“That was one time.”
“Three.” My thoughts try to whirl back in time, but I keep them firmly planted in the present.
“Let’s call it experimental char.”
The silence after that isn’t as heavy. The road opens and the sky decides to be blue in spite of itself. I watch his hands on the wheel, steady and precise, the same way he held me apart from the world once. Like we could keep the tide from pulling us under.
“Where is this place?” I ask.
“Kearny. Old brick but new locks. We bought it as a fallback for complicated clients. No Gemini insignia, no paper trail that points to me, and Ale doesn’t use it, which is the point.”
“And your men?”
“Two blocks out. If I say so.” He glances at me. “But I didn’t.”
“Because you don’t trust me.”
“Because I’m giving you what you said you wanted. A door you can walk out of.”
That shouldn’t land gentle, but it does. I hate that it does.
We take an exit that looks like everyone out here, shoulders of broken bottles, and a deli that’s been twenty different delis. He threads us through a grid of streets that all smell faintly of fryer oil. The car rattles over a pothole, and my heart leaps up my throat.
He doesn’t notice. Or he pretends not to.
“What’s the first thing you’ll do if you live through this?” His voice is casual, like we’re playing road-trip games and not outrunning two mob families.
“Change my name,” I reply. “Then I’ll buy some new sneakers. You know, Nike’s are very expensive abroad. Then, I’ll sleep for fourteen hours without dreaming I’m going to bleed out in an alley.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll give up this life all together. Find a job where I don’t have to carry a gun to the bathroom.” I angle my head. “What about you?”
He thinks for a second too long. “I’d like to take a train somewhere stupid. Like Maine. No plan. Read a paperback someone left on a seat and eat terrible food at all the stops.”
“Very glamorous, Rossi.”
“I’m a simple man.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Sometimes I practice,” he replies. “For the big ones.”
He pulls onto a narrower street with row houses hunched shoulder to shoulder. A mural of a girl with blue hair watches us from a brick wall like she knows every secret on the block. He cuts left again, then idles by a stoop that’s definitely seen things it shouldn’t have.
“Is this it?”
He nods. “We’ll park around back. The cameras are mine, but just in case.” He slides into an alley so narrow it barely deserves the name, then he kills the engine, and listens the way all predators do. With his full body, without blinking.
No voices. No footsteps. A dog barks two blocks over. My heart keeps its mad drummer’s tempo and then remembers it can finally slow.
Matteo rounds the car and opens my door. He doesn’t offer a hand. Good. I don’t know what I would do if he did. I shoulder the duffel and follow him to a steel door recessed into brick. He keys a code into a box that looks like it belongs to some much more modern building and the lock thunks.
“Inside.” He cants his head.
“No surprises,” I warn. “If one of your cousins pops out of a closet, I shoot him or her in the foot.”
“They all deserve it,” he replies dryly, and swings the door wide.
