41. Body Bags
Body Bags
The two-and-a-half-hour drive to Palermo went according to schedule. Inspector Meloni never kidnapped women before, but he followed directions on how to use the gas and kept his speed below the limit as to not bring attention to the hostages drooling over the backseat.
Meloni hated to get his hands dirty. He was police after all, and he wanted no fingers or warrants pointing back to him.
He’d look away for the right price, a service he provided to the highest bidder.
It was no coincidence that women went missing across his district.
The fee he received for helping smugglers navigate law enforcement undetected was too lucrative to pass up. No one cared about missing migrants.
The country’s tough-on-immigration policies made it easier to shuffle them to the highest bidder. The more society treated them as threats to their safety and livelihood, the less they worried about their humanity.
It was good for business, and business was thriving.
Meloni made a right onto the back service entrance of a property he’d kill to have as his own. He had killed today and hoped his pledge of loyalty to a new mafia outfit would guarantee him a lifetime of luxury. He was simply too old to be living with his mother.
A house with private access to the sea, an infinity pool, and a woman to make him sandwiches was all he needed.
The white house at the top of a small hill had a panoramic terrace overlooking the gulf. No neighbors existed for kilometers to hear any screams. The eight-bedroom property sat on over 18,000 hectares, 46,000 acres.
The inspector followed a guard’s signal to park inside the garage. He hoped somebody would come get these women out of the SUV they’d forced him to drive. He was a sedan man pushing fifty with a bad back, bird legs, and no stamina.
The door to the house inside the garage opened.
Meloni shivered at the man approaching the front of the vehicle.
His broad shoulders and lean muscles filled out the jeans and T-shirt he wore whenever he got his hands dirty.
Unlike Tino, he was emotionless and hard to read.
Meloni hardly feared anyone—he was the police—but he feared this man.
“You have her?” he questioned Meloni, who nodded the baseball cap off his head.
“Yes. She was with her friend. They’re in the back.”
“And the driver?”
“Handled,” Meloni said with a little more authority in his voice. “I put him in his trunk and disposed of it at the construction site like you said. The code you supplied to text Salvatore’s wife worked.”
Mere mention of Salvatore Bennici pissed Meloni off all over again.
He hated his good looks, fancy suits, wealth, and the way women in Eden swooned over him.
He couldn’t wait to see his demise and got hard thinking about his downfall.
The new outfit had what they needed to incite a mafia war and feed prosecutors the evidence to put Salvatore away for the rest of his life.
He would die before he made it to prison, but Meloni would look him in the eyes first and smile, knowing he helped kill him.
“If there’s nothing else, I’ll be at work for the rest of the day.” Meloni shifted from foot to foot. “Can someone give me a ride back to my car?”
The first bullet that entered his chest didn’t register until pain exploded through his cracked ribs. The second hit a femoral artery in his thigh. Meloni collapsed to the ground. He tried to stop the bleeding in his leg but struggled to breathe with blood spilling out of his mouth.
“Why?” he croaked at the man squatting over him.
“Tying up loose ends” were the last words Meloni heard before his heart stopped. More blood spilled onto the polyethylene laid over the driveway that he’d missed.
Body bags.
A war with Salvatore taking the fall was a means to end the competition.
The personal vendettas against Bennici never concerned the man pulling the strings.
Everything fell into place so perfectly, but did he expect his plan to include killing the one person who’d been hidden from him for nearly forty years.
Bianca Harris.