Page 14 of Mafia Queen
Santino looks at the man clutching his throat, choking up blood that seeps and squirts through the fingers, and through the bright red mask painted on his face, are two matching eyes—unbandaged, unwounded by a cameo pin—both as big and soft as meatballs.
In the scuffle, I lost sight of who I was attacking. The shard drops from my fingers.
“Santino,” I say, still in shock. “That’s not Damiano.”
“This? No. This is Arturo Tabona.” He lays his hand over the one pressing the jugular.
I could do something. Stanch the wounds. Take him to the hospital to be sewn up. As long as there’s pressure on the arteries, he might even survive long enough to get to the ER, but not long enough to avoid starving his brain.
My living husband crouches by him.
“Will you accept children lovingly from God?”
“Ke-ke-ke…” Each attempt is a cough.
“Shh, now.” Santino reaches into the boy’s pocket and takes out his phone. He presses the bottom circle to the owner’s thumb, and it opens. The wallpaper is a sunset scene of a happy couple. “Ah. Anna Silvio. I’ll visit her and offer condolences.”
The tender eyes go wide with an expression of terror. Arturo already knows what it’s taking me a moment to figure out. The condolences aren’t benign. They’re a threat, and he’s going to be dead in a few minutes—unable to protect his family or girlfriend—because I killed him.
“And bring them up according to the law of Christ and his church?”
That’s Father Alfonso’s last chant as he’s led away. The king doesn’t move.
“Where is Damiano Orolio?” he asks the dying man. “Where did he run?”
“Dh-dh-dh. Nuh-nuh.”
Santino takes the pressure off the wound I inflicted, letting it spurt life in a jet. There’s no last gasp. No audible last breath of life. Just a silence so deep I have to look down to make sure Arturo’s still lying there—and I see it. Clear as words on a page. His eyes go from living to dead. Full of fear to fully empty. His skin contracts against the muscle by a fraction of a hair.
Last summer, I attended in the ER during the wildfires. A fireman died on the table, and it wasn’t like this. Maybe because we were trying to keep him alive. Or because he had no last words. Or maybe I hadn’t felt as if my own soul was being sucked away when he died because I hadn’t killed him.
The silence from the now-absent priest couples with the departure of a soul, and the sounds echoing inside the church drown out everything.
There’s only Santino, but outside of that, I’m distracted and small, stuffed into a padded box and sealed inside. This is over, but I can’t digest what just happened or what’s going to happen. There’s only this man who rose from the dead and came for me.
Back from the dead, staring down at me, reaching into his jacket pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He opens it with one hand, thumbs one free, and bites the filter to pull it out.
“He got away,” I say, stating a fact, expressing fear, and looking for reassurance in just three words.
“I’ll find him.” Santino goes back into his breast pocket and comes out with his steel Zippo. It’s bent, and he has to use two hands to open it. “Then I’m going to kill him.”
He lights up. I’ve never smoked, but when I smell the raw, unburned tobacco, I realize how much I want to.
“We checked everywhere, boss,” a man says from outside the width of my connection with Santino.
“Get the car,” my husband replies.
The men—maybe half a dozen of them—take off out the transept door. Gas cans litter the ambulatory, about twenty feet away, and the white linen altar cloth is soaked piss-yellow.
“The fuse ends at your feet,” he says.
With ascritch,Santino spins the flint and hands me the flaming Zippo. I take it and get a good look at it for the first time. The steel bends in the center around a bullet-sized indentation.
He had this in his jacket pocket when Gia shot him.
Smoking saved his life.
“Do it now before the fumes catch.”
