I take the guns and make sure there’s a bullet in the chamber before stuffing the handgun behind my waistband.The rifle I hang over my shoulder.“What’s the plan?We just storm in?Won’t that wake up this whole town in a second?”
Caputo gives me a look that makes me wish I hadn’t spoken, and those swaying snakes are all over it.
He slams the trunk shut and faces the other men, all of who are also armed with rifles, machine guns, and handguns.
“We have the fire power and the manpower to take out this whole town, but we’re only gonna shoot if we can’t help it,” Caputo says, addressing all of us.“Is that clear?”
Everyone is either nodding, or muttering agreement.
“I want a six-man team at the police station, making sure none of the cops are able to respond to a call,” he says.“And the rest of us are gonna make sure no call like that comes in the first place.”
“Do we shoot the cops if they move?”one of the guys asks while the others are still muttering agreements.
I can feel Caputo’s disdainful look even though it’s not directed at me.This guy is my age, but he’s acting like some hardened general of a thousand battles.He looks thirty-five but acts sixty.It’s weird.
“Don’t kill any cop that you don’t have to,” Caputo says.“We have enough heat on us without needing to add to it.”
That’s another thing I don’t know.Just how much law enforcement dust Ferro’s coup raised up.I am definitely not in the loop, and I have to get there.Fast.
“Same goes for this family they’re hiding out with,” Caputo adds.“We leave them alive.Now put your masks on and let’s go.”
He picks out the six guys he wants at the police station and tells the rest of us to follow him.
It’s hard to breathe through the thick black ski-mask on my face.Or maybe there’s a whole different reason why my lungs suddenly feel like they’re on fire and I can’t fill them with air.
Ferro won’t ask any question after he decides I’m betraying him, I know that much about the guy.And I’m certain he’s already at least halfway to deciding that.
Unless I bring Ferro the head of Gianna’s father tonight, I could be dead by morning.
Chapter13
MATTEO
We’rein the bushes surrounding the quiet, dark house.The white porch and awning seem to glow in the beams of moonlight that are filtering through a gap in the clouds.It’s illuminating the grass too, making it look just like the waters of the ocean stretching out behind our backs, slick, black and glowing with a light that’s not actually real.
I’ve shut off my thinking part, the part of my mind capable of remorse and compassion.But some of it is still filtering through, making me think how this house looks like a ghost house, because everyone hiding in it will likely be no more than ghosts come morning.Except maybe the two Codelli women.Hopefully.Because I don’t see Codelli coming without a fight, which means Caputo’s plans of harming no one probably won’t be realized.
“Go, go, go,” Caputo’s whispered command comes.And then I’m moving with the rest of the twenty or so guys, emerging from the bushes and from underneath trees all around the house.
I’m with the group that reaches the front porch.Caputo is in front, and he makes short and nearly silent work of opening the front door.No alarm blares.I was kind of hoping it would, I realize as it doesn’t.
“Basement,” Caputo says and points at himself, me and three others.The rest he sends to other parts of the house.
I follow him down the hall and through the kitchen where he has no trouble finding the door that leads to the basement.Or picking the heavy lock on it.A lock that, in the ghostly moonlight filtering in through the kitchen windows, looks like it was newly installed recently.
The wooden stairs leading down into the darkness creak, but not as badly as I’d want them to be.The room smells of old blood, disinfectant, and that weird smell of new bandages that’s at once faint but pervasive as hell.
Screams echo above us.Women’s screams.Men’s yells.
A shadow moves in the corner of the room a moment before a deafening shot blasts.The bullet flew so close to my head I could feel its hot wind as it passed.It lodges in the wood somewhere behind me with a loud, but harmless thud.
Some of the guys take cover, but Caputo rushes the shadow and I’m right on his heels.It’s a man, the white of the bandage covering his abdomen shining in the faint light streaming down the stairs from the kitchen.
Caputo has him on the ground and disarmed in a series of short, stacked movements that look easy, effortless.
“You fucking bastards,” the man says, and I realize it’s Rafaelle.Maybe I knew that from the onset.I don’t know.My mind’s too disconnected.
“Where’s the rest of the family?”Caputo asks, kneeling on Rafaelle’s back and pressing a gun to the back of his head.But Rafaelle just laughs.
