Chapter 102
Cesare
Outside The Hospital
“GODDAMN IT!” I roared.
Lucrezia was right:
They’d come to Florence.
Two of our guys – Mignolino and Scellone – had been parked near the A1 highway on the east side of the city when the Rosolini caravan and five fuckin’ cop cars came roaring through.
Mignolino tailed them to the hospital. Even though he drove slow to avoid suspicion, it wasn’t hard to follow them. Mignolino said he could hear the sirens from miles away.
Now me and everybody else who’d come from the farm were parked on a side street a quarter mile from the hospital.
I scoped out the situation through binoculars.
The neighborhood was a modern part of Florence, and the hospital was probably only a few years old. The whole front of the building was mirrored glass –
And it made the five cop cars parked out front look like ten.
They weren’t moving. They were just sitting around, not doing shit.
Obviously the Rosolinis had paid them off.
So close…
And yet so far away.
“FUCK!” I screamed as I threw the binoculars into the front seat. I heard the lens crack as it hit the dashboard.
“Calm down,” Lucrezia said coldly.
“If we go in now,” I raged, “not only do we have to go through a bunch of Cosa Nostra fuckheads, we gotta go through those goddamn cops! AND THEY CAN CALL BACKUP!”
“So we wait.”
“I’VE BEEN WAITING FOUR FUCKING YEARS!” I screamed. “I’M DONE WAITING!”
Lucrezia looked at her phone. She looked pissed.
“The Russians are almost there,” she said coldly.
“You said they were supposed to be there an hour ago,” I sneered.
She ignored me. “If you’d just stayed at the farm like I told you, we could have killed everybody in the house.”
“Dario Rosolini isn’t in the fucking house,” I snarled, and pointed savagely at the hospital. “He’s in THERE. I can FEEL it.”
“Well,” she said mockingly, “if you want to try your luck with all those cops, be my guest.”
I thought about breaking her nose.
The bitch deserved it, that was for sure.
But it wasn’t worth the trouble it would cause. Once she started screaming, somebody out on the street would hear. They’d call the cops over, and then we’d be –
WAIT.
Hold on a second…
“Ciro,” I said, “get Cicciobello on the phone.”
He pulled out his cell and dialed.
“The boss wants you,” he said, and handed it back to me.
“What are you doing?” Lucrezia asked distrustfully.
I ignored her. “Where are you?”
“Uh…” Cicciobello said, and he paused like he was looking around for landmarks. “Someplace in the old part of town. I think we’re near the Ponte Vecchio.”
The Old Bridge.
“There a lot of people where you’re at?” I asked. “Tourists ‘n shit?”
“Yeah – why?”
“Can you drive across the Ponte Vecchio?”
“Nah, it’s, like, a bunch of jewelry shops ‘n shit.”
“Shops on a bridge?” I asked in confusion.
“Yeah, it’s fuckin’ weird.”
“If you and the boys were on foot, could you get across the bridge and escape on the other side of the river?”
Lucrezia sat up in alarm. “What are you doing?”
“I mean, yeah, I guess,” Cicciobello said. “I could probably tell the cars to drop everybody off where I am… then they could take another bridge across the river and meet us on the other side.”
“Good. I want you to do that. I want everybody but the drivers to get out where you are, then I want the cars to circle around to the other side of the river and wait for you.”
“Okay… what do you want the rest of us to do, boss?”
“Shoot every single fuckin’ person you see.”
“…uh… what?” Cicciobello asked, stunned.
Lucrezia stared at me –
And lost her shit.
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!” she screamed.
She started clawing at me to get the phone. I held her off with one hand as I kept talking to Cicciobello. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Yeah, boss, but – ”
“YOU FUCKING IDIOT! CICCIO, DON’T LISTEN TO HIM – ” she shrieked –
Until I backhanded her. Hard.
Lucrezia cried out and held her face in her hands as she cowered in the seat next to me.
Cicciobello sounded alarmed. “Boss – is Lucrezia – ”
“Don’t fuckin’ listen to her,” I snarled. “You do what I tell you to do, you hear?”
“But boss… if we shoot the place up, the cops are gonna come gunning for us.”
I grinned. “That’s the fuckin’ idea.”