It was colder in here than on the street. Concrete floor, bare bulb, drain in the middle and a wet ring around it from when Marco’s man had bleached the place. There was a table bolted to the wall and two chairs, one of which had all but lost its seat to old water damage. I did not take a chair.
Salvatore stood in the center of the room, sleeves rolled to the elbow. There was blood on the hem of his left cuff. He had been working the younger of the two would-be kidnapers for forty minutes, alternating between questions and the slow, calculated application of a broomstick to the soft spots in the man’s body. The man had pissed himself at the fifteen-minute mark, but otherwise hadn’t given much up.
Tonio was at the table, holding the older one’s wrist flat against the wood with both hands. His face was calm, but there was a light in his eyes that meant he was having fun. The older one was sweating hard, even though the room was cold enoughto make your teeth ache. Sal had cut their shirts off at the collar and left them in just the ribbed undershirts, which were now damp and clinging to skin.
It was good that she wasn’t here.
I stood with my back to the door. The blood had already dried in the cracks of the concrete, old stains layered under the new. The air was thick with the metallic stink of it and something older—cigarette ash, mildew, the ghosts of men who had not left this room. The taste of her was still in my mouth. I had tried to wash it out, twice, with salt water and then coffee, but it lingered. My hand was bandaged. The bite had not gone through to bone, but it had bled enough that I had to wrap it twice before it stopped. I flexed the fingers now, testing the pain, and it spiked hard up the back of my forearm.
Salvatore looked up and saw me. His gaze went from the line of my coat to the bandage on my hand, took in the fact that my shirt was damp at the collar where I had washed my mouth in the kitchen sink, and made a judgment about all of it that he did not share. He nodded once.
“Where’ve you been?” he said.
“Looking for her,” I said.
He waited for a beat. “Find her?”
“Yep. Then I lost her again.”
He nodded again, as if he had expected nothing else. The older man at the table spat sideways and tried to twist out from under Tonio’s grip. Tonio tightened his hold and bent the man’s wrist a quarter turn further than it wanted to go, making him hiss and bare his teeth. The sound was raw. It echoed off the walls, ugly, like a cat fighting.
Sal walked around behind the younger one, who was shivering now and blinking hard to keep his eyes clear. There was a thin line of blood at the corner of his mouth. Sal put a hand on theman’s shoulder, not hard, but in a way that said you are staying here until I say otherwise.
“You know who I am?” Sal said.
The man nodded. He tried to say a name but it came out as a wet grunt.
“Good,” Sal said. “Then you know what happens next.”
Tonio, from the table, said, “Make it quick. I don’t want to have to join in.”
Sal shot him a look, then back to me. “Then let’s get on with it.”
He stepped in front of the younger one and crouched, making himself level with the man’s face. He spoke low, in Italian. I could pick out the key words: who, money, woman, pain. The man shook his head, then nodded, then shook it again, like a dog trying to get water out of its ear. Sal let him go a minute, then straightened and walked to the table.
Tonio was already standing with the older guy bent over the table, one arm braced against the man’s shoulder, the other pinning his wrist flat to the scarred wood. It was a fucked-up twist on a schoolyard game: palm splayed, fingers straining to peel free, but Tonio’s body blocked any shot at escape. He looked like he could’ve just as easily been teaching the guy how to throw a fastball, except Tonio grinned when the man tried to yank back and couldn’t.
“A real character, this one,” Tonio jerked his chin at the guy, still smiling.
I took a good look. Heavy brow, pitted skin. A nose that’d been busted years ago and maybe never set right, left side of his jaw shadowed with an old bruise. The hands were knobby, joints swollen, veins raised like cables. His accent, when he’d tried to beg earlier, wasn’t Sicilian or even Italian. Bratva, for sure. Ukrainian or Russian, maybe a bit of both, the way the vowels slurred. I didn’t need to say it. But the room liked the sound of spoken certainty, so I gave them what they wanted.
“Character is right,” I said, keeping my voice low.
Sal nodded, once. “Bratva muscle. Not local.” He said it like a death sentence.
Tonio snorted, then leaned closer to the man’s ear. “So, what brings you to our basement, cyka?”
No answer. Just the man’s breath, fast and sharp, gumming up the air with spit and snot. The stink of terror was a chemical thing; you could almost see it, like heat rising off the concrete.
Sal turned to the man, his hands loose at his sides. “Why are you here?”
The man just stared at the wall behind Sal, jaw clenched and eyes hot with something—rage, shame, something that made him more dangerous than any idiot who folded at the first sign of pain.
Tonio shifted his weight, dug a thumb right into the web of flesh below the man’s pointer finger. The pressure made a wet, popping noise, and the man hissed through his teeth.
“Tell us,” Tonio said, gentle, like he was talking to his own kid. “You don’t want to draw this out. I, on the other hand, would be very happy to.”
Still nothing.
