Page 93 of Ruthless Daddy
“You may call me whatever you like,” the voice said. “It does not matter. I would like you to listen, please, for one minute, and then we will be finished.”
Across the room Pietro was still at the stove with Tonio. Tonio was laughing about something. Olimpo had gone over to investigate the smell of the pan and was being told, in Italian, that he was a terrible dog and a worse friend. I held the phone very tightly against my ear and I did not move and I did not speak.
“You will go to an address I am about to give you,” the voice said. “You will arrive in one hour. You will come on foot from the south. You will be alone. You will not bring a phone. You will not bring a weapon. You will not bring the Sicilian. You will not bring any of his cousins. You will not bring the Caruso brothers. You will not tell them where you have gone. If any of these conditions are not met — if I see one of them on a corner, if I see a car from the family on a side street, if I hear a helicopter, if the old man’s name appears in a single telephone call from your apartment in the next sixty minutes — then I will shoot Mr. Wendell Pierce in the head, and you will hear it on a recording I will send to this number, and then I will leave Chicago, and the next contract on you life will be cheaper because we will not worry about hurting you. Do you understand me, Madame.”
I had not known Wendell’s surname.
It was the thing my mind seized on, stupidly, the small flat horror of it—that this stranger knew Wendell’s surname and I did not.
“Madame. Do you understand me.”
“Yes.”
“Repeat back to me the conditions, please.”
“One hour. South on foot. No phone. No weapon. No one from the family. No call from the apartment. I understand.”
“Very good.” He sounded mildly pleased, the way a teacher sounds when a slow student has finally produced the correct sum. “The address is as follows.”
He gave me an address. South Side. A street I did not know.
“Mr. Pierce would like to say something else to you,” the voice said. “I am giving him the phone for ten seconds. Please do not waste them.”
The phone moved again.
“Miss Anna.” Wendell. Very small. “Don’t come, Miss Anna. Don’t — “
The phone moved a third time.
“Sixty minutes from now,” the voice said. “I will be timing from this moment. Goodbye, Madame Ancelotti.”
The line went dead.
I sat with the phone against my ear for another second after it ended. The screen had already gone dark. The dial tone that I had been half-expecting did not come; phones did not do that anymore. There was only the quiet of a closed line and the quiet of the room and, somewhere behind both, my own pulse, doing something very fast in the side of my neck.
I lowered the phone. I set it down, face up, on the corner of the desk next to the half-eaten pear and the espresso cup Sal had left.
Across the room Tonio said something to Pietro and Pietro answered, in Italian, in the slow patient register he used for conversations with his cousin that he was not really paying attention to. He had not looked over at me. Neither of them had. The phone call had taken less than ninety seconds.
The analyst in my head came online the way she always did, the way she had at Halberd, the way she had in the courtroom, the way she had at three a.m. in a Greyhound station in Indianapolis when a man two benches over had reached into a duffel bag and I had not yet decided whether to run.
This is a trap.
This is obviously a trap.
I stood up and the chair pushed back two inches on the wood floor and Olimpo, who had returned from his pan investigation, lifted his head and looked at me with mild dog-curiosity and then put his head back down.
Nobody else turned.
Walk across the room,the analyst said.Walk across the room right now. Pietro is six meters away. Six meters. Walk.
I walked two meters and then I stopped.
I stopped at the edge of the rug, where the work end of the room gave over to the kitchen end, and I stood there in my socks with my hands at my sides and I did the worst thing I had ever done. I thought about it.
The analyst made her case. She made it fully. She made it the way I had made cases at the firm, the way I had made my case in the courtroom—a clean linear argument with the evidence stacked and the inferences pulled tight. The phone call was a trap. The address was a kill box. Wendell was probably already dead and certainly would be within the hour and my arrival would not change that, because the only currency that bought him another minute of life was my body in the room, and the moment my body was in the room the currency was spent and the transaction was closed. Going alone did not save him. Going alone killed me and killed him both. Telling Pietro was the only move with non-zero survival probability for Wendell, and the only move with non-zero survival probability for me, and the only move that was not actively suicidal.
The analyst was correct. The analyst was completely and obviously correct.
