Behind, the girl let out a high, thin whimper of despair.
“Get out of here,” he shouted at her, but she was blocked in by the thrashing bodies and had nowhere to go.
Valerio shook the snarling animal, punched it. Its jaws did not release. He slammed it against the wall. Again and again.
This was shit. This had all gone to shit.
That was when Silvestri shot him.
Maurizio had been shot once, in the shoulder. He’d told Valerio that he’d never even felt it—that the adrenaline had numbed the pain, and that it had taken someone noticing the bleeding for him to know what had happened.
“It wasn’t that bad,” he’d said. “Like someone punched me in the arm.”
Valerio remembered this as the bullet slammed into him, and realized: Maurizio was a fucking liar.
Fire tore through Valerio’s leg, a searing agony in his hamstring as he collapsed to the floor.
He fell onto the dog, which had released its grip at last, the warm body limp beneath him. Through a miasma of pain, Valerio understood that the dog had also been shot—that this was why it had released its jaws.
Silvestri shouted and gestured with the gun. “Not Brutus. No. No. No!”
“Put that down,” Valerio ordered. “I’m a cop. You shot a cop. They’ll be sending in a team any minute now. They’ll shoot you if they see you with that.”
This last part was a lie, but Valerio had been calling Maurizio whenSilvestri confronted him. Despite his own idiocy, despite everything, he desperately hoped that Maurizio had picked up, had heard—would find him, and send backup. But that was wishful thinking. He needed to get himself out of this somehow.
The first priority was to assess the damage. Stop the bleeding.
It hurt. Fuck, it hurt.
“Call emergency services,” he told Silvestri. “This doesn’t need to get any worse.”
Silvestri rose to his feet and, trembling, blood spattering his silk bathrobe, stumbled down the hall towards the stairs, still gripping the gun.
Valerio rolled off the motionless dog and looked around for his phone. He didn’t see it. At the end of the hallway, crouched against the door, the little girl stared at him.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “It’s going to be okay. Can you see my phone?”
She didn’t answer. Valerio glanced around. He couldn’t find it, and didn’t have time to look.
“He’ll come back,” he said. “Get into that room.”
She did as she was told and Valerio followed, half crawling, half dragging himself down the tiled hall.
Inside Silvestri’s room, he shut the door.
“Do you have a phone?” he asked the girl. “Call one-one-three.”
—
Propping himself against a wall, Valerio peeled back the coveralls. Beneath, he was wearing yesterday’s clothes—a T-shirt and corduroy pants. Gingerly, he felt his thigh below the buttock where the bullet had gone in, then felt for an exit wound. The back of his pant leg was warm and wet, the pain exquisite. He unbuckled and stripped off his belt. Threading this around his leg, he guessed by the pain where he needed to tighten. His hands, slick with blood and shaking badly, kept losing their grip. He swore as he cinched the leather tight.
No sooner had he managed this than he heard pounding footsteps on the stairs. He cracked the door open to see.
His briefly irrational hope for rescue was doused when he saw the black clothes, muscled body, and white hair of the Ghost.
Twenty-Six
After lunch and before heading into work, Nikki visited a secondhand bookshop near Piazza Dante.
