His head rolls on his shoulders until he’s staring straight up at the ceiling. He takes a deep breath and blows it out. “Gun,” he says.
Garcia is already picking it up. “He’s in no condition to use this,” she says, eyeing my husband like he’s just a specimen in a jar. I feel like punching her.
But she’s right.
“Give it…” Luca insists, trying to hold out a hand.
Garcia passes the gun to me instead. “Hope your Mob Boss husband taught you to shoot in between all those crimes and murders he was committing.”
“Foryoursake, I hope I remember those lessons,” I clap back. “I’ll try not to wing you, huh?”
Frank and Darla have found an open door and are waving us into a room off the side. We manage to get in there before the invading army—that’s what it sounds like, echoing down the tunnel—makes it down far enough to spot us. I leave a long smudge of Luca’s blood against the door as I push it open to get the wheelchair through, but there’s no time to clean it off.
And once we’re in the room, there’s not much more protection that I can see. The doors swing open both ways, in and out, and have no lock. It’s an old abandoned kitchen area, I think, although most of the kitchen equipment has been ripped out, and all that’s left is an old oven and the open pipes and spigots sticking out of the floor. Once the doors close, all we have for light are our cellphone flashlights.
“Can’t protect a goddamn thing in here,” Frank says, echoing my thoughts.
Outside, the noise has died away, but the silence is more terrifying than the shouting.
“Over here,” Garcia whispers, motioning to Darla, who runs over quickly to the doorway the detective is holding open.
But I pause. “Hang on—that’s a fucking walk-in freezer. Like that one inThe Shining. Are you out of your mind?”
“It’s not working,” Darla murmurs. “And it opens from the inside—in case anyone gets shut in.”
“I’m not going in there to asphyxiate with my husband,” I say. “And there’s alockon theoutside. If people are coming for us, they could just lock us in there and leave us to die.”
I might be very slightly claustrophobic sometimes. Like whenever some unknown enemy is trying to kill me.
Likenow.
“Move it,Principessa,” Frank says, seizing me with his good hand. “We don’t got a choice. Best we can hope is that they don’t even notice us and go straight past that outer door.”
I look to Luca. Iknowhe’ll see what a terrible idea it is—
Luca is slumped in his wheelchair again. I run over to him, shaking his shoulders. “Luca, wake up!”
Darla comes over and Frank pulls me away, despite my protests. “Keep itdown,” he whispers harshly. “Let the nurse do her thing.”
Darla feels at his neck for a pulse and I freeze in place for a horrible three seconds, maybe the worst of my life so far. Then she thumbs up one of his eyelids. “He’s passed out,” she says softly, “and he’s opened up a few of his sutures.” She looks over at me. “He’ll be alright as long as we get him back upstairs as soon as we can.”
“Best way to do that is hole up, hope this shitstorm passes us by,” Frank mutters stubbornly.
It’s so quiet out in the tunnel. Too quiet.
“I don’t want to die in a fucking box,” I whisper. I’m having flashbacks to the nightmares I had after Tino Morelli’s death. More than one night I dreamt of his demise, the invasion of the cellar of his house where he was holed up, trying to reach his escape tunnel.
“You and me both,” Garcia says, holstering her gun and coming over to take the handles of Luca’s chair. “But we have no other choice right now. It’s the best plan we have.” When I still don’t move, she nods at Frank, who suddenly winds an arm around my waist and lifts me bodily, dragging me across the floor to the walk-in freezer.
I don’t fight. I think all the fight has left me, seeing that dark red seeping across Luca’s middle. Garcia wheels Luca in after me and Frank, and Darla comes in last, pulling the door shut. There’s not even a lock on it.
We’re fucked.
I turn my attention away from the door to look at Luca in the shaky light of my cellphone. There’s no reception down here, no way to call for help. I can only hope that the personal alarm on my keyring, which I pressed as soon as the alarm upstairs went off, and then several more times before we got into the elevator, reached Carlucci or Vitali. In the meantime, I concentrate all my concern on Luca.
He’s not quiteaspale as he was before he passed out, I decide, although it’s hard to tell one way or the other in the stark light from my phone. And then we hear noises outside, feet shuffling, muffled talk echoing down the tunnel, loud enough to reach us in our hiding place.
I turn off my phone light.
