I knew there was a traitor’s body in that room, and I knew I didn’t want to explain what had happened.
I closed the closet door and shut the panel behind me.
It was pitch black, and if I remembered the stairs correctly, they were treacherous and rotted.
“Antonio,” I whispered into the darkness. Was he gone?
Above me, I heard the clopping and shouting of people entering the carriage house and doing what needed doing. I wondered if they knew about the tunnels and whether there was someone from my world who would check.
My fingers grazed the stone walls. I’d seen them in the light. They were made of big rocks, cut into cross sections of multifaceted dark-grey ovals and mortared together with beige cement. To the hand they were rough and sharp, not cut but cracked.
Prepared to be in the tunnel under the grate, I snapped my keys from my bag and juggled to find the little LED light. I clicked it.
The service tunnel was five feet wide with a concrete floor cracked to dust and rock. The ceiling joists were thick, bare wood under slats and below them, Antonio stood, pointing a gun at me. His head had stopped bleeding, and in his other hand, he held a silver suitcase.
“Theresa,” he said, lowering the gun.
“Antonio? Where are you going?”
“On my way back.” He must have seen me look at the suitcase, because he held it up for me to see. “This is the C4.”
“They’re coming.”
He looked up as if that would help him hear through the dirt and wood above. The thumping of booted feet and shouts of serious men came through the layers of ceiling and floor.
“I was going to die in the house and escape through the tunnel, the long way, to Ludwig, while you were safe under the truck.”
I stepped toward him, my LED moving the shadows across his face. “We have to do your plan, but with two.”
He pressed his lips together and looked down. He took my hand. “Si,” he said. “We will.”
A shout echoed over the walls, and he and I jerked our heads up. It was close, but not so close. In the closet maybe. Maybe they’d opened the door.
I felt his breath on me, short and shallow, and his eyes were a little wider under his bloody forehead. I put my hand over my mouth.
“Adesso!” he snipped, “And put the light out.”
I did. He tugged me with him into the darkness. I tripped and he yanked me up. “A little ways, and I’ll put the suitcase at the halfway point between the end and the closet stairs. Then we run.” We came to a point where glass insets in the sidewalk let a little illumination through. It was night, and the spots of blue lamplight made more shadow than brightness.
“If people are coming, by the time we get there… we have to give up.”
He jerked me forward, until the only barrier to me falling was his body. “I. Don’t. Give. Up. Any. More.” He said it through his teeth.
“I don’t want to kill anyone else today.”
In the dimmest of light, his brow shading his expression, he whispered, “I can plant it here, before they come down. There will be a bomb between us and them, but we need to be protected.”
“There’s a well,” I said. “Fiona used to throw her empty vials down there.”
I didn’t give him a chance to answer. It was my turn to yank him to where we had to go, clicking my little light on when it got too dark to see. I pulled him through a room with a ditch that smelled of dried meat and over to a rotted-wood platform with a water pump. It keened to the side.
I found the rusted iron ring in the center and pulled up a wooden circular lid. Antonio shone his light down it. It was dry as a bone, and smaller than I remembered, with no vials, as if someone, some kid or some adult hiding something, had filled it in.
“Plant the bomb behind the wall and—”
“Get in,” Antonio growled, dropping the suitcase.
“But you won’t fit.”
He knocked my feet from under me and caught me, carrying me in both arms, and as effortlessly as he did everything, he put me into the hole.
It was a tight fit. I couldn’t fit a kitten in there with me, much less Antonio.
“Two explosions,” he said. “Wait for them both. Then come through the house across Ludwig Street.
“Where will you be?”
“There.”
Shouting, close by. Voices on stone. They’d found the partition and moved it. I
thought we’d have more time. There was no chance he would get close enough to the closet to block the way and then back to safety in time.
“You have to detonate now,” I said. “Before they come down. You’ll never make it.”
“Two explosions. Wait. Then get out and run to the house. The car is in the back. Don’t stop until you’re in the car.”
“Wait!”
“I have to put this thing by the stairs, back there, to keep them from coming down. No more delays.”
Before I could answer, he slammed the lid back on.
Darkness. Silence.
I knew the distances all too well. The halfway point between the well and the house, under the street, was too far for him to get to, and that suitcase would blow in some cop or security guard’s face. If he left it close to where we were, the time it would take for him to get to safety would cause the same result.
He would die. And in the middle of the realization, the explosion hit. The earth seemed to move against me on the left and expand away on the right.
He couldn’t have gotten away. No one could run that fast.
I wanted to get out. I needed to see where he was, but I had to wait, and the second explosion came on the heels of the first. I cringed because it came so fast.
I didn’t wait a second longer than I had to. I shook the ringing out of my ears and put my hands against the trapdoor. It was red hot, and I snapped my palms back with a curse.
Closing my eyes and steeling myself, breathing, counting three, two, one…
I punched the wood. The burning sensation was nothing compared to the hardness of the surface against my inexperienced hands. But it moved, just a little, shifting to the ledge and over. I saw the room above in the crescent of space between the well edge and the lid, bathed in flickering red light and letting in a blast of heat.
I shifted and wedged my foot above me, pushing at the lid with the soles of my feet, and kicked upward. The lid creaked and shifted, the circle breaking at the diameter. Beyond it, the ceiling smoked. I scrambled out of the hole, careful not to touch anything that could have been hot.
