The taxi rolled to a stop on a dimly lit corner. I craned my neck to see the leaning signpost beside us, but the street name had been worn away, the letters obscured by a layer of filth and rust. Ramshackle houses cast shadows over the pitted, neglected sidewalk.
“Meter’s running,” the cabbie pressed when neither Vero nor I opened our door to get out. I glanced at the meter in question. It wasn’t even on. Marco Toscano seemed to have friends in every shady corner of this town.
“We are not getting out here,” I said firmly. “Take us back to the Royal Flush.” Anywhere was preferable to the splintered windows and sagging porch of the weary three-story foursquare standing watch over this corner. The lower level was half-sunk into the ground, one foot of the century-old house already in the grave.
The cabbie shifted into park. “Mr. Toscano doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Use the side door,” he said, pointing down a narrow passage between two houses.
“Have you never watched a slasher film? Or cable news?” Vero asked him.
The cabbie’s arm swung over the seat back. There was a soft click as he pulled back the hammer of a handgun and pointed it at us. “Get out.”
“Okay, okay. Keep your panties on!” Vero threw open her door and we both scrambled out.
I waved exhaust from my face, my eyes burning from the fumes as the cab peeled off, leaving us alone god only knew where. “Great. What now?” I asked.
Vero pushed up her coat sleeves. “We’re going to go in there like the badasses we are and demand they give us Javi back.”
“We’re not badasses. I’m a mom. You’re a nanny.”
“We just spent a week at the police academy.”
“That does not qualify us to negotiate with terrorists!” I chased after her into the alley, my protests echoing off the brick-and-clapboard siding rising up on either side of us. I threw an arm in front of her before she could reach for the small brass knob on the short cellar door and lowered my voice to a stern whisper. “We can’t go in there, Vero! Do you know what happens to women who go into creepy basements? Murder! Murder happens to women who go into creepy basements. And I did not survive being shot at by Feliks Zhirov’s thugs just to be tied up and strangled by a loan shark in a creepy basement in Atlantic City!”
“Javi could be in there!”
“This is not a good idea!”
“Neither is leaving! Do you know why?” she whispered back. “Because when I was six years old, I wandered off during a school field trip and got lost at Six Flags, and do you know who found me? Javi,” she said, her dark eyes blazing. “And when I was eight, I ran away from home because my mother wouldn’t let me see a PG-13 movie during a birthday party sleepover. I decided I was going to live in the woods behind my neighborhood, only it got really dark and I was too afraid to walk back to my house alone, and do you know who came looking for me? Javi,” she said, the memories spilling out of her as if a dam had broken. “And in ninth grade, a guy from the wrestling team offered me a ride home from school, only he decided to stop at a park and get handsy instead,and do you know who followed the guy on his ten-speed, yanked the asshole out of his car, and made him regret all of his life choices? Javi. So if you don’t want to go into that creepy cellar, I get it, Finlay, and I won’t make you. But if there’s a chance Javi’s in there, then I’m going in.”
“Okay,” I said past the lump in my throat. It wasn’t lost on me that this was more than she had ever shared with me about him, and her feelings for him obviously ran deeper than she’d let on. “Fine, we’ll go. But if I see any duct tape or torture devices down there, I’m calling the cops.”
She nodded.
We turned back toward the cellar door, shoulder to shoulder, steeling our nerves as Vero reached for the knob.
She counted to three and cracked the door open. We both peered inside.
A wedge of buttery light spilled across our feet. The low hum of conversations and the clink of wineglasses and silverware drifted up the stairs, carried on a breath of garlic-scented air.
Vero’s nostrils flared. “Death by scampi?”
I sniffed, too. My mouth watered and my stomach growled. “Fine. We’ll go into the creepy cellar—for Javi,” I clarified.
Cell phone in hand, I followed Vero as she tiptoed inside, ducking to avoid hitting her head on the frame. The stairs were narrow, the bloodred carpet turning at a small landing so we couldn’t see what waited for us on the other side. Frank Sinatra crooned softly beneath the chatter of voices and the occasional burst of laughter. A tapestry of framed photographs covered the wood-paneled walls, most of them signed. I was pretty sure one of them was Beyoncé.
A man in a dress shirt waited indulgently at the bottom of the stairs as we gawked. “Mr. Toscano is waiting,” he said, gesturing for us to come inside.
I looked past him into a low-ceilinged room. Tables dressed in linen were scattered throughout, the rich, heavenly scent of Italian food heavy all around us as well-dressed men and carefully coiffed women twirled mounds of fresh pasta into their mouths.
A large man in a bursting suit jacket snapped his fingers to get our attention. The maître d’ ushered us to the man’s table, pulled out the two chairs across from him, and urged us to sit. A younger man dined alone at a tiny table nearby, his eyes raking over us as we sat down, the muscles in his jaw working slowly around a piece of garlic bread as he studied us. He looked disturbingly familiar for reasons I couldn’t quite place, until he turned back to his meal and I saw him in profile… the aquiline nose, the thick, dark stubble on his jaw, the contours of his hairline that receded sharply from a widow’s peak. This was the sneaky photographer Vero and I had spotted taking photos of Ramón’s garage a few weeks ago, the one we’d pursued as he’d raced away in his Audi. He’d shot a gun at us and run us off the road before we’d ever figured out who he was, but we’d seen his license plate. The car had been from New Jersey. It was the same Audi we’d seen in the security footage of the men who’d kidnapped Javi.
I nudged Vero. She spotted him, too. Her fists clenched at her sides, like she’d like to rip the garlic bread from his hands and ram it up his nose.
The maître d’ refilled Marco’s wineglass from an open bottle on the table. “Will your guests be joining you for dinner, Mr. Toscano?”
“That depends.” Marco glanced up at us through a fringe of shocking dark hair that didn’t at all match his bushy gray eyebrows or the streaks of silver he’d neglected to trim from the rims of his ears. His eyes made an inscrutable pass over Vero as he sliced into a pork chop, dragging a forkful of meat through a pool of thick red sauce on his plate. “Do they have my money?” he asked. When Vero didn’t answer, he gestured loosely toward us with the tip of his knife in some semblance of a response the maître d’ appeared to understand. The man excused himself without offering us a menu.
Vero slapped my hand as I reached for the bread basket on the table.
