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Red, White & Dead

Page 28

by Laura Caldwell


  “Where did you live the whole time?” I asked him.

  “ Rome,” he told me. “Mostly Rome, but also Milan and Naples.”

  “What did you do with yourself?”

  “I joined the antimafia office. I practiced my Italian. And I went back into profiling.”

  “Trying to bring down the Camorra.”

  A solemn nod.

  “You just couldn’t leave it behind.”

  His face turned fast to mine, his eyes flashing, then he looked back at the seat in front of him. “I knew nothing else.”

  “So when I went to the antimafia office in Rome, did they let you know?”

  “Not right away, but yes. Hardly anyone knows that I work with the office. Almost no one knows my real name or identity. But word of your visit eventually got to some people I know. And they briefed me.”

  “And then I was followed to Naples, and those guys came after me with guns.” Something occurred to me. “Elena said that those men were just trying to scare me, because the Camorra doesn’t chase, they kill.”

  “That’s true.”

  I felt a little frozen with fear. “Did you send those guys after me? Were you trying to scare me into going home or something?”

  “No.” His voice was curt, distinct. “Of course not. I never want you to be scared. From what I can tell, there must be a Camorra spy in the Rome antimafia office, a mole who told someone you were in there. They must have figured out you were going to Naples and followed you.”

  I replayed that night when the guys were chasing me, when they were getting off the elevator near ours in the hotel and ran down the hall toward our room, only to get clocked with that door.

  “That was you, wasn’t it?” I said. “The door opening when those guys were running down the hallway at the hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very Laurel and Hardy of you.”

  He chuckled again. “Sometimes you have to go back to the basics.”

  I folded my hands in my lap and looked down at them. “Did you ever remarry?”

  A sad smile, a definitive yet soft, “No.”

  “Do you have any other kids?”

  A shake of his head, a flash of pain across his face, as if the thought seared him.

  He seemed so strong, someone who could endure anything, even the forced loss of his family, and yet, now that the secret was out, there was something that arose from within him and was revealed in his eyes. It was…What was it? He was wounded. Yes, my father was a wounded man.

  How strange to think of him alive, as someone suffering right now, instead of thinking of him as my father, who passed away when I was young.

  “And you,” he said. “I know a little more about you. And I have to say, from what I saw, I liked that Sam.”

  That Sam…I felt a wave of sadness. It was so powerful I closed my eyes against it. But then I realized it was just that-only a wave, one that crested and went away. When it was gone, I opened my eyes and looked into my father’s-green eyes that looked like mine (minus my eyeliner and two coats of mascara).

  Thinking of Sam and me, of the couple we used to be, made me think of another couple, and I had to ask. “Does Mom know?”

  “That I’m alive?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head no.

  The internal wounds seemed to pain him now, and his eyes took on an anguished tint.

  “I guess we need to figure out how to handle this,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yes, there’s a lot to think about.”

  I said, “Who did you tell?”

  He looked at me questioningly.

  “I mean who did you tell that you faked your death? Anyone?”

  “Elena.”

  “But no one else?”

  “Of course not. That’s part of the deal.”

  “No one. Wow. That can’t be good for you.”

  He shot me a question with his eyes.

  “You know,” I said, “you must be really fucked up.”

  He laughed. I laughed. Then we started to laugh harder. It wasn’t particularly humorous, but somehow a funny bone had been struck, one in both me and my dad. My dad. That was the first time I had thought of him like that since I learned he was alive.

  61

  Dez Romano looked at his date next to him at the bar at Fulton Lounge. She was a medical student at the University of Chicago, having returned to school after a successful career at a pharmaceutical company, and she was fucking hot.

  Dez thought back to when he was growing up and how he’d believed women were either gorgeous or they were brilliant. Never both. Or at least that’s what his father always told him. Thank God he eventually realized that wasn’t the case. And in a way, today’s breed of women, like this one, had shown him the path and made Dez want to be at a different level himself.

  When Dez married his ex-wife, they were both from the South Side of Chicago. He envisioned that his marriage would be like that of his parents’-his father ran the roost, his mother did whatever his father told her to. Dez thought he wanted that kind of relationship. Dez’s wife, however, ran circles around him. She got a college degree when he didn’t. She went on to get her MBA. During all that time, all that education, he was the one who had the pocket change.

  He was just starting to work with the Camorra and learn the business. There wasn’t much money to go around, there certainly wasn’t any glamour, but he was the one, not his ex, who was making whatever money they had, he funded her financial loans. After finishing MBA school, his ex skyrocketed. She worked for one big corporation after another, eventually moving up to a CFO position at a Fortune 500 company. She had an affair with another executive and left Dez. She didn’t even marry that executive. It occurred to Dez years later that she might have had the affair just for an excuse to walk out. After they were done, she just moved up and up and up, and now she was one of the top execs at her company, set to take it over in the next few years.

  Dez was glad for the divorce. It had kicked him in the ass, made him step up his work with the Camorra. He wasn’t able to seek success the way his ex had. He wasn’t going to get an education and climb his way up the ranks. But as he started dating this new breed of women, who were so feminine, so sexy, and so in charge of their intellect and their lives, he decided he wanted to be like that, too.

  “So,” the med student said, swiveling on her stool and facing him, “what should we do after this?” She had a guy’s name, Chad or something, and she was from a little town in Tennessee. But she owned this town now, or she was about to, like so many other women like her. She had been telling him how the pharmaceutical company was paying for med school, how she would eventually go back to work for them. “Nightcap?” she said, cocking her head to her shoulder.

  “Great.” Dez left the topic of sex alone, although he knew she wanted him to bring it up, to make a flirty, seductive overture of some sort so it was clear exactly what they were about to do. But no, Dez liked making these women work, and then let them think he was taking a backseat, that they were subtly in charge of it all.

  He had to admit, he thought he’d played that route with Izzy McNeil, thought that he’d played her to talk to him, to hang out with him. The truth was he’d seen her glancing at him the moment he walked into Gibsons. Of course, he realized now that he was the one who’d been played. Of course she had glanced. Of course she had spoken up. She had been sitting there specifically waiting for him to come into the restaurant.

  He hadn’t been able to figure out what McNeil wanted at first. When they were at the nature museum, she’d tossed out the comment about working for the Feds, but he didn’t believe that, not unless the Feds were doing things really, really differently. Instead, he figured she worked for the bank, the one that had brought Michael down. And now he knew she was probably working for her father, working to bring down the Camorra.

  But ultimately it didn’t matter who she worked for. Soon, she wouldn’t be working for anyone ever agai
n.

  The med student leaned forward a little and sipped her wine. She flashed him a gorgeous smile. She had long, shiny brown hair that hung flat next to her head. She looked at her watch. “I have rounds tomorrow with the gastro service at five o’clock.”

  “I have to be up early myself. But we still have time for our nightcap.”

  He downed the last bit of red wine in the glass in front of him, then he made like he was going to signal the bartender for another round.

  She caught his arm and smiled. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He thought of what he really had to do tomorrow. He had to wait for Izzy McNeil and her father to come back to the United States, had to wait for Mommy McNeil to show up. And once he had the McNeil family together, he would kill them.

  Dez had arranged something ingenious, if he did say so himself. He had gotten the place rigged so that on his command, a natural gas leak would seep into the building. His boss, La Duca, appreciated the beauty of the irony and had told Dez that a well-placed gas leak was what had led to the death of Grandma McNeil down in Arizona. Eventually, a buildup of gas in the basement of the Mexicans’ building would ignite the flame of a commercial water heater and the building would go up, and the McNeils would fry, just the way Grandma had, just the way they thought Christopher McNeil orginally had.

  The cops would suspect that the Mexicans had set their own building aflame. They would have good reasons to think that. Dez had been slipping information to the authorities, through one of his other dealers, about the Mexicans. Their group was getting arrested one by one. The walls were closing in. And the motive for the four bodies discovered there, four bodies that the Mexicans sent up in flames along with their building, would be clear. Charlie McNeil had gotten into trouble with drugs. Trouble he couldn’t pay for or dig himself out of, and so to send a message, the Mexicans had lured his family in and taken them all out. They were ruthless, those Mexicans. The cops wouldn’t come looking for anyone else.

  There was one thing Dez had to do before he killed the McNeils. And this part La Duca didn’t know about. He would get Christopher McNeil to talk before he died, get him to tell Dez the identity of the top boss, the one in Naples. McNeil must know who that boss was, having studied the Camorra and worked against them in secrecy for as long as he had. Once Dez knew the identity of the boss, he wouldn’t be relying solely on information trickling down through La Duca. He wouldn’t be operating so much in the dark. Instead, he would know his audience, and he could create his other plans-the ones for the rest of his life, the Camorra, the city of Chicago. He intended to play the city the way it used to be played-with personal agendas served, but always giving back to the community at large. Letting the cops bust the Mexicans certainly had that theme in mind.

  And then, yes. He was going to bring the Camorra, the new version of the Camorra, to the world.

  The med student stood and tucked her black alligator purse under her arm, jerking her head at the door with a smile.

  Sex, Dez decided, would take the edge off and kill some time. He stood, giving her the same smile back.

  He trailed her to the door, looking at her ass. Too bad Izzy McNeil hadn’t turned out to be Easy McNeil, like this chick. The interesting thing about these women was that most of them had finally realized that it didn’t lessen their power to have sex with a guy. Totally the opposite. It empowered them. It was just that some of them waited longer than others, waiting until the time was right for them. He had the feeling McNeil wouldn’t have let him close to her physically anytime soon, even if she hadn’t been playing him. Which only made her more attractive.

  But tonight he would close his eyes and pretend the girl he was slipping inside was la testa rossa.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and gestured at the door.

  62

  The plane hit the runway with a startling bump. I grabbed the arms of the seat and looked at my dad. He didn’t even flinch. He just continued to argue with me about whether I would go with him to find Charlie. “This is not a play thing, Isabel.”

  “Not a play thing? I’m not a kid, and I know it’s not a play thing, and this is my brother. He hasn’t seen you in twenty-two years. He doesn’t even know you’re alive. If you do find him, you can’t just show up out of nowhere. It’s bad enough he’s been kidnapped…” My voice caught on some tears that flushed up out of nowhere. “How much trauma do you want him to suffer?”

  My dad said nothing.

  From a few rows behind us, Maggie said, “You guys okay?”

  I turned around and glanced at her. Her hair was matted on one side, standing up in golden crests on the other. Maggie, being Maggie, had slept just fine on the flight. Elena didn’t look as if she’d even closed her eyes.

  “Aunt Elena?” I said. “Do you need anything?”

  She sent me a beseeching look, shook her head. My stomach twisted with anguish for her.

  Wanting something, anything, to distract me, not knowing what I should say to my dad, I turned back around and took my phone out of my bag, switching it on. A bunch of text messages flooded in. A couple were from Theo. How are you? How is the plane? I can’t wait to see you.

  I grinned at those texts, seeing his image in my mind. Theo had shown me in Naples and Ischia that he could handle more than just acrobatic sex in my apartment. But now?

  Now, I decided, I wanted to feel normal for a second. I started to text Theo back, then stopped. Mayburn had said it was difficult, nearly impossible, to tap cell phones, and he’d said mine hadn’t been tampered with before I left. But what if someone had done something to it when I was in Italy? I couldn’t imagine that was the case, since the phone had almost never been out of my possession. And then I decided that even if it somehow was tapped, it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t give out any identifying info. I wanted just an everyday exchange in a world in which every day lately had been surreal.

  We just landed, I wrote to Theo. Can’t thank you enough.

  What are you doing today? he wrote back.

  Looking for my brother. You?

  Good luck. Let me know if I can do anything else. I’m working today and then going to Old St. Pat’s.

  The block party?

  Yeah, they’re doing it early this year. But if you need me, just tell me what you want me to do.

  I could think of nothing to say to respond to that. God, block parties. They were staples of Chicago summers, but the thought of attending one seemed too childlike and innocent.

  I glanced across the aisle at my dad. He was real now, not just an imaginative theory, and Charlie, the most innocent and childlike person I knew, was in real trouble. I tossed my nonswearing campaign to the Chicago winds and thought, Jesus fucking Christ, if they hurt my brother I will…I will what? What would I do?

  Futility-one of the worst feelings in the world, and second only to the big doozy, regret-flooded into my brain, into me, until I felt as if I was swimming in it.

  I looked back down at my phone, leaving the last text from Theo unanswered. I began scrolling through my e-mails, trying once again for distraction. One e-mail was from Dena Smith, a partner at a law firm where I had applied last week.

  I stared at that e-mail. We were pleased to receive your résumé, and we are, in fact, seeking lateral attorneys at this time…But the words didn’t matter. It seemed so long ago that I cared about something as mundane as a job.

  I clicked to the next e-mail. It was from Charlie! Sent a few hours ago.

  “Oh my God, Dad,” I said. We both froze for a second. I had just called him Dad. Out loud. “It’s an e-mail from Charlie.”

  The plane slowed. My father unclicked his seat belt and shot out of his seat, leaning over me to see the phone. “What does it say?”

  “Nothing. But hold on, there’s an attachment.” I clicked to open it. An eternity passed. Then there was the image. Of Charlie. His curly brown hair was messed. And his face…bleeding and swollen on one side.

  “Oh God,” I said. �
��Charlie.”

  Below the photo was a caption. I read it fast, handing the phone to my dad. There, below the picture, someone had written, Isabel McNeil. Come see your brother. Bring your daddy, too. Both of you or there’s no deal. Bring cops and your bro goes bye-bye. You’ll get the address later, and when you do, you’ll have 25 minutes to get here, or he’s gone.

  63

  The plane doors opened and bright morning light filled the cabin. It made me suck in my breath. The air smelled like the Midwest somehow-like trees, like something scrubbed clean but with a lingering layer of smoke. I inhaled again. Chicago. I was back on my turf, in my hometown.

  Following my dad, I moved to the plane door and walked down the few steps to the ground and swiveled my head around. I’d never been to that airport in the suburbs before. A small one-story building stood to the right. I looked to the left and flinched. Four men, dressed all in black, stood there.

  “Isabel,” my father said. He was a few steps from the plane. “They’re here for us.”

  I noticed that the men wore black baseball hats, just like my father had that day when I’d seen him outside of Gibsons. I took a step closer to them and lowered my voice. “Who are they?”

  “Old friends.”

  “FBI?”

  “No. I have no association with the FBI anymore. They don’t know I exist.”

  “But these guys do?” Other questions hung in the air. And your wife didn’t? I didn’t?

  He gave a terse nod. “Only recently.” No other explanation was forthcoming.

  The men walked toward my father and he to them. They all bent their heads down as if in a huddle. A minute later they broke apart. One of them handed my father a set of keys, then two others walked to one of two black town cars and stood outside it.

  “They’ve been here since we left Italy yesterday. They’ve done a complete sweep, and there’s no one here at the airport. Either Romano couldn’t figure out what airport we were coming into or…”

 

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