Chương 8
Melissa nodded.
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“No, you’re the kind who says she knows and then tries to negotiate with her own blood pressure.”
Teresa helped her sit up. “Your baby looks good. Feed him on schedule. Keep him warm. Stop carrying the entire male population of New Jersey.”
In the garage, Adrian was on the floor beside his wheelchair.
Melissa’s heart stopped.
Then she saw the loose wheel.
He and Daniel had removed it to clear a strand of wire wrapped around the axle. Adrian sat with his back against a tool cabinet, one leg extended awkwardly. Daniel crouched beside the chair with a wrench.
“What happened?” Melissa asked.
“Maintenance,” Adrian said.
“You fell.”
“I transferred.”
“Poorly,” Daniel added.
Adrian gave him a cold look.
Teresa stepped over Adrian’s leg and handed him a packet of gauze. “Your palm opened again.”
“I’m surrounded by critics.”
“You’re alive. That’s usually how it works.”
After Teresa left, Daniel locked the garage and switched off the exterior lights.
They could not remain there. Salvatore’s people would eventually trace the van, the wall gate, or Evan’s history. Daniel had already removed its transponder and license plates, but cameras along the route might still identify it.
“My father left another location,” Melissa said.
Daniel’s hands stopped on the wheel bolt.
“Where?”
“You know.”
“I know several.”
“The place with the blue door.”
Daniel looked at Adrian. “No.”
Adrian said, “I don’t enjoy being discussed as luggage.”
“It’s an old union hall in Kearny,” Melissa said. “My father took me there after he showed me the tunnel. He said it was safe if the mansion ever fell.”
“Your father believed my house would fall,” Adrian said.
“My father believed every house falls.”
Daniel stood. “The union hall has been empty for years. Salvatore knows Gabriel used it in the eighties.”
“He knows the building,” Melissa said. “Not the room beneath it.”
“How many secret rooms did your father collect?” Adrian asked.
“As many as your family collected enemies.”
Daniel considered the plan, disliked it, and finally agreed because he had no better one.
They transferred to an older delivery van owned by the bakery. Teresa packed bread, bottled water, diapers, and a thermos of coffee into a cardboard box. Before closing the rear doors, she touched two fingers lightly to Leo’s blanket.
“He doesn’t care what your names are,” she said. “Try to deserve that.”
Daniel drove. Adrian sat in his wheelchair facing backward, the pistol beneath his shirt. Melissa rested on a narrow bench with the baby against her chest.
The city after midnight looked both abandoned and observed. Traffic signals changed for empty streets. Rain smeared storefront lights across the pavement. At a gas station, a man in a hooded sweatshirt stood beneath the awning smoking and arguing into his phone. Two teenagers ran across the road carrying a broken umbrella between them.
Ordinary people continued having ordinary nights.
Melissa found that offensive.
Her life had split into before and after, yet a woman in a laundromat still folded towels beneath fluorescent lights. A delivery cyclist still waited at an intersection, one foot on the curb. Somewhere, a cashier was counting change.
Adrian watched her.
“What?” she asked.
“You always look at people through windows.”
“You always notice.”
“I notice you.”
The words landed badly between them.
Melissa looked down at Leo. “You noticed Melissa Hart.”
“I noticed the woman who hates olives but orders them because she thinks removing them at the table looks childish.”
“That is not a personality.”
“You fold receipts into quarters before throwing them away.”
“That’s worse.”
“You sing the wrong verse of every song.”
“I don’t sing.”
“You do when the dryer is running.”
Daniel glanced at them through the mirror. “I can turn the radio on.”
Neither answered.
The union hall stood behind a chain-link fence near the river, a long brick building with boarded windows and faded lettering above the entrance. Daniel opened the gate with a key from the same ring Evan had carried.
Inside, the air smelled of dust, wet plaster, and old paper. Broken chairs were stacked against one wall. A mural of dockworkers had peeled until several faces were missing.
Melissa led them to a supply closet near the stage. Behind shelves of yellowed meeting minutes, a narrow blue door opened onto a stairwell.
Adrian stared down the steps. “Your family disliked accessibility.”
“My father didn’t know I would marry a man in a wheelchair.”
“He planned the van.”
“He knew about the chair by then.”
Daniel found a freight platform at the far end of the hall, manually operated but functional. It took fifteen minutes to lower Adrian into the basement.
The hidden room beneath the building was larger than Melissa remembered. It contained two cots, a table, canned food, bottled water, an emergency radio, and metal filing cabinets. A portable heater stood beside a generator vent.
On the table lay a fresh newspaper dated that morning.
Daniel picked it up.
“He’s been here,” Melissa said.
A coffee mug sat in the sink with a brown ring drying at the bottom. Beside it was a jar of orange marmalade, her father’s favorite.
Adrian rolled toward the filing cabinets.
“Don’t,” she said.
He stopped.
“This is not your house.”
“No,” he said. “It appears your father had one beneath mine.”
Daniel searched the room while Melissa laid Leo on the center of one cot and changed his diaper. The baby kicked both legs free of the blanket, furious at the cold air. His feet were red and impossibly small.
Adrian positioned his chair beside the cot.
“His toes are long,” he said.
“They’re yours.”
“My toes are normal.”
“Your second toe is longer than your first.”
Daniel opened a cabinet across the room. “I regret surviving tonight.”
Inside the cabinet were ledgers, folders, photographs, and cassette tapes arranged by year. The newest folder carried Salvatore Moretti’s name.
May you like
Melissa picked it up.
The first page was a photocopy of a bank transfer from a construction subsidiary controlled by Salvatore to a private security company registered in Delaware. Subsequent pages listed payments made in the months before Adrian’s shooting. Each payment corresponded to a vehicle rental, a burner phone purchase, or a transfer to one of the gunmen later found dead near the river.
