Chapter 4 – DARIO
DARIO
“S he’s gone, boss.”
I hurry down the stairs to meet Ray in the foyer. It’s almost four in the morning. Ivano and a dozen men are still scouring the city. Posy has vanished without a trace.
I stride over to Ray. He has her cell and credit card in his hand.
“They were in a trash can?” He told me on the phone, but I ask anyway. I’m trying to figure out this problem with the facts available even though it’s impossible—like putting together a puzzle with only three pieces from a box of a thousand.
“Next to the ATM in the hotel,” Ray confirms again.
“No blood? No signs of a struggle?”
“Renelli’s men wouldn’t leave any.” We both know that, but I had to ask. I’m—unsettled.
Ray sniffs and shrugs off his trench coat. He’s rumpled. Exhausted.
“Coffee!” I bark at one of the staff, and there’s a scurrying.
I need Ray alert. He’s my best man. He knows Posy.
“Where would she go?” he asks me.
How the fuck would I know? I pace to the front window. Her car is still in the drive. I forbid her to park it in the garage herself. She’s scraped the side panel twice.
“Does she have a best friend?” Ray probes, sinking onto a bench with a muffled groan.
“She has friends.”
He takes out a little pad of paper and a golf pencil. He looks like Columbo. “I need names.”
Jesus. I don’t know their names. “There’s the one with the hair. And there’s one with big tits. Ask Carolyn.”
Ray tucks the pad back into his pocket, rolls his shoulders, and stretches his legs. “Maybe you want to let this go, boss.”
I glare at him. He straightens up.
He pauses a long moment and then sighs. “I’m just sayin’—if she’s dead, do you want to know? And if she’s gone, do you want her back?”
Yes. No. It doesn’t matter right now. She’s mine. I decide if she lives or dies.
“Do we have a man at the airport?”
“Yes. And the bus terminal. We got guys paying visits to the car rental places. Hotels. It’s a needle in a haystack, though. I say we hang back and wait for her to tickle the system. Miles is on it. As soon as she buys a ticket or rents a room, we got her.”
“If she’s alive.”
Ray gives a short nod. “If she’s alive,” he repeats.
Posy’s smart. She’ll figure out the risk, and she’ll leave town.
But where would she go?
I don’t know how she spent her days. Shopping, I guess. As long as she was home when the markets closed, I didn’t care.
Does she like the beach?
She used the pool every day before the weather turned.
I’d catch a glimpse of her from my office window, and I’d come out, bend her over the back of a chaise lounge, hook her wet bikini to the side, and sink into her tight pussy.
She’d be so hot wrapped around my cock, her thighs and back cold to the touch as the late summer air dried her skin.
I adjust myself and pace back to Ray. “Where does she like to go?”
His thick brows knit together, and he shrugs a shoulder. “The mall. The Promenade. Stansbury Park.”
“Stansbury Park?” A memory sparks and my lip curls.
“Yeah. She plays chess with the old guys.”
“She wins?”
“Usually.”
My grandfather took me to Stansbury Pavilion to play chess.
I learned Fool’s Mate and the Sicilian Defense there, stuffing myself with hot roasted peanuts Nonno bought for a quarter a bag.
It feels like a hundred years ago, not twenty.
I imagine Posy cross legged, playing with the old guys as the pigeons peck the ground.
An unfamiliar tightness grips my chest.
“You had someone comb the park?” I ask.
“She’s not there.” Ray shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “She’s a clever kid. She probably left town as soon as I dropped her off.”
“But you didn’t see her leave the hotel?”
“I wasn’t watching. And there’s the subway station underneath.”
Of course that’s where she went. The subway.
The simplest solution. That’s how her mind works, why she’s such a formidable opponent.
Most people can be distracted with gambits.
You can switch strategy midstream and seize the advantage during the lag as they adapt.
Not Posy. She operates independently of her adversary, always pursuing the straight forward, elegant win.
She’s an instinctual player. It’s an extraordinary thing to watch.
Again, there is a discomfort in my chest. An after effect of the rage, I’m sure.
I didn’t expect it. I haven’t lost myself to it since I was a junior at St. Celestine’s, dousing Lucca Corso’s Ferrari in gasoline.
It was stupid beef, a throwaway insult to his mother that became a beatdown and ended in arson.
Sister Mary Francis made Lucca and I clean the chapel for the rest of the year, and our fathers paid for a new floor and bleachers in the gym.
Lucca and I sparred in the narthex when we got bored with polishing pews, and I discovered a way to channel the rage. It was a relief. The blankness left behind was vastly preferable to the mindless fury that arose unbidden and drove me to behave—without due consideration.
As I did when I sent Posy away.
I call up the image of her face in the video. Her hairline. That wasn’t a wig. Her hair was brown. She was wearing a lot of makeup, but she did not quite look like she does now. It could be the—duress—for lack of a better word, but she seemed young.
And—the realization crashes on me.
I made a mistake.
She was clearly in pain, and it was clearly a challenge for the man I had assumed was Frankie Bianco to get his cock inside her.
Posy doesn’t love anal, but she’s not unaccustomed to it.
I take her ass when the mood strikes me, and she asks for lots of lube, but she doesn’t act like she’s getting reamed.
That video wasn’t from December.
She was telling the truth.
The time stamp is a fake. Frankie’s fucking with me. Now why would he do that?
I picture my visitors from earlier. Renelli and Graziano next to me on the sofa. Lucca and Tomas across from us on a chair. And all the way across the room, leaning on my desk, Frankie Bianco, contender for the crown.
I’m a piece in play. And they dare to use Posy to get to me.
I need her back now.
“Get the CCTV tape from the station for the half hour after you dropped her off,” I order Ray. “Bribe whoever you have to. Money’s no object. Find out where she went. Do it yourself. Call everyone else in.”
“You’re sure, boss?” Ray’s already dragging himself to his feet. He knows me. I’m always sure. Asking is just his way of complaining.
“Sleep when you’re dead.” I say over my shoulder as I head toward my office. The European markets are about to open, and I need to focus myself so I can figure out this mess.
I will find Posy soon. We’re on her trail. It’s only a matter of running her to ground.
She’s not dead. Renelli’s soldiers move slowly. They think that if they drag their feet enough, he’ll keel over before they have to do any real work. It’s been this way for awhile now. Since Amato lost his edge.
Still, it makes my skin crawl that she’s out there because of my misjudgment. All my efforts for the past eight months blown in minutes. She saw only what she wanted to see, and I had exactly what I wanted. I knocked over my own tower of blocks.
How hard will it be to lull her back into her happy fantasy?
Not hard. Posy’s a good tactician, but she’s also soft. Emotional. Weak. She cries easily. A splinter in her palm. A commercial with a kitten.
Frankie and the others said she was easy. Daddy issues. The kind that’ll suck your dick for a kind word.
It’s true as far as it goes. They think that makes her worth less, but then again, they don’t use their own brains, so what use would they have for a woman’s? Posy is the only person who’s ever been able to beat me at cribbage. And she’s one of the few who even knows how to play.
I want her back now.
I scroll idly through my portfolios. The letters and numbers blur.
I push up from my desk. This is pointless. I can’t focus. Posy is not where she’s supposed to be. She’s always asleep upstairs when the London Stock Exchange opens. Always.
Fuck.
I only know one way to excoriate this feeling. I slip on my jacket and grab the keys to the Bugatti from the peg in the kitchen. I’m dialing as I head to the garage.
“Miles? I need an address for Giorgio Fusco.”
I’m going to have a little chat with the director of Posy’s movie, and then I’m going to stab him in the throat so he sprays blood like a hose as he dies.
On the drive back, I’ll call Carolyn. She’ll need to make Posy fall back in love with me.
It shouldn’t be hard.
She falls in love at the drop of a hat.