Chương 3
Claire lowered Lorenzo onto the cot.
He resisted.
“You don’t have another option.”
“I don’t like lying down.”
“Tonight is full of personal growth.”
Emma climbed beside him.
Claire opened the emergency cabinet.
Gauze.
Old.
Tape.
Older.
Scissors rusted at the hinge.
A bottle of iodine that had expired before Emma was born.
“Useless,” she muttered.
Emma opened her toy kit and held out a tiny roll of clean white gauze.
Claire stared.
It was real gauze.
Not much, but real.
She had put it in the toy kit herself months ago after Emma kept stealing adhesive bandages from the bathroom.
Lorenzo looked at the smiling bear over his eyebrow.
“Your daughter may be the best-equipped person in this room.”
“Don’t encourage her.”
Claire lifted the blood-soaked towel.
The wound began seeping again.
She pressed fresh gauze over it, used the cleanest cloth she could find as reinforcement, then wrapped Lorenzo’s torso with strips torn from the linen lining of an old emergency blanket.
He watched her hands.
“You were a nurse?”
“No.”
“You know what you’re doing.”
“I know enough to know you need a hospital.”
“Can’t.”
“Can.”
“I walk into Greenwich Hospital with a bullet wound, police arrive.”
“Yes. That’s generally how bullet wounds work.”
“Then the people upstairs know exactly where I am.”
“The people upstairs already know you’re bleeding in their gardening shed.”
His mouth hardened.
Claire saw that the sentence had reached him differently.
Their gardening shed.
His house.
His grounds.
His people.
“You said Emma heard someone say I was dead.”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Emma said a woman with shiny shoes.”
Emma was arranging the plastic tools in her first-aid kit.
Claire crouched beside her.
“Sweetheart. When you heard the lady talking, where were you?”
“Big room.”
“The upstairs sitting room?”
Emma nodded.
“Who was with her?”
“Men.”
“Which men?”
Emma shrugged.
“Did you know any of them?”
“The one who smells like smoke.”
Lorenzo looked at Claire.
“Paolo.”
“You know a man by how he smells?”
“My cousin smokes cigars in rooms where he’s been asked not to for twenty years.”
Emma added, “And the lady had sparkly shoes.”
Lorenzo’s face went still.
Claire noticed.
“Who?”
He did not answer.
“Lorenzo.”
He disliked hearing his first name from her. She could tell.
That made her use it again.
“Who?”
“My aunt Celeste.”
Claire sat back.
Celeste Marano.
The lady who hosted museum benefits, foundation dinners, cancer fundraisers, and Christmas toy drives from the Duca mansion. The lady who thanked staff individually and once gave Claire two hundred dollars when Emma had pneumonia.
The lady who wore jeweled shoes indoors.
“You’re sure?”
“No.”
“That sounded very sure.”
“It sounded like a name.”
“Does she want you dead?”
Lorenzo looked at Emma.
“Adults use better questions around children.”
Claire nearly laughed at him.
“You’re a mafia boss bleeding under your family’s lawn and now you’re concerned about age-appropriate vocabulary?”
Emma looked up.
“What’s mafia?”
“Nothing,” Claire and Lorenzo said together.
Emma frowned.
Claire said, “A group of people who make bad choices.”
Lorenzo turned his head.
“That is incredibly reductive.”
“You can teach the seminar after you stop bleeding.”
Emma returned to her plastic thermometer.
Claire looked at Lorenzo.
“Why would Celeste think you were dead?”
His breathing slowed.
Not because he was calmer.
Because he was getting weaker.
“I was supposed to be.”
“What happened?”
“Dinner.”
“That is not what happened.”
“Family dinner.”
“With guns.”
“Eventually.”
Claire waited.
Lorenzo did not continue.
She pressed harder against his bandage.
His eyes sharpened.
“Talk.”
“Are you always like this?”
“When a man bleeds on me? Yes.”
“Remind me not to do it again.”
“Talk.”
He looked toward the dark tunnel mouth beyond the room.
“I called a meeting.”
“About?”
“Business.”
She said nothing.
He glanced at her.
“You’re going to make me say it?”
“Yes.”
“Criminal business.”
“Thank you.”
“I wanted certain things shut down.”
“What things?”
“Routes. Warehouses. A crew working out of Bridgeport.”
“Why?”
He hesitated.
That interested Claire.
Not because the answer was complicated.
Because it embarrassed him.
“What were they moving?”
“Pills.”
“Prescription?”
“Fentanyl.”
Claire’s expression changed.
Lorenzo saw it.
“I didn’t authorize it.”
“Does that make the dead people less dead?”
“No.”
The answer came without defense.
That changed something small between them.
Claire did not forgive him. She simply stopped expecting him to argue every point.
“I told Paolo to shut it down,” Lorenzo continued. “He said he had.”
“And he hadn’t.”
“No.”
“Celeste knew?”
“I didn’t know.”
“Now?”
“Now I’m bleeding in my father’s storm room.”
Emma pushed the plastic thermometer toward his mouth.
“No,” Claire said.
Emma lowered it.
Lorenzo said, “I found invoices. Truck manifests. Payments. Paolo was using companies under my name.”
“You’re shocked organized crime lacks transparent accounting?”
His mouth twitched.
“Less surprised than offended.”
“So you called dinner.”
“I called people I thought I could trust.”
“That went well.”
“They shot me in the service corridor.”
“Who?”
“Paolo.”
“Your cousin.”
“Yes.”
“Celeste watched?”
“I never made it back to the dining room.”
Claire understood then.
“You don’t know she was involved.”
“No.”
“You’re guessing because Emma heard her say you were dead.”
“That’s not nothing.”
“No. It isn’t.”
Lorenzo’s eyes closed again.
Claire touched his shoulder.
“Stay awake.”
“I am awake.”
“You’re talking with your eyes shut.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“Don’t quote poetry at me.”
“That wasn’t poetry.”
“You’re bleeding too much to be smug.”
Emma climbed off the cot.
“I get Bunny.”
Claire caught her gently.
“No.”
“He’s alone.”
“No, Emma.”
Her daughter’s lower lip tightened.
Not a tantrum.
Worse.
The silent, wounded look children used when they believed an adult had violated a moral law.
“We can’t go upstairs.”
“Bunny’s scared.”
“I know.”
“You said we don’t leave people when they’re scared.”
Claire shut her eyes for half a second.
Parents made hundreds of statements they never expected to hear used in litigation.
Lorenzo reached inside his jacket.
Claire tensed.
He removed the pistol carefully by two fingers.
May you like
Emma watched.
“Don’t,” Claire said.
