Page 5 of Taking Savannah
The compound is quiet but not silent. Quiet and silent are different things. Silent is the Delaware apartment where the only sounds were the refrigerator cycling and boots on the stairs twice a day. Quiet is pipes in the walls and a generator somewhere beneath the floor and footsteps in the corridor that pass my door and keep going. People exist on the other side of these walls. The compound is full of people, and that is what keeps me from losing my shit entirely.
Here's what I know…
The Bonaccorso family. Mafia, obviously. I'm not an idiot. I poured drinks at their waterfront club for eight months. I knew what the place was by the end of my first week. The men in the back booths with the tailored suits and the shoulder holsters and the conversations that went dead the second I came to refill their glasses. The cash payments, the off-books VIP room, the manager who answered his phone in Italian and hung up looking gray. I knew all of it and I stayed because the tips were three hundred a night on a good Friday and Gigi's medical bills didn't pay themselves even after she was gone.
The club, though… that's where everything went to hell.
It was a Tuesday, late, last call already announced. I was wiping the bar and counting my register, which is the bartender version of locking up and getting the fuck out. Two men sat in the corner booth. Not regulars. I'd never seen either of them, and I remember faces the way I remember drink orders, without trying and without forgetting. One was tall, gray suit, expensive watch that he kept checking. The other was shorter, heavier,wearing a jacket that didn't hang right because the gun under his arm pulled the fabric.
They thought I'd left. Lights down, music off, and I was behind the bar in the shadow of the liquor shelf where nobody looks because nobody thinks the bartender is still standing there after the show ends. Invisible. The way women who pour drinks for powerful men are always invisible until they're not and suddenly they want a piece of ass because it’s the only one left.
They talked for eleven minutes. I watched the clock above the register.
Names. Dates. A marina south of the waterfront. A boat called the Meridian Star. Tuesday and Thursday handoffs. Physical exchanges between people embedded in both families, Bonaccorso and Castillo. Not digital, paper. Hard copies in briefcases swapped on a boat at a dock where the security cameras don’t work.
They talked about routes that were blown and soldiers who were feeding information and to whom. They used a name I didn't recognize, Kreiss, and they used it the way you'd use the name of the person who signs your checks. Someone above them. Someone they reported to.
And then the tall one said the thing that made me stop breathing.
"Both families. Bonaccorso and Castillo. They still think they're fighting each other."
The shorter one laughed. "Let them."
I stood behind the bar with a rag in one hand and a bottle of Windex in the other and I did not move for three full minutes after they left. I finished closing and locked up and drove home and sat in my car in the parking lot of my building for forty-five minutes with the engine running and my hands on the wheel, telling myself I didn't hear what I heard.
Two days later, the men came.
I still don't know how they knew. Maybe the club had cameras I didn't see. Maybe one of the booth guys glanced toward the bar at the wrong second and caught my outline behind the shelf. Maybe the Bonaccorso manager noticed I'd clocked out late and mentioned it to someone who mentioned it to someone who decided a bartender who stayed past closing on the wrong Tuesday was a problem worth containing.
Three men. Five in the morning. My apartment door opened before I was out of bed, and the first one had a hood over my head before I could get to the knife in my nightstand. They zip-tied my wrists, walked me downstairs, put me in an SUV with tinted windows, and drove for two hours without saying a goddamn word.
The Delaware apartment had one bedroom, one bathroom, and bars on the windows with screws still shiny from installation. They brought food twice a day and left it inside the door and never spoke to me beyond instructions.Don't touch the windows. Don't make noise. Don't try to leave. One of them, theyoungest, left me a pack of playing cards on the third day. Only kindness anyone showed me in fourteen days. I played solitaire until my eyes burned and won eleven times and lost a hundred and sixty-three and counted every single game because it was the only thing that kept the walls from closing.
And then the door opened and a man with dark eyes and a crooked grin walked in and I threw a floor lamp at his head.
Emilio.
I roll the bottle cap between my fingers and think about him. The diner. The way he sat across from me and ate eggs and left a tip that was twice the bill and looked at me the way people don't look at you when they're planning to hurt you. The way he said "vixen" and sounded pleased about it.
I don't trust him. I don't trust anyone in this building. Trust got burned down to the studs in that Delaware apartment, and the reconstruction hasn't started.
But he bought me pancakes. He said the lock worked from the inside. And when it clicked, he didn't look relieved. He looked like that was the bare minimum a room should offer, and he'd have torn the door off the hinges if it hadn't.
I noticed that and felt fucking weird about it.
I wake up with the bottle cap pressed into my palm hard enough to leave a circle on the skin and my neck stiff from sleeping sitting up and my shoes still on. The room is full of bright morning light.
The compound sounds different now. Footsteps with direction instead of patrol. Voices down the corridor, low and businesslike. The smell of coffee from somewhere below me, strong enough to reach the second floor through the vents, and my body responds to it before my brain does. I need caffeine the way some people need oxygen, which is to say constantly and without apology.
I get up. My back is killing me. I go to the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror for the first time in two weeks.
I look likeshit.
Not broken, though, mind you. Gigi would have made the distinction. Broken is when you stop caring what the mirror shows you. Shit is when you care and the mirror doesn't have anything nice to say back. Dark circles under my eyes, lips cracked, hair beyond help. I haven't had product or a proper wash in fourteen days, and the curls have given up entirely. My nails are bitten past the quick on three fingers, angry red crescents where I chewed through the nail bed during the hours in Delaware when the solitaire wasn't enough and the walls were winning.
I wash my face and find a toothbrush still in packaging on the counter, which means someone thought ahead. I brush my teeth, pull my hair back with the band from my wrist, and look again.
Better. Still not good.
