Page 82 of Mafia Queen
“He needs to be disarmed,” I say without raising my voice, yet I’m heard.
Men come to push the driver against the car. They take his gun and rifle through his pockets, then back off. He stands and looks up at me, indicating the back door as if asking if he can open it.
“Vai!” I shout, telling them to get the hell on with it. “Sbrigati!”
The driver opens the back door. From my angle, I can only see his back as he takes a cane, and the stretch of his shirt across his shoulders as he strains to hoist the passenger to his feet. Then he moves enough to reveal an old man in a suit it’s too warm for. He gives the man the cane and reaches into the back seat again.
It could be a submachine gun. A bomb. A body. And all I can do is lower the gun from my shoulder and aim it at the end of my extended arms. I suck at this. If I have to shoot them, I have a better chance of hitting them if I aim at the sky. I can’t hit a soda bottle, and I’m just a girl who wanted to spend her summer on the beach.
I’ve never been so terrified in my life.
From the back, the driver lifts a box the size of a six-pack cooler.
Could be a bomb.
Could be a body part.
Could be a trick to get us all killed.
Turning around, I see Celia and Loretta holding hands on the dining room patio, hanging back as if negotiating a battle between fear and curiosity.
No one’s going to die for me today.
I rush down the ladder and reach the bottom, behind the locked gate, just as the strangers approach the place where the gate opens.
“Get back,” I hiss to the men who encroach out of a sense of propriety over my safety.
The old man is stooped and slow, bent at the waist in a summer hat and a suit cut for bad posture. His metal-tipped cane is unsure on the ragged ground. The driver does not rush the old man, but walks reverently beside him, holding the box by a handle on either side. No one is rushing them. Especially not me. I don’t want to see what’s in that box.
They stop at the gate, a few feet away, separated by wrought-iron bars spaced far enough apart to get an arm or a bullet through.
“Speak,” I bark with a confidence I don’t feel. “Before I let them shoot you.”
The driver answers in a boom. “We’ve come for the daughter of Camilla Cavallo.”
I’m the wife of Santino DiLustro and the sister of Rosetta Moretti. But I am also my mother’s daughter, and I don’t know why that’s important.
Il Blocco’s face is blotted with a patchwork of brown age spots, and the long, gray hairs of his eyebrows cover dark indents where the floodlights cover his eyes in shadow. His bottom lip sags, but one edge of his mouth turns up in a smirk.
“I am Nazario Coraggio.” He speaks Italian. “I was your mother’s consigliere.”
Mamma? She worked the register at my father’s grocery store. She was a wife and a mother. A daughter to my bossy and controllingNonna. She loved my father, who probably had a consigliere—long ago, when this man was just beginning to be old.
He must have advised my father, and now his brain is addled with age. The secrets he’s kept all these years are breaking his brain. He may be powerful or rich, but he is also elderly and confused.
“You’re mistaken,” I say. “My mother didn’t need a consigliere’s advice.”
“Probably not,” he says, rocking his cane back and forth. “But she got it anyway.”
Carmine and his men approach the consigliere from behind, ready to turn this violent with half a word from me. I should have them grab these two beforeIl Blocco’s dementia gets someone killed.
Except this old man isn’t confused.
He hasn’t been confused a day in his life.
I take a step back and issue a command.
“Open the gate.”
