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Masked Don

Page 99

by K.C. Crowne

I cover Matthew’s eyes. I tell myself not to look, and I look anyway, just once, at the edge of my vision. Pyke is on his side by the door, exactly where he planted himself to keep them from the hall. His eyes are open. He went down facing them.

They put us in the back of a van, and the doors slam, and the dark closes in.

I put my mouth against Matthew’s hair.

“Daddy’s coming,” I whisper. “You’re holding the map, baby. You’re holding the map.”

CHAPTER 38

ENZO

Three days after the garage, the mansion is a war room.

The elders heard me out yesterday, thanked me for my patience, and asked for a week to consider. Old men always want a week. Leverage only works with a fist behind it, so every hitter I have is here. They fill the dining room and spill into the hall, grim and armed and quiet, waiting to hear how we take Luca Santini apart. I spread the map across my mother’s table and mark it by hand: his warehouses, his cash houses, his transfer points along the expressway.

“Same hour,” I tell them. “Every target. He can’t reinforce what he doesn’t know is burning.”

I’m halfway through the third target when my phone buzzes against the wood.

It isn’t a call. It’s an alert from the app I check more often than I would ever admit to anyone. The first night, I drew a fence around the cabin on the map, a quarter mile in every direction, and the small blue dot that has lived inside it for days has just crossed the line.

The dot is moving.

Not walking. Driving. South on the Northway at eighty miles an hour.

The room goes away. I’m dialing Pyke before I know I’ve picked up the phone. It rings. And rings. I call Danny in the truck. Nothing. The Kowalski brothers. Nothing. I don’t call her. If that phone rings in a car full of Luca’s men, they find it, and I lose the only map I have.

“Anthony.” My voice is very calm, and everyone in the room hears what’s under it. “Who do we have near Lake George?”

“Bobby Tesca. He’s got a bakery in Glens Falls. Twenty minutes out.”

“Send him. Tell him to call me from inside the cabin.”

Nobody moves. Nobody speaks. I stand at the head of my mother’s table and watch the little blue dot crawl down the map toward my city with my whole life inside it, and I think, very clearly, that if it stops moving, I will burn New York to the waterline.

Every part of me wants to send twenty cars north to run them off the road. I don’t. A car full of Luca’s rifles forced off a highway at eighty miles an hour is a coffin with my son inside it. Wherever Luca is taking them, he means to stop there. So I let the dot crawl, and I wait.

Twenty-two minutes later, the phone rings.

Bobby Tesca’s voice is shaking. He has three kids and a bakery, and he hasn’t done this kind of work in a long time. “Boss. It’s bad. Pyke’s in the front room. He took two of them with him. Danny’s in the truck. The Kowalski boys are out back by the trees.” He stops. “There’s a boat tied up at the dock, aluminum, outboard, no numbers on it. Nobody else. Her stuff’s still on the bed. The little one’s shoes are by the door.”

I close my eyes.

One road in. I said it to her like a promise. I put a man on the road and two in the trees, and I never once looked at the water. They came up the road for Danny and across the lake for everyone else, timed to the check-in, so by the time Pyke heard nothing but static, they were already at the door.

Pyke, who made me eat eggs before dawn. Who has a twelve-year-old daughter who rolls her eyes at every word he says.

“Stay with him,” I say. “Don’t let anyone touch him until I send people. And Bobby. Close his eyes.”

When I hang up, the room is so quiet I can hear the clock in the hall.

That’s when I see Genevieve.

She’s at the top of the stairs, one hand on the banister, and her face is the color of ash. She’s looking at me the way people look at a firing squad. Marta’s words come back to me all at once.

Something is going on with her. Promise me you’ll check on her.

“Fifteen minutes,” I tell the room. “Out.”