Chapter Twenty-Five #2
She wore an adult-size T-shirt. It bagged, brushing her bare thighs. Long hair hung down her back, tangled and matted from sleep. Bony-kneed, full-cheeked, flat-chested, she was younger than Gemma. He didn’t think she could be older than thirteen-year-old Davide.
The room was clearly Silvestri’s: his clothes draped on the furniture and crumpled on the floor.
A sick and violent anger gripped Valerio. The fucker was abusing a kid here. Now.
He had nothing. No gun, no protection, no authority. He was operating far outside the law.
Reason told him to leave, to find the evidence incriminating Luca, to call for backup—live to fight another day.
Well, fuck reason.
“Are you okay?” he asked gently.
She stared at him, expression flat, unsurprised to find a strange man standing in the room.
“My name is Valerio,” he said. “I’m a policeman. I’m here to help. Do you want to leave?”
Her body tensed. Her hands clenched into fists. She nodded and stood.
Valerio didn’t want to frighten her by approaching. He gestured her forward.
“Come. I’ll get you out of here.”
She came slowly towards him.
“We need to hurry,” he urged, reaching out.
With his other hand, he felt in his pocket for his phone, and dialed Maurizio.
He was far outside any operational rules—but he’d worry about that later.
What he needed now was to get this kid someplace safe.
Idiot that he was, he’d decided to leave his personal weapon behind.
He regretted this now. He needed backup.
The line was ringing, phone pressed to his ear, as he felt the girl’s warm hand grip his. He gazed into eyes that were wide with terror.
“I got you,” he said, and tugged her from the room.
He’d planned to hustle her down the hallway and stairs, to get them both into the Ape and out into the street before Silvestri noticed. But he was too late.
Silvestri was in the hallway, blocking their egress, the muscular dog at his side. The girl gasped, hand tightening in his.
“I knew it!” Silvestri shrieked. “Ines warned me about you! I knew it!”
He was carrying a gun—silver, and too large. He handled it awkwardly, like an accessory instead of a weapon. Valerio hoped he was right in guessing that Silvestri had no fucking clue what he was doing—or this would never work.
Pushing the girl behind him, Valerio released her hand.
Then, in three rapid steps, he shoved the weapon aside and plowed his right fist into Silvestri.
The smaller man gave no resistance, his body moving with the punch and slamming to the floor.
The gun skittered away on the tile. That might have been it.
That should have been it. But the dog, defending his master, jumped on Valerio, who raised his arm to protect his face and neck.
The pressure and pain of the dog’s teeth clamped onto his right forearm. Valerio roared.
Behind, the girl let out a high, thin whimper of despair.
“Get out of here,” he shouted at her, but she was blocked in by the thrashing bodies and had nowhere to go.
Valerio shook the snarling animal, punched it. Its jaws did not release. He slammed it against the wall. Again and again.
This was shit. This had all gone to shit.
That was when Silvestri shot him.
Maurizio had been shot once, in the shoulder. He’d told Valerio that he’d never even felt it—that the adrenaline had numbed the pain, and that it had taken someone noticing the bleeding for him to know what had happened.
“It wasn’t that bad,” he’d said. “Like someone punched me in the arm.”
Valerio remembered this as the bullet slammed into him, and realized: Maurizio was a fucking liar.
Fire tore through Valerio’s leg, a searing agony in his hamstring as he collapsed to the floor.
He fell onto the dog, which had released its grip at last, the warm body limp beneath him. Through a miasma of pain, Valerio understood that the dog had also been shot—that this was why it had released its jaws.
Silvestri shouted and gestured with the gun. “Not Brutus. No. No. No!”
“Put that down,” Valerio ordered. “I’m a cop. You shot a cop. They’ll be sending in a team any minute now. They’ll shoot you if they see you with that.”
This last part was a lie, but Valerio had been calling Maurizio when Silvestri confronted him.
Despite his own idiocy, despite everything, he desperately hoped that Maurizio had picked up, had heard—would find him, and send backup.
But that was wishful thinking. He needed to get himself out of this somehow.
The first priority was to assess the damage. Stop the bleeding.
It hurt. Fuck, it hurt.
“Call emergency services,” he told Silvestri. “This doesn’t need to get any worse.”
Silvestri rose to his feet and, trembling, blood spattering his silk bathrobe, stumbled down the hall towards the stairs, still gripping the gun.
Valerio rolled off the motionless dog and looked around for his phone. He didn’t see it. At the end of the hallway, crouched against the door, the little girl stared at him.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “It’s going to be okay. Can you see my phone?”
She didn’t answer. Valerio glanced around. He couldn’t find it, and didn’t have time to look.
“He’ll come back,” he said. “Get into that room.”
She did as she was told and Valerio followed, half crawling, half dragging himself down the tiled hall.
Inside Silvestri’s room, he shut the door.
“Do you have a phone?” he asked the girl. “Call one-one-three.”
—
Propping himself against a wall, Valerio peeled back the coveralls.
Beneath, he was wearing yesterday’s clothes—a T-shirt and corduroy pants.
Gingerly, he felt his thigh below the buttock where the bullet had gone in, then felt for an exit wound.
The back of his pant leg was warm and wet, the pain exquisite.
He unbuckled and stripped off his belt. Threading this around his leg, he guessed by the pain where he needed to tighten.
His hands, slick with blood and shaking badly, kept losing their grip.
He swore as he cinched the leather tight.
No sooner had he managed this than he heard pounding footsteps on the stairs. He cracked the door open to see.
His briefly irrational hope for rescue was doused when he saw the black clothes, muscled body, and white hair of the Ghost.