Chapter 5
Santo
The restaurant was empty. Wouldn't open for hours.
Sal had let me in through the side entrance without comment, because Sal had been letting Carusos in through the side entrance at inappropriate hours for forty years.
He'd nodded at me, looked at my face—whatever was on my face—and gone back to polishing glasses with the practiced disinterest of a man who understood that not knowing was a form of job security.
I hadn't slept.
Not because of the wound, though the wound didn’t help.
Not because of the head, though the spot above my left ear where the bookend had landed pulsed with a dull, patient insistence that matched my heartbeat.
Not because of the bite on my forearm, which had scabbed into a crescent of dark bruising.
I hadn't slept because at three in the morning I'd driven twenty-three miles to a three-flat on North Kedzie to rescue a fucking dog.
The padlock opened. The door opened. And inside was a room that stopped me in the doorway the way a fist to the chest stops you.
A mattress on the floor. A hotplate on a milk crate.
Four shirts on a tension rod. A plastic bin of dog food—the good kind, I noticed, which meant she fed the dog better than she fed herself.
And on the wall near the baseboard, in pencil, two words that I read and understood and filed in the place where I kept things that hurt for reasons I couldn't justify.
FUCK THIS.
Midge was under the blanket. I saw the shape of her—a small trembling lump that growled when I crouched down, a sustained low-frequency warning that said I will end you with the conviction of something that weighed less than a bag of sugar. I put my hand out. Palm down. Waited.
She bit me. Of course she did. Not hard—a test bite, a negotiation.
Not the way her momma had bit me. I didn't pull back.
She sniffed my knuckles, sniffed again, and something in the smell—her owner, maybe, the traces of the woman who'd been in my house for hours—made the growl fade.
She climbed into my hand. Warm. Bony. One ear up, one ear gone.
Shaking with the whole-body tremor of a creature that ran hot and scared and brave all at the same time.
I drove back to Oak Brook with a chihuahua on my lap and my stitches weeping and I didn't call Dante.
I should have called Dante.
Instead I walked into the guest room where she was sleeping—boots on, fists clenched against her chest, the scarred knuckles up like a barrier between her body and whatever the world might try next—and I put the dog on the pillow next to her face and I left.
I wasn't going to examine why I did that. Not now. Not here. Not with Dante about to walk through the door with his don's face on and his questions loaded.
The back office door opened. Marco first, eating a cannoli.
At eight in the morning. He dropped into a chair across from Vito's old desk with the ease of a man who'd never met a moment he couldn't make casual, crossed one ankle over his knee, and bit into the pastry with the serene confidence of someone who believed the world would wait for him to finish chewing.
Dante came in behind him. Closed the door. Didn't sit.
I gave it to them straight.
"Someone broke into my house last night. While I was at the sit-down. A woman. Mid-twenties. She was after the laptop from my study and the jewelry from the bedroom safe."
Marco stopped chewing. Dante didn't move.
"I caught her on the way out. She fought." I touched the spot above my ear without meaning to. "She fought well. She's at my place now. Locked in the guest room."
"Alive?" Dante. One word.
"Alive."
Marco swallowed the cannoli. Wiped his fingers on a napkin. His face had shifted—the casual mask still in place but the eyes underneath it doing different work, faster work, the calculation that people never saw because they were too busy underestimating the nightclub brother.
"The timing," Marco said. "The sit-down was yesterday.
Enzo asks for Bridgeport, and the same night someone hits your house?
" He shook his head slowly, the motion carrying the weight of a conclusion already reached.
"That's Valenti. That's Enzo probing. He wanted to see what you had, what was exposed, maybe grab something he could use as leverage. "
Dante's chin dipped a fraction. Agreement.
"She's not professional," I said. "Her gear was amateur. Cheap jacket, stolen medical tape on her hands. Someone gave her the security code and the safe location, but she's not trained—not by anyone with resources. She's a tool."
"A tool can still cut," Marco said, gesturing at my forearm. "Apparently."
"She needs to go to the safe house. In Archer." Marco leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Let Nico handle the extraction. He'll get a name, find the chain back to whoever sent her, and we'll know by Thursday whether this is Enzo or someone freelancing."
Extraction.
Something in my chest tightened. Not my wound—deeper, behind the ribs, in the space where I kept things I couldn't afford to examine. A compression, like a fist closing around something soft.
"No."
The word came out harder than I intended. Flat. Final. The kind of no that didn't have a negotiation behind it.
Marco's eyebrows went up. "No?"
"She's not a professional," I said again. "She's a disposable asset. Someone pointed her at my house and didn't care what happened when she got there. Sending her to Archer tells whoever sent her that we're rattled. That we're escalating over a little girl."
Marco opened his mouth. I kept going.
"I'll handle it. My place. My problem."
The way I said it surprised me. The finality of it, the possessive weight —my place, my problem— as if the woman in my guest room had become something I was claiming rather than something I was managing.
I heard it after it left my mouth, and I couldn't take it back, and the silence that followed was the particular silence of two very smart men deciding not to say what they were thinking.
Marco looked at Dante. Dante looked at me. Three seconds. That signature pause, the one that meant the don was weighing something that mattered.
Then Dante nodded. Once. The conversation was over.
Marco finished his cannoli. Brushed the crumbs from his jacket with a shrug that said your funeral, which was Marco's way of disagreeing without fighting about it. He stood, clapped me on the shoulder—the good one, because Marco noticed everything—and left.
I was halfway to the door when Dante's hand closed on my arm.
Not a grip. A touch. His fingers on my forearm, just above the bite mark, light enough that I could have pulled free without effort. I stopped.
"Be careful." Quiet. Not the don's voice. The brother's.
I nodded. He let go. I walked out into the morning, and the place behind my sternum—the thing that had moved at three a.m. and hadn't settled—shifted again, and I didn't look at it, and I kept walking.
The Eisenhower was lighter heading west—morning rush moved into the city, not out of it—and I made Oak Brook in thirty-two minutes, which was thirty-two minutes of my hands on the wheel and my brain running a loop I couldn't shut off.
Her. The dog. Her place.
All the details, whizzing around my head.
But most of all, her. Her smell. The way she’d looked when she slept. The slow rise and fall of her chest.
I sighed.
I took the Oak Brook exit. The suburbs opened around me—wide streets, old trees, the manicured silence of money keeping its distance from the rest of the world.
I knew this road completely: every house, every driveway, every car that belonged and the spaces where they belonged.
Mrs. Whitfield's silver Lexus, always parked at a slight angle because she couldn't see out of her left eye and wouldn't admit it.
The Hendersons' landscaping truck, white with green lettering, there every Tuesday.
The empty stretch near the Pellegrini property where the road curved and the oaks grew thick enough to block the sightline from both directions.
The sedan was parked in that stretch.
Dark. Four-door. Tinted windows—aftermarket, the kind of tint that went past legal into the territory of not wanting to be identified, which was itself an identification.
The engine was off. But the exhaust—I caught it as I approached, the faintest shimmer of heat distortion rising from the tailpipe into the November air.
Residual. Recent. The engine had been running five minutes ago, maybe less.
Someone had been sitting here with the heater on, watching, and had killed the engine when they heard my approach or saw my car on the road.
I didn't slow down.
The temptation was there—the animal impulse to stop, to confront, to pull alongside and put a face to the silhouette behind the tinted glass.
But I'd learned the difference between impulse and intelligence a long time ago, mostly by watching men who hadn't learned it end up in situations that didn't have exits.
You don't approach an unknown vehicle on an empty suburban street when you're alone and wounded and the only weapon you're carrying is a Beretta with twelve rounds and a bad attitude.
I passed my gate. Kept my speed even, my eyes forward, giving the sedan nothing—no brake lights, no head turn, no indication that I'd registered it as anything other than another car on another street.
My peripheral vision did the work. Dark blue or black, hard to tell in the flat November light.
American make—Chrysler, maybe, or Dodge.
The kind of car that said fleet, said rental, said deliberately unremarkable.
The tint was uniform, all four windows plus the rear, which meant a shop job, not factory.
I turned right at the next intersection and looped the block.