Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Gemma
I'm wiping down the counter when I see him.
He's parked across the alley from the back door, sedan idling, a man behind the wheel who isn't looking at his phone.
I keep my hand moving on the counter. Circle, circle.
He's got the build. Shoulders that fill the seat.
A jaw kept clean in that specific way. I know the type the way you know a smell from childhood.
Dominik's friends. Dominik's bosses. Dominik's anything.
The car is a dark four-door, nothing special, the kind they always pick because nothing special is what they want you to see.
I look at the clock. Twelve minutes left on my shift.
I'm not finishing my shift.
"Hey, Carla." My voice comes out level. "I gotta run. Nina's not feeling great."
Carla glances up from the register. "You okay, hon?"
"Yeah. Just want to get her home."
She waves me off. I don't go to the back, by the door that he’s watching… I leave the apron on. I leave the rag on the counter. I walk to the corner booth. I grab my bag.
Nina has six crayons lined up in a row by length.
"Baby." I crouch. "We're going on a little adventure, okay? Pack up fast."
She looks at me with Dominik's eyes. I push that thought out and reach for her backpack myself, sweeping crayons in with my palm.
"Are we going home?"
"In a minute. First we're going to play a game where we walk really quietly, like mice. Can you do mice?"
"Mice don't talk."
"Smart girl. Bear too." I tuck the stuffed bear under my arm.
I lift her off the booth. She's heavier than she used to be and I can feel her warm breath on my neck, and I am walking, I am walking out the front, the bell jingles, and the sidewalk is bright and ordinary and full of people who do not know.
I don't look back at the alley. If I look, he sees me look.
Cars. A woman with a shopping bag. A kid on a bike. I keep walking with Nina on my hip until the diner is behind us a block. I cut left, fast, into the side street, and there's the pharmacy parking lot half a block down. I aim for the cars ahead.
"Mama." Nina's voice is small against my collarbone. "Why are we going fast?"
"Because we're winning the game."
"What game?"
"The mice game."
"You said the mice game was quiet."
"It's quiet and fast. Shh. Shh, baby."
The lot is half full. I scan. A minivan, a pickup, a Civic, and an old Corolla. The Civic is closest. I try the passenger door first because that's the side I'm on, and my hand is shaking now, full tremor down to the wrist, and the door does not open. Locked. I move to the next row.
Nina is heavy. My shoulder hurts. I shift her higher.
The pickup. I try the driver's side. Locked.
I am breathing through my mouth and I can hear it.
There's an Audi at the end of the row, two-tone paint that used to be one tone, and I try the back door because I don't know what else to do. The handle gives. The door opens.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to whoever you are.
"In, baby. In we go." I set Nina on the bench seat. The car smells like cigarettes. "Stay down for me, okay? We're playing hide-and-seek now."
"You said mice."
"Now hide-and-seek. Down on the floor. Bear too."
She slides down. She doesn't cry. She has never been a crier, and the part of me that has time to feel things will feel something about that later.
I climb in after her, pull the door shut quietly, and crouch on the floorboard with her, my back against the bench, my arms around her small ribs.
The seat smells. The carpet has a stain. Nina's eyes are huge in the dim.
"We're going to wait here a little bit," I whisper. "Then we're going to find a fun new place to sleep tonight."
She thinks about this. She nods.
I press my forehead against the back of the bench seat and try to make my lungs slow down.
I'm crouched between the front seats trying to figure out how to explain to whoever owns this car why there's a woman and a four-year-old sitting in it.
It might be nothing. He might be waiting for someone else. There's a check-cashing place two doors down from the diner, there's a bookie in the apartment above, there are a hundred reasons a man sits there that have nothing to do with me.
Dominik is dead. I watched the casket. I signed the papers. He has been dead for a year and four months and he cannot put his hands on me again, he cannot take her, he cannot do anything because he is in the ground.
But I don't know who he owed.
I never knew who he owed. He kept that part shut. There were nights I heard him on the phone saying yes sir and sounding like a boy. Whoever he said yes sir to is still alive. Whatever Dominik signed his name to didn't die when he did. Debts don't.
I see them before I understand I'm seeing them.
Keys. In the ignition. A little leather fob hanging off the ring.
Who leaves keys in a car?
Nobody leaves keys in a car. Not in Pilsen, not on Ashland, not anywhere. I stare at them like they might be a trick of the light, like if I blink they'll be gone and this will be the kind of car a person locks behind themselves like a person should.
They're still there when I blink.
"Nina." I keep my voice low. "Stay right there on the floor for me. Don't move. Don't sit up."
"Are we still hiding?"
"Yeah. Yeah, baby. We're still hiding. I'm going to drive us to the place, okay?"
"Okay."
I climb between the front seats. My knee bangs the console and I bite down on the sound.
The driver's seat is too far back for me, way too far, set for a man with long legs, and my foot doesn't reach the pedal right but I don't have time to adjust anything, I just slide forward until the ball of my foot finds the brake.
I take the keys in my hand.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry to whoever you are.
I'll leave it somewhere. I'll leave it somewhere good, somewhere with cameras.
Somewhere a person can come pick it up and not have to worry.
I'll wipe my prints off the wheel. I'll leave the keys on the visor.
I am not this person, I am not a person who takes things, I have never even shoplifted, I have one parking ticket in my entire life and I paid it the day I got it.
I turn the key and the starter grinds because the engine is already running, and I let go fast. The sound is too loud. It's the loudest thing that has ever happened, and I sit there with my hand frozen on the wheel waiting for the alley man to appear in the rearview.
Nothing. The lot is the lot. A woman pushes a stroller past the entrance.
Drive. Drive, drive, drive.
I pull the gearshift down to D. The car eases forward on its own. I touch the gas with the tip of my toe and it surges and I jerk back to the brake and the whole car lurches and Nina makes a small sound on the floor in back.
"Sorry, baby. Sorry."
Easier. Easier on the pedal. I roll out of the spot, turn the wheel and roll toward the lot exit.
At the exit I stop. I look left and right.
Cermak is a river of cars. I find a gap and take it too slow. Someone behind me lays on the horn and I flinch so hard my knee hits the underside of the wheel.
"Sorry, sorry," I say, to nobody, to the horn, to the car, to the man whose Audi this is.
I drive.
Luca
I'm three aisles deep in Walgreens, holding two different brands of muscle rub like I'm picking out wine, when I see her through the window.
A woman. Brown hair pulled back, a kid with her. The kid can't be more than five. They're cutting across the parking lot.
I watch because there's nothing else to watch. The store is half empty. My shoulder is grinding against the strap of the basket and I've been pretending for ten minutes that I'm reading labels. Anything to make the errand last.
She stops at a Civic. Tries the door. Moves on.
I set the muscle rub down.
Then she gets to my Audi.
The pharmacy door is twenty feet to my right. I could be out there before she has the handle open. I could put a hand on the hood and watch her face do whatever it's going to do.
I don't move.
She tries the handle. The handle gives.
The keys.
Sicily and Palermo problem. My father's car, my uncle's car, my own first car at seventeen.
All left running outside the bakery on Via Maqueda while we went in for coffee.
Everyone knew whose car it was and nobody touched what belonged to us.
You leave a habit like that in your hands.
It travels with you across an ocean and sits in your ignition in a Pilsen pharmacy lot waiting for a woman with a child to find it.
She got her and the kid down on the back floor. The woman gets in the driver's seat.
The Audi starts.
She pulls onto Ashland. The taillights merge into the rest of the red on the street and my car is gone.
There's a piece of me, the piece Valentino trained, that's already cataloguing.
I walk to the front. I pay for the muscle rub and the bandages because the cashier has been watching me. I'm not going to be the man who walked out empty-handed after standing in the aisle for ten minutes.
Out in the lot, the space where my car was is just a rectangle of oil. I stand in front of it.
Six weeks of pacing my apartment. And a woman has walked off with my car while I'm standing here with something moving in my chest that I haven't felt since before the bullet.
Curious. That's the word. I'm curious.
My phone goes off in my jacket.
I take the call left-handed. "Yeah."
"The shipment from the lake," Fabio says. "It came through. I just wanted to confirm with you which dock."
"Two."
"Two. Right." A pause. "And the driver — John, yeah? Or the other one?"
"John."
"Okay. Okay, good."
I stand in the oil rectangle and let him have his pause.
"You good, Luca?"
"I'm good."
"Shoulder?"
"Shoulder is shoulder."
"Alright. I'll let you know how it goes."
"You don't need to let me know how it goes, Fabio."
"Yeah, I know."
"You handled the lake last month without me. You handled the Cicero thing without me. You don't need to call me about which dock."
"I know," he says again.
I let it sit. Because I do know why he's calling. The first three times he did it I almost put my fist through a cabinet. By the fourth I understood. Bruno is the boss. Valentino is the underboss. After Valentino, me. After me, Fabio. That's the order, and the order has held since we came over.
Now I'm sidelined and Fabio is doing my work. Fabio is the kind of man who doesn't want my chair while I'm warm in it. He calls because the calls keep the order in place. They tell me he hasn't moved up a step. They tell him I haven't moved down one. It's manners and loyalty.
I'd have done the same for Valentino.
"Dock two," I say. "John. Call me when it's offloaded."
"Will do."
He hangs up.
I put the phone back in my jacket and think about a woman with a child that stole my car in front of my eyes.