“Body in a folding chair. Old Black man, mid-sixties, parka. Single round to the back of the head. Suppressor — there’s a casing on the floor a meter behind the chair, twenty-two, subsonic. Zip ties on his wrists and ankles. He’s been dead maybe forty minutes.”
I closed my eyes.
“Tire tracks in the lot. Two vehicles. Van and a sedan. Both south, then east. The van came in clean and went out heavy, the sedan came in heavy and went out clean. They moved her between them.”
“Where,” Dante said.
“Working on it.”
The line went quiet.
Marco was already on the second monitor. He had pulled up the city traffic camera grid and he was running plates against a window of the last hour and a half. His face did the thing it did when he was working at the top of his abilities, which was that it did nothing at all. The face went still. The hands moved.
“There,” he said.
A van. White panel. The plate did not match the registration. It went south on Cottage Grove and then it went east on 79th and then it dropped off the grid for nine minutes and then it picked up again on a service road on the southwest side of the city, and the service road went exactly one place.
“Lansing,” Marco said.
I did not know what was at Lansing.
“Private airfield,” Dante said.
Santo’s voice came back on the speaker at 11:48.
“Pietro.”
I did not answer.
“Pietro.”
“Yes.”
“I’m at Lansing. The apron’s warm. There’s deicing fluid on the tarmac that hasn’t frozen yet. The tower says a Gulfstream left here at 11:24 wheels-up. The flight plan they filed is for Gander, Newfoundland, refueling stop, onward routing not yet disclosed. The plan is falsified—the tail number doesn’t match the registration the tower logged. I’m sorry,cugino.She is in the air.”
The line stayed open.
Nobody said anything.
I do not remember standing up from the chair. I remember being on the floor. I remember the cabinets at my back, the lower kitchen cabinets, the painted wood with the brass handles Tonio had complained about for six months, and I remember sliding down them until I was sitting with my knees up and my hands hanging loose between them.
She was in the air.
She was over Lake Michigan. She was over Ontario. She was over the black water of the Atlantic, somewhere, by herself, in the dark of an aircraft cabin, with men I did not know.
Catania came up through me.
It came up the way a wound came up—old, buried, never properly closed. The warehouse. The dark. The crates of chickens. The girl who had looked at me with the still flat attention of a person who had already decided she was going to die, and had been waiting only to find out whether I was the one who would do it.
I had not done it.
I had not done anything.
I had stood still.
I had failed like that again.
Olimpo came over. He pushed his head into my chest. I put my arm around his neck.
