“They won’t help, will they?” he said.
She shook her head.
“Nobody likes to hunt wolves,” he said with a sigh.
Nikki’s heart was racing. There was a sick taste in her mouth. She looked down and realized she was still gripping the package of pancetta.
“What about another wolf?”
Twenty-Seven
Pain reminded Valerio that he was alive. He held to it grimly, stubbornly, as the car jostled and jolted along the rutted roads, clenching his teeth to keep from crying out.
The trunk was leaking. Rain soaked the foam liner, sopping his clothes, and the small space was filled with the powerful stink of mildew and exhaust. He lay on his left side, hands zip-tied behind his back. It was excruciatingly uncomfortable—arms contorted, circulation cut, pressure on his twisted shoulder. These mundane miseries somehow amplified the agony of the gunshot wounds in his thigh, and his forearm, which had been crushed and ripped by the rottweiler.
When the men arrived, he’d fought back, and done what damage he could. But injured, without a weapon, he’d been laughably ineffective.
The Ghost had aimed his gun, a detached assessment in those grey eyes, and Valerio had the sudden disorienting realization that he was seen as a rabid dog to be put down.
But Silvestri protested with a wail.
“Not in my house!” he screeched, looking with dismay at the white and gold furniture already spattered and smeared with Valerio’s blood. “Do it someplace else! Get him out of here.”
—
As they dragged him away, Valerio turned, straining, to verify that the girl was still alive. She sat on the floor, backed against the wall, skinny arms wrapped around her knees. He wanted to shout to her, urge her to get away, but she’d just witnessed his failed rescue attempt, and he knew his words would be empty.
He shouted anyway. “Don’t give up!”
—
Trussed in the trunk, shivering from damp and blood loss, he was glad that he’d had a chance to bind his leg and stem the bleeding. Yet Valerio had no illusions that he’d survive what came next. Errichiello no longer had a reason to keep him alive. By getting himself shot, he’d spoiled any usefulness he might have as an inside man with the police.
Raging at his idiocy and impotence, Valerio’s chest constricted, as if to keep his thrashing heart where it belonged.
It wasn’t despair, exactly. But something of that flavor. And a sense of fate, as if all the moments of his life had led inexorably to this one. Time itself seemed to stretch out, unwinding like an enormous snaking rope trailing on the ground behind him. And Valerio’s thoughts took on an unfamiliar sheen—as if he saw things clearly for the first time.
To his surprise, his thoughts were of his father, whose life and character never really deserved the sainthood that Valerio’s mother assigned him after death. Costanzo Alfieri had been an affectionate and enthusiastic man, and the boy Valerio had loved him fiercely. But his father had also been fickle, spending money and time he should have saved, forgetting promises, and forever disappointing his wife and three young children. Valerio’s mother had always been the one to put the pieces back together, to make do and make excuses, to soothe the ragged wounds in her children’s hearts.
On that night, Valerio had seen his father at the kitchen table, right hand thrumming, and that irascible expression he had: a sort of mischief tucked into the left corner of his mouth. Five-year-old Valerio had climbed onto his father’s lap. Enveloped in the familiar smell of beer and cologne and cigarettes, he mimicked his father, thrumming fingers on the table.
Costanzo laughed and squeezed him, and set him down.
“Go to bed,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”
He’d broken that promise, too.
Valerio wondered if he’d managed to be a better father than his, and was reminded of all the times he’d disappointed Gemma andDavide. With an urgent pang, he suddenly wished he’d used his savings to buy Davide those football boots he needed.
The thought of leaving his children now—like his father had left him—was a molten core burning through his chest. And his mother, whose husband had vanished, would lose her son in the same way.
My Valerio, she’d told the Virgin.He acts without thinking.
She was right, of course. That was what had landed him in this mess.
Well then, think, you fool.
—
