9. Chapter Nine Carmelo
Chapter Nine: Carmelo
The Marinos' check-in was three days ago.
Paul made the call on Tuesday at nine fourteen AM from the back bedroom, away from the windows.
I was parked on their street in the rental car, close enough to see him walk from the kitchen to the bedroom, far enough that the motion sensor above the garage didn't trigger.
Nine minutes and twenty-two seconds. He hung up, walked back to the kitchen, poured a second cup of coffee and sat down at the table with his wife.
Three days ago. Their next check-in isn't for twenty-seven days. Twenty-seven days before the handler notices the silence. Five to six after that before someone comes to the house. I have a month, there abouts.
I drive to Chestnut Hill at ten on a Friday morning because Friday mornings are quiet on their street.
The neighbors on the left both work. The neighbors on the right are retired and leave for their grandson's school drop-off at eight fifteen and don't come back until after eleven.
I've watched this block for three days over two weeks.
I know when every car leaves and every door opens, even when every garbage can gets dragged to the curb.
The Buick is in the driveway. The Toyota is gone. Linda is out. Grocery store, most likely. She goes Fridays between nine and eleven. Paul is home alone.
I park two streets over and walk. The knife is on my belt, jacket covering it, gloves on from the car.
The morning is cold and overcast. Nobody on the sidewalk.
Nobody in the front yards. The only sound is a dog barking three houses down.
Same dog every time. Small. Loud. Annoying as fuck, but not a problem.
The back door has a deadbolt and a knob lock. The knob lock takes four seconds. Kwikset, cheapest hardware store brand, the kind of lock you install when you don't actually believe anyone is coming through your door. The deadbolt takes another six. I'm inside.
Coffee and toast hit me as I walk through the kitchen. There's a plate on the counter with crumbs and a smear of butter. The dishwasher is running. From the living room, a television. Morning news, the anchor's voice bright and artificial.
I move through the kitchen into the hallway. The floorboard near the bathroom door creaks under my weight.
"Lin? That you?"
I step into the living room.
Paul Marino is in a recliner, mug in one hand, remote in his lap.
His face cycles through three things in less than a second.
Then his skin goes gray and his knuckles go white on the mug and the recognition settles into the kind of fear that empties a man's face of everything except the understanding that he is about to die.
He doesn't know my name, but he knows what I am. Men who work for organizations that traffic children and drug them and report on them make it their business to know what every enforcer on the eastern seaboard looks like. I am not a difficult man to remember.
His hand shoots toward the phone on the side table. Fast for fifty-four, but not fast enough. I cross the room in three strides, grab his wrist and pin it to the armrest. The mug drops, shatters on the hardwood. Coffee spreads in a dark stain under his feet, soaking into his socks.
"Who do you call?" I ask.
Nothing. His eyes are locked on the knife on my belt. I can feel his pulse through his wrist, hammering, skipping beats.
"The handler," I say. "The one you call every month from the back bedroom. Nine minutes. You tell them she's stable, medicated, not asking questions."
"I don't know what you're—"
"Don't."
He stops. His mouth is open, his bottom lip trembling, and there's sweat on his upper lip even though the house is cold.
"Eleven years." I tighten my grip on his wrist until the small bones grind together and he sucks air through his teeth.
"You've been drugging a girl for eleven years.
Watched her grow up inside a lie you built.
Reported on her to the people who sold her.
Gave her pills every morning and told her she had anxiety and you knew exactly what those pills were doing. "
"We were told she was—"
I pull the knife.
The blade clears the sheath and the sound is small, just leather and steel, but Paul Marino hears it the way a man hears a gunshot.
His whole body locks. His bladder releases.
The stain spreads down his thigh and onto the recliner cushion.
The smell hits the room, and I look at this man who fed pills to a child for eleven years and didn't lose a single night of sleep over it, and now he's pissing himself in his recliner because the bill just came due.
Two motions. The first opens his throat.
The blade catches the light from the television on the way across, a flash that's there and gone, and then blood sheets down the front of his shirt and his hands come up to his neck, both of them, fingers trying to hold together what the knife separated.
The second motion is insurance. Below the ear, into the soft tissue, angled up.
He stops moving. His hands drop. He slumps sideways in the recliner.
The television is still on and the news anchor is talking about the weekend forecast and the coffee stain is spreading toward my boots so I step back.
Three seconds standing over him. No change in my feelings.
No rage, or satisfaction, sure as fuck no guilt.
The rage was in the decision. The decision was made months ago in the apartment across from the restaurant, staring at coded placement records.
This is execution. I've done enough of them to know the feeling comes later, or doesn't come at all.
I search the house.
The back bedroom is where they keep the operation.
The closet has a lockbox. I break it open.
Inside: four pill bottles, three sealed, one open.
The labels are printed with a pharmacy name and address I already know is fictitious.
Dosage instructions: "one daily, with food or water, for anxiety management. " I take all four bottles.
The filing cabinet has three drawers. The bottom one holds the check-in logs. Handwritten, monthly, going back eleven years. Each entry dated and brief.
Asset stable. Medication consistent. No behavioral flags.
Asset started employment at local restaurant. Medication consistent. No flags.
Asset turned 21. Medication consistent. Social contact limited. No concerns.
Eleven years of Grace's life reduced to status reports in a retired municipal worker's handwriting. I take the logs.
The top drawer has the photographs. I pull the folder and open it.
Grace at fourteen. Taken from a distance, from a car, on a street I don't recognize. School uniform, backpack, hair in a ponytail. She's looking at the ground while she walks.
Grace at seventeen. Outside a high school gym, in a group of girls. She's on the edge, half in the frame and half out. The other girls are laughing. She's not. Her arms are crossed, right index finger tapping her left elbow.
Grace at twenty. Walking to work. The restaurant awning is visible behind her. Work clothes, hair pulled back. Her face is slightly rounder than it is now. She's carrying a bag I haven't seen her carry.
Grace at twenty-two. Twenty-three. Each photo taken from a distance. Each one documenting, not capturing. No birthdays. No holidays. No dinner tables. No hugs. Just a girl growing up inside a frame held by people who were paid to watch her.
I close the folder and put it in my duffle bag just as the crunch of gravel under tires hits me.
The front door opens.
Linda comes in with two grocery bags. She sees the coffee stain on the hardwood first. Then she sees Paul. The bags hit the floor. A jar of marinara shatters on the tile, red sauce spraying across the white linoleum in a wide arc. It’s poetic, in a sick sort of way.
She turns to run.
I'm between her and the door before her second step.
She faces me. She doesn't scream. Doesn't beg.
Her eyes are dry and her jaw is set and she has the face of a woman who has been waiting for this, who knew from the day they placed a drugged thirteen-year-old girl in her care that this was one of the possible endings.
Now it's here and she has nothing to say.
"Take your vitamins." I grunt as I push into her jaw so it pops open before slamming a bottle in her mouth and punching it into the back of her throat. “This is for Graziella.”
Her eyes widen. One second of pure recognition, the understanding that I know everything, that the entire operation is exposed, that the girl she's been drugging for eleven years has someone standing in her kitchen with a knife who knows her real name. Then the knife moves.
She drops next to the grocery bags. The marinara spreads across the tile and meets the blood and the two reds mix, sauce and something thicker, and the kitchen smells like tomatoes and copper and revenge.
I clean the scene. Thorough, automatic. I've done this enough times that the process doesn't require thought. Wipe surfaces. Check for trace. Collect materials. Bag evidence. I take the phones. The lockbox contents. The photographs, the logs, the pill bottles. I take care to clean my knife.
I call Danila. "It's done."
"Both?"
"Both."
"I'll send a crew. Six hours."
"The back door."
"Copy." He pauses. "You good?"
"Yes."
I leave through the back door. Walk two streets to the rental car and put the bags in the trunk. Drive back to Philadelphia. Park three blocks from the apartment and walk to the building before heading upstairs. Then I wash my hands in the bathroom sink.
The water runs clear. Gloves did their job…. my hands are clean.
They were always going to be clean.
I stand at the sink, looking at my hands, thinking about Linda’s face when she saw me.
The absence of surprise. She knew what she was doing for eleven years.
She knew it would end like this. She did it anyway.
For the salary, the house in Chestnut Hill, the lawn service, the Buick, the flowers and the lifestyle.
Now that the hard part is done, I have an urge to watch my girl from table four before solidifying her place in my life.
Grace is working the dinner shift. I can see her through the restaurant window as I approach, moving between tables. The world looks the same as it did yesterday.
It isn't.
Not for her, at least. The withdrawals will happen soon and then everything shifts.
I walk across the street, through the door, and sit at table four. She sees me from across the room. Her face changes. A softening, a fraction of an inch of opening that she doesn't give anyone else. I've watched her greet every regular in this restaurant. None of them get this.
"Hey," she says, coming to the table. "The usual?"
"Yes."
"You weren't here yesterday."
"No."
"I noticed." Her chin lifts a fraction, daring me to comment.
Then she's gone, walking to the kitchen to put the order in.
My chest fills with something I don't have vocabulary for, because two hours ago I killed two people, now the woman I did it for is telling me she noticed I was missing and her chin went up when she said it.
The pork shoulder comes up. She brings it, sets the plate down.
Her finger taps the edge once. I look at her hand and think about the photographs in the folder in the trunk of the rental car.
Grace at fourteen, finger tapping her elbow.
Grace at seventeen. Twenty. Twenty-two. Documented. Watched, but never known.
The pill bottle on her nightstand has maybe a week left.
She's going to run out. She's going to call Linda.
Linda isn't going to answer. She's going to call Paul.
Paul isn't going to answer. She's going to text and nobody is going to text back because the Marinos are on the floor of their kitchen in Chestnut Hill and a Bratva disposal crew is six hours from making them disappear.
Grace is standing at my table tapping the edge of my plate with no idea that the only people who could refill her prescription are gone.
I did that. I saved her.
She's going to start remembering. The dreams first, then the fragments, then the flood. Eleven years of suppressed memory released into a body that has been carrying the trauma without knowing it. She's going to feel what was done to her before she remembers what was done to her.
"Can I get you anything else?" she asks.
"No," I say. "Thank you."
She walks away. I eat. The pork shoulder is good. Marco is having a good night. Devon's doing the broccolini right for once. The restaurant is warm and full. Plates clinking. Conversation. Javi's cocktail shaker. The kitchen radio playing something low.
I eat as my brain clicks over information in a slide show. One. Two. Three. There’s no room for anything except memories of the things I’ve done for this girl, and the things I have yet to do.
I leave cash under the saucer, stand, and walk to the door. Grace is at the bar talking to Javi. She looks up when I pass. I hold her gaze for one second, then push through the door into the cold.
Tomorrow I'll get back to the car and burn the bag. The only evidence that the Marinos ever existed will be a folder of photographs, a bottle of pills, and a set of handwritten logs that say, "asset stable, medication consistent, no flags."
Eleven years, reduced to paperwork.
I go back to the apartment, shit, shower and shave, and then stand at the window. Grace's lights turn off at eleven twenty-six.
I don't go to bed. The clock is running now.
Everything that happens next is mine.