Chapter 43
Cesare
While Luciano told us how to get into his family’s compound, my guys brought the dead bodyguard up from the ground floor and dumped him in the kitchen.
Then they took a bunch of towels from the dead mistress’s bathroom, mopped up as much blood as they could in the lobby, and stuffed everything in garbage bags they threw in a dumpster.
Their cleaning job wouldn’t pass inspection in the bright light of morning, but the lobby was so dim that you couldn’t really see much. It wouldn’t raise anybody’s suspicions till daybreak, by which point we’d be long gone.
Hell, the dead bodies might not even get found until they started to stink in a couple of days.
Once Luciano was dressed, we took him down to his BMW in the street. I kept my gun at his back the entire time.
Luciano took the wheel. I sat directly behind him in the backseat, but I didn’t need a gun to keep him in line; the video feed of his wife and kids did the job just fine.
Romeo sat next to me and kept the tablet volume turned up just loud enough so Luciano could hear his children whimpering.
While Lucian was listening, I gave Cicciobello an order over the tablet: if anything happened to us – if Luciano decided to get cute and drive the car into a wall at 60 mph – Cicciobello should shoot the entire family, starting with the wife.
Luciano didn’t so much as talk back the entire drive to his father’s mansion.
It was me behind the driver’s seat, Romeo in the middle, and Ciro on the right. We also had a guy nicknamed Tiratore hiding in the trunk.
‘Tiratore’ meant shooter, because that was his entire job for the last four years: he’d practiced with a sniper rifle three hours a day, every day.
Motherfucker was deadly.
Luciano drove most of the way in silence. But as we got close to the compound, he said, “You swear you’ll let my wife and kids go if I get you in?”
“If you don’t try to fuck us,” I said.
“What about my parents and sister?” he asked nervously.
“As long as your father tells me about Dario Rosolini, they’ll live.”
It was a lie, and Luciano knew it. If he didn’t, then he was the dumbest motherfucker I’d ever met.
I guess he really wanted to believe he wasn’t selling out his family.
That must’ve been why he swallowed all my bullshit – hook, line, and sinker.
Don Amato’s compound sat on a hillside overlooking Naples – a gigantic building in the middle of 20 acres of gardens.
A 15-foot-tall stone wall surrounded it all. The only entrance was through a pair of massive iron gates next to a guardhouse.
There weren’t any other houses or buildings around it for a quarter mile. Even if shit got a little noisy, nobody would hear.
Luciano slowed down as we approached the gates.
“If you fuck us, your wife and kids are dead,” I reminded him.
“I know,” he said hoarsely.
“Cicciobello, stand by,” I said into the tablet.
“You got it, boss.”
“Mute it,” I said to Romeo.
He turned off the sound, then flipped it over on his lap so the light from the screen wasn’t visible.
“Wipe your fuckin’ face off,” I ordered Luciano. “You’re sweating like a pig.”
He wiped his face off with his sleeve before he turned off the main road.
There was a guard station outside the stone walls. Luciano pulled the BMW up next to it, and a 30-something guy in a rumpled black suit walked out.
It was two in the morning, so the guard probably wasn’t at his sharpest. And if he was doing guard detail in the middle of the night, he probably wasn’t the Amatos’ top guy.
Still, this was where it could all go wrong.
The BMW’s windows were tinted black. At night, anybody on the outside couldn’t see a goddamn thing inside the car, which meant the guard wouldn’t be able to see me.
Ciro and Romeo were dressed in black, and the lights were off inside the BMW –
But if the guard looked inside Luciano’s window and saw my guys, I was going to have to jump out and kill him.
Unfortunately, there were probably guards on the other side of the gate, too.
Shit could turn into a bloodbath real quick.
So it all came down to Luciano and whether he could sell it.
He rolled down the window.
“Buonasera, signore,” the guard greeted him.
“Stay back,” Luciano ordered.
“…sir?” the guard said warily.
I clenched my jaw.
FUCKING ASSHOLE –
My hand tightened around my gun as I got ready to jump out of the car.
“I think I might have Covid,” Luciano said.
“Oh,” the guard said, and took a step backwards in alarm.
I grinned in the darkness.
Smart motherfucker!
It perfectly explained Luciano’s sweating, and it kept the guard from looking too closely inside the BMW.
“Why are you here if you’ve got Covid, sir?” the guard asked. “Don Amato’s not going to like that.”
“I’ll stay in a guest bedroom for the next few days,” Luciano said. “I didn’t want my wife and children to get sick.”
The guard frowned. “But… aren’t they already exposed?”
I wanted to shoot the guard for being fucking annoying –
But Luciano handled it perfectly.
“I might have it. I’m not sure,” he snarled. “But if I got it, it was from someone my wife doesn’t need to know about.”
“…ohhhhh,” the guard said, and I could almost hear the wink wink in his voice. “I understand, sir. I hope it’s nothing.”
“Same here.”
The guard nodded, then walked back to the guard shack.
Luciano rolled up the window as the iron gates opened up.
“Nice job,” I said approvingly.
Luciano didn’t say anything as he drove the car inside.
It was good he’d convinced the guy at the gate, because four other guards were hanging around just inside the stone walls.
They watched, unconcerned, as we drove past them and approached the main house.
We were in.