With reinforcements.
Chapter Nineteen
On the landing we ran across Julian Castellani, who was naked again except for his jeweled cock. His toes were painted a sparkly gold, and he was eating from a handful of small cookies.
“Hello,” he said in surprise, running a hand through his tousled hair. “If I knew you were coming, I’d’ve baked a cake.”
“Get back to your rooms,” Castellani growled, but Julian completely ignored him. His eyes traveled from me to Angelo, and I felt my hackles rising.
“Whatever this is, it looks like fun,” Julian said, and fell in beside me as we walked. “You can hold the gun on me if it makes you feel better,” he confided.
I pointed my gun at him. “It does, actually.”
“You have a very dark sense of humor, Baxter Flynn,” he told me. “I like it.”
Castellani dismissed the security guard out of the room with a jerk of his thumb. “Where do you want to begin?”
“From last night,” Angelo said, “and if necessary, we’ll go back to before Bax and I even arrived in this godforsaken town.”
I’d rarely heard him sound so bitter.
Castellani brought up the security vision and scrubbed back to when Angelo and I had last seen Greco. It was strange watching myself there on the screen, and I felt a disconnection from reality.
“What’s going on?” Julian asked again. After a long silence, he said, “If no one’s going to tell me, I’ll have to start guessing.”
“Shut up,” his father said tersely.
Julian laughed.
Had the alarm been raised by now, I wondered? How many Castellani soldiers would be waiting out there for us? We had an extraction plan, such as it was, but it depended on whether I was right…or wrong.
I’d been wrong aboutso manythings before in my life. The last time I’d been wrong about something as important as this, Angelo had gotten shot.
My gun hand wavered slightly. Angelo glanced over at me, and looked down at his free hand. I saw his fingers curl in and out.
In and out.
I took a deep breath, regrouped, and refocused. Together, we’d get out of here...and we’d get the answers we wanted, too.
Castellani scrubbed forward in the video again, until Angelo sharply said, “Stop.”
I’d seen it too: the change of light and the dark figure slipping in through the door.
Castellani swore under his breath, rewound, then played the video in real time. Although it was dark, the video had recorded in night vision, and so despite the creepy green tint to everything, the recording was almost as clear as if it had happened in daylight.
Someone entered the safe house. Someone dressed in a dark hoodie and gloves. We all watched in silence as the figure wandered slowly around the small apartment, even going so far as to stand over Donnie Greco, asleep and oblivious on the bed. For a wild moment I wondered if Greco were already dead there in the bed, but then he turned over, rearranged his pillow, and went back to sleep.
The figure did not move an inch. It just stood there, watching Greco.
I imagined it smiling.
“No self-preservation, that guy,” Julian observed. I wondered which one he meant as he munched another cookie.
A few minutes passed before the hooded figure moved again, and Castellani fast-forwarded through until it did. Then, whoever they were, they went straight into the kitchen, then opened the cupboard doors until they found what they were looking for: the packet of ground coffee. They opened it, added something from their back pocket, closed the coffee bag again and replaced it in the cupboard.
It was when they were leaving that we finally got a glimpse of the face—and not even a glimpse. The figure paused in the hallway, looked straight at the camera, and pulled their hoodie down off their head. With a smile, they made a heart gesture with their gloved hands, blew a kiss, and then left.
In the present, Angelo had already turned his aim onto Julian, who continued eating his cookies, although he gave a wink at Angelo. “Did you like it?” he asked. “Your present, I mean.”
