“Who?” she repeated.
He placed his elbows on the table, his palms came together in the attitude of prayer and he brought his hands to his bowed face until the knuckles of his thumbs were pressed to his nose.
“You ready for this?” he asked her.
She nodded and rubbed her hands up and down her denim thighs.
He took up an iPad and he turned it to face her. “You recognize this man?”
She hadn’t known what to expect. She thought that when she was shown the picture there should be some recognition. She should know the face of someone who wanted her dead. She should see the face and have an awesome revelation: oh, the man my father wronged! ...Or the guy I cut off in traffic, or my ex-boyfriend, even a face from one of the families... Some soldier who had worked for her father or one of the other Dons, and now he was deluded by visions of grandeur.
Nothing.
The face she was shown sparked no recognition. The photo was of a man getting into a vehicle. Couldn’t tell the vehicle, only the roof was visible, and it was out of focus. The man was looking in the general direction of the camera but she sensed the photographer was hidden. The man was casting a glance over his shoulder before he got in his vehicle. He had sunglasses in his hand, poised as if he were just putting them on or just taking them off. He was lean, vaguely handsome, she would need more than one photo to decide. Blonde hair, square jaw, black eyes like Rocco, or maybe her own. His blonde hair seemed bleached lighter but she got the impression he was naturally light. Light hair and black eyes, cold black eyes. There was a savagery in his eyes even evident in this static image. Rocco tilted the screen so he could get a look as well. The corners of his mouth turned down and he shrugged. She felt a weightlessness, a hopelessness suddenly. Rocco looked to her and she shook her head no. He shook his head as well. Neither of them had seen him before. She’d hoped this would provide answers. She turned to Killian, couldn’t hide the dejection, and she murmured, “No, I don’t know him.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Killian nodded, and he brought the screen to himself now and he swiped with a finger, turned it back to her. Said, “How about this wee boy? ...You recognize him?”
On the screen was a young boy in swim trunks. A wild looking kid, one she recognized. He was mugging for the camera, smiling but frowning, showing off that he was missing a tooth. He made a muscle with his scrawny eighth-grade arm and was squeezing some other boys out of the picture with his antics. His feet were planted in white sand.
“My cousin? ...Flavio?”
Killian gently gripped her wrist and she looked down at his hand, at the tattoo that scribbled down from under his cuff, the tail of a dragon curled down to his knuckles. “They’re both Flavio, love.”
He swiped the photo back to the man getting into a car, said, “This is Flavio as a man. He’s become quite a dangerous one. He is the one who ordered you dead.”
“Flavio?” she whined. Impossible. “Why...why would my cousin want to kill me?”
“He’s not your cousin.” His hand that held her wrist squeezed her gently again and he said, “He’s your half-brother.”
She reeled. Almost literally reeled. Her whole world coming at her so fast the chair was tipping over and she was washed away as if by a tidal wave. She flattened both palms on the cool table before she did end up on the floor. The room spun as she struggled wildly to comprehend. “My half...what?”
“I’m sure of it,” he said. “Your father had been sending money to him in Sicily his whole life. Sent it to Flavio’s mother and then when she died he sent it to a trust held by an Italian lawyer named Benedetto Carlucci. Not that much money, but it kept him fed and clothed and a few times it even kept him out of jail.”
“Out of jail?”
“Flavio was a wild one,” he said, cocking his head, and seeming to surmise some of the things he’d read about the boy who she thought was her cousin.
She shrugged away Killian’s hold on her arm and she stood, walked backwards then away from the table and leaned her ass against the kitchen counter. She brought both her hands up and covered her face, stared into the floor. “Flavio?”
“Flavio is known as Flavio Vacca. That was his mother’s surname. He never had a father. He’s risen to some prominence in Sicily but not as a made man—as a man who has made a name for himself for running a small guerrilla army of bloodthirsty soldiers that seem to operate for any family. Anyone who will pay. He’s made some money and he has a nasty reputation but he is not a made man. He has no Family. He’s like the private contractor of the Sicilian underworld. He facilitates, but he has no loyalty.”
“Why would he want me dead?” she said, her eyes welling with wet that threatened to spill over.
“My feeling is that he knows your father is his father. Knows that he passed and knows he can contest the inheritance and the holdings.”
“Can he?”
“You know the world better than I.”
She nodded. Rocco stood now and as he came to her she put her arms out and he held her.
Killian said, “My guess is he wants a family. He wants to be made. He wants to rule. He must think he’s owed it.”
A tear rolled down her cheek as she began to fathom the betrayal. Her father had lied to her. Spending those summers in Sicily he would go once a week and she would stay a night or two with her father’s sister (a woman he told her was his sister). They had a small house in a beach town near Siracusa. She would go with Flavio and some of his friends and they would hang out at the beach. Flavio was a wild kid. Killian got that right. He was a loud mouth, had a hot temper that came quickly. Even in his early teens and younger she knew he was trouble. She thought of her aunt. The woman she knew as her aunt. She wasn’t? She wasn’t her real aunt like her father had told her. They would hug, they would kiss cheeks… Did her mother know? She came to Sicily with them, but those days spent with Flavio, Daniella’s mother stayed alone at the house they had rented.
“He can have it. He can have it all. I don’t want it. I want life. I want my life...”
She stifled a cry, didn’t want them to see her suffer like this. The betrayal was enormous. Her father had included her in his tryst. She was complicit. She’d played with her half-brother, calling him cousin, while her own father played house with another woman, a woman he was cheating on her mother with. It was insupportable. Another tear rolled down her cheek. “Papa,” she whispered. Wished she could talk to him, cry to him, and beg him to tell her why. How could he be so cold?
“Excuse me,” she said, gently pulled away from Rocco and she left the room, her feet moving quicker the closer she got to the dining room and the bed. The tears were coming and she needed to be alone.
rocco
Rocco stared at his hands for a good long time. Killian sat wordlessly next to him. After a while he looked up and when his eyes met Killian’s he felt his tension ease. Not from what he gleaned from his good friend, but a certain settling solace came to him. He knew what he had to do.
“I’m going to give her one.”
Killian’s brow lowered and his head cocked. “One of what?”
Rocco leaned forward, said with great gravity, “One of...those.”
Recognition flared his friend’s eyes, brought back their sparkle. “Ah, well...one of...those.” He winked gleefully, then he leaned back in his chrome-legged chair, easing it rearward so it balanced on just two legs and he sneakily looked down the hall where Daniella had disappeared. When he came back down on all four legs he rested a tattooed hand on Rocco’s forearm, and said, “Mate, you’d be mad not to.”
“First I’m going to need a phone number. Don’t tell me you don’t have it.”
Killian thought a moment, his mouth flicking from side to side, his mustache twitching. He said, “If we leave her here and go on our own she will be livid.”
“That’s why you’re not coming.”
“Rocco...”
“Stay with her. I have to do something and
I need you to keep her safe.”
Killian mushed his fingers into his cheeks above his beard and massaged his face, groaning with frustration. They’d known each other a long stretch, and in that window had lived lives fraught with danger and death, making their friendship one that seemed a hundred years old sometimes. Killian would know not to argue, just to facilitate. “Be careful,” he said. “I didn’t say it...” he looked down the hall again, then leaned close and spoke confidentially. “Didn’t want to upset Daniella...Flavio’s mother...she was...a bad one too...in the end, killed by cops. Went down in a gunfight. Flavio’s her son...” He let the implication hang. Apples don’t fall far from the tree. And Rocco had a whooshing flux of potted marijuana, water on his Cheerios, and his father’s effective straight jab.
He nodded. “But Papa Nero was her father...maybe some of his...I don’t know...clarity...got left to this kid.” He laced his fingers together on the table, eyes absently on his almost empty glass of whisky. He thought of yellow roses then, new beginnings, and how Daniella asked him not to kill.
“A phone number, Killian. And I’ll need your car.”
20
Kill-Switch
rocco
Rocco had watched the warehouse for forty-five minutes but now it was time to go. He threw his binoculars into the duffel bag he had at his feet and zipped it up. He was on the roof of a derelict warehouse in the Lower West Side. Behind him in the bluing dawn was the empty parking lot of a Target, its buzzing backlit sign heard even across four lanes of roadway that were only occasionally cut with the hiss of a passing vehicle. It was 4 A.M. and the city was just coming awake. Ahead of him, beyond a crumbling concrete parapet, beyond the south branch of the Chicago River, was the skyline of the city’s skyscrapers, black against the emerging light. A wink of waking gold sunlight sparkled off the corner of the Prudential Plaza. Below him was the decaying ruin of warehouses that had thrived a hundred years ago when Chicago was a player in the agricultural trade. On his right hand side, looming above him like a medieval fortress, were thirty-five conjoined stone silos that had at one time contained grains. Defunct since even when his deadbeat father was a boy.
He stood on the rusted roof-girder of a warehouse. The material of the roof had collapsed long ago and it was a thirty foot drop to the rubble strewn floor below. Sheets of shredded tarpaulin hung in the rafters underneath him and they whipped and snapped in the winter wind while he’d watched the warehouse immediately adjacent to the one on which he was secretly perched.
He’d called the number Killian had given him. He’d talked to a man representing Flavio. The man spoke acceptable English, heavily accented with Italian. He told the man who he was. Told him he had Daniella, and told him he had an offer. The man put his hand over the phone and under the loud brushing of his skin against the microphone he heard the muffled sound of multiple male voices laughing and arguing in Italian. The man came back and he said they would meet in person. Told him these silos in the abandoned warehouse village near McKinley Park.
Rocco got here first and he surveilled. Pressed against concrete and rusted steel in the cold black winter night he watched them arrive. Hidden in his roost he watched, thirty feet above the floor, black eyes peering like a raven’s. Four SUVs with various modifications. Large tires with huge bright chrome wheels. One had neon under-lighting, burring the snowy ground below in a peculiar shade of teal. Thunderous EDM boomed from their interiors, stereos turned too loud. In the middle of their SUV formation was the sleek low shape of a candy yellow sports car. A Lamborghini. He assumed that must be Flavio. The five vehicles toured the grounds of the abandoned warehouses that segmented this broad concrete patch, settled on a building and then rose a ramp and disappeared inside the black yawning maw of a crumbling warehouse, their headlights leading the way. Rocco watched and listened. Heard their movements, heard their brittle voices through the cold air. Talking to one another in Italian. Now they were quiet. Now the sun was coming up.
If Daniella wanted this to be over but she wanted an end to the bloodshed there was only one way to do this. So he lowered his duffel silently back down to the floor below in a length of rope fed from a hank gripped in his right hand. He descended, retrieved his bag and stealthily made his way to the Target parking lot, snuck behind the building, to Killian’s car he’d left hidden between two dumpsters.
Up until today, hiding in a plumbing closet in the Empire Crest, wedged between pipes, trying to save the love of his life, had been his worst plan ever. This one today was much worse. He was stepping into a nest of vipers with bare feet. It was the kind of thing a man would do when he was in love.
The headlights of Killian’s old Camaro lit up a warehouse wall emblazoned with the bright colorful tags of graffiti, then swooped to the right as he came around the corner of one ruin, and dead ahead was a man waving him to the building where he already knew they had gathered. He passed the man, a joyless unsmiling sentinel hidden behind black sunglasses, jabbing a leather gloved hand towards the warehouse he'd watched them enter. The sun was in the sky now, very low, but the sky was cloudless and it lit the man in a strange summery gold but cast a long cold blue shadow behind him that almost touched the foot of the ramp he would ascend to enter the warehouse.
He steered the Camaro up the ramp, into the gaping gullet of the ruined building, and ahead he could see the congregation. The four black SUVs were parked in a circle, the yellow Lamborghini parked at a jaunty angle in comparison to them inside the ring that they formed. They were near the back of the warehouse and there was a raised concrete platform with long low steps rising up to meet it. On this platform there was a lone chair, and a blonde-haired man sat on it.
The Camaro rumbled in the enclosed space, deep and guttural, its heavy Detroit sound coming back at him off the crumbling walls. Standing in the circle of the cars were a dozen gangsters. Grim men dressed in black overcoats and parkas, rifles slung over their shoulders, their frosted breaths whispering above their heads as they watched him approach. One of them, toothpick in the corner of his mouth, stepped forward and jabbed a finger towards the floor at his feet indicating to where he wanted Rocco to draw the Camaro. He complied, bringing the grill to the man’s gesturing hand then putting the car in park. Guns were pointed at him now, a few of the men putting rifles up in their shoulders and sighting on him. He extended both hands out the open car window.
The one who stood at the hood, called to him, “Come on out,” and he nodded his head and waved his hand in a come-hither gesture. Rocco opened the car door from the outside then eased it wide with his boot. He stepped out.
The one at the hood with the toothpick stepped forward and indicated for Rocco to turn so he could be frisked and Rocco turned his back to him and put his arms out. Ahead of him, on the roof of the Camaro was a black box the size of a smartphone. Magnetized, it clung there and it was barely noticeable. Toothpick shoved him in the middle of his back and Rocco put his hands on the roof of the Camaro, one going around the black box. His ankles were kicked and he spread his legs wider. He was frisked from behind. Satisfied he had no weapon he was roughly spun around. Toothpick saw now that he held the black box. He tried to remove it from his hand and Rocco said, “I wouldn't do that if I were you.”
“Why not?” he sneered.
Rocco looked in his eyes and made a rumbling sound effect of an explosion. “It’s a detonator,” he said. The man took out a pistol and he pointed it in his face, just below the tip of his nose.
Rocco smiled and said, “I wouldn't do that either. It’s a kill-switch. Anything you might do that would take my grip off this box will blow all of us to kingdom come.” He thumbed over his shoulder and in the passenger seat was his duffel bag. Unzipped and yanked open, it was evident there were butcher paper wrapped explosive ingots that read C4. A network of wires criss-crossed over them under the open flaps of the bag.
Toothpick peered into the car, gun still leveled at Rocco and he shouted up to the throne in Italian
what he was looking at.
Soft laughter filled the high open space of the warehouse. Then there was the flapping of wings as a small flock of pigeons scattered above them and moved from one end of the warehouse down to the other. Downy feathers floated around them all in their wake.
“Come,” the man on the chair commanded. Rocco smiled to the one with the toothpick and he eyed him back fiercely. Rocco made his way through the ring of SUVs and to the base of the steps.
“You’re as dangerous as they told me you were,” the man said from his throne. Flavio Vacca, the man from the photograph, Daniella's half-brother, was slumped luxuriously in a wooden chair. The chair was stained the color of cherry and it gleamed with polish. It looked like it belonged in a church, with a high back that extended two feet above Flavio’s head. It was carved with intricate details and Rocco had to imagine that he had brought it with him. Flavio was dressed in steel grey suit pants, a black turtleneck, over it he wore a leather coat with a sybaritic fur collar that his head leaned lazily into as he regarded Rocco through half-lidded eyes. The eyes were black and unfeeling, savage, but they sparkled with an intelligence. His hair was short, bleached blonde, thick, brushed forward messily like a handsome Julius Caesar. His voice was at once deep but grandiloquent—more in tone than grammar. The Italian accent was difficult for him to hide and that manufactured tone was one you would use if you wanted others to think you were educated. The Interpol file on Flavio said he grew up in a prigione-scuola, a sort of Italian reform school. His flair for luxury and drama was strikingly similar to the Taliban warlords of northern Afghanistan.
Rocco mounted the steps that led to the throne like he was ascending a dais. Flavio indicated to stop when Rocco’s eyes were level with his feet, ensuring he’d have to look up at him. Flavio thought he was royalty, or some warrior king but if he asked Rocco to kneel there would be bloodshed today.
Broken (Dying For Diamonds Book 1) Page 17
