17. Chapter Seventeen Carmelo
Chapter Seventeen: Carmelo
Renzo Ferrara arrives at six AM.
I hear the car from the apartment window.
A black sedan, rental, pulling to the curb outside Grace's building.
He sits behind the wheel for four minutes before he opens the door.
I know because I count. Four minutes of a man sitting in a car on a Philadelphia street, trying to figure out how to walk into a building and meet the daughter he lost sixteen years ago.
I go downstairs. Grace is asleep in my bed. She fell asleep around three, her hand still in mine, her finger circling my knuckle in her sleep. I eased my hand free at five and sat at the window and watched the street and waited for the car I knew was coming.
Renzo is standing on the sidewalk when I come through the front door. He's older than the last time I saw him. His face is drawn, his eyes red. The kind of aging that happens from the inside when a man carries trauma for too long and it reshapes his face. He's tall, lean, gray at the temples.
"Carmelo, where is she?" His voice is rough. He hasn't slept either.
"She's upstairs."
"How is she?"
"She remembers everything. The rooms, the men, the pills. All of it. And a friend of hers was killed last night by the network's verification team. She hasn't started grieving that yet. She's running on nothing."
Renzo's jaw tightens. His hands are at his sides, fists opening and closing, and I recognize the gesture because I do it too. A man who needs to hit something and doesn't have a target.
"The men who killed her friend," he says.
"Being handled."
"By who?"
"My brothers."
He nods. "Can I see her?"
"Yes.”
We walk upstairs. The apartment is small and bright in the early light. Grace is on the bed, curled on her side, her dark hair spread across the pillow. She's wearing my shirt and it comes to her knees. She's swimming in it and somehow she’s never looked better.
Renzo stops in the doorway. He makes a sound.
Not a word, not a cry. A sound from somewhere below language, the sound of a man seeing his daughter for the first time in sixteen years and recognizing her face because it's his wife's face, or his mother's face, or the face of the girl he carried on his shoulders through a garden he's never stopped seeing in his sleep.
"Papa."
Grace is awake. She's looking at Renzo from the bed. Her gray-blue eyes on his gray-blue eyes. Her face is pale and exhausted and swollen from the crying that finally came around two AM, silent and long, soaking the pillow while I held her hand and said nothing.
"Papa." She says it again. The word she spoke in fragments weeks ago, in a flash of being carried, arms around a neck, the smell of tobacco and warmth. She knows who it belongs to now.
Renzo crosses the room in three steps. He drops to his knees beside the bed. His hands reach for her and stop, hovering, because he doesn't know if he's allowed to touch her. Sixteen years of searching and he doesn't know if his daughter will let him hold her.
She reaches for him. Her hands find his face, small palms on his jaw, the same way she holds my face, the same way she holds anything she needs to know is real. Her thumbs press below his eyes. His tears run over her fingers.
"Graziella," he says. "Figlia mia."
She doesn't flinch at the Italian. Her body receives it the way a body receives its own name, with recognition, not fear.
The language that made her skin crawl for eleven years is coming out of her father's mouth and her body knows the difference between the men in the rooms and the man on his knees.
I step back. I move to the kitchen and stand at the counter and give them the room.
I can hear them through the thin wall. Renzo's voice, low, broken, speaking Italian and English in alternating sentences.
Grace's voice, quieter, asking questions.
When was I born. Where did we live. What was Mama's name. Did she look for me too.
I pull my knife and clean my nails and listen to a father and daughter find each other through a wall and think about Aurelio.
About the knife I buried with him. About the night he told me I was his, not by blood, by choice, and how I didn't know what that meant until I heard Renzo say figlia mia and understood that some men spend their entire lives trying to say two words to the right person.
My phone buzzes. Leone.
Motel. 30 minutes.
I text back: On my way.
I put the knife in my belt. I pull on my jacket. I walk to the bedroom doorway. Renzo is sitting on the edge of the bed. Grace is sitting up, cross-legged, facing him. She's holding his hand with both of hers, her small fingers wrapped around his, and her right index finger is tapping his wrist.
"I have to go," I say.
Grace looks at me. She reads my face and she nods once.
"Come back," she says.
"Yes."
I leave and take the stairs two at a time. The morning is cold and the street is empty except for Renzo's rental and a delivery truck and, parked at the corner of Ninth, a black SUV with tinted windows.
Leone is behind the wheel. Claudio is in the passenger seat. Matteo is in the back, his laptop open on his knees, phone to his ear, running intel.
I get in the back next to Matteo. Leone pulls away from the curb.
"Motel on Columbus," Leone says. "Room 14. Claudio confirmed the vehicle is still in the lot. Both men are inside."
"Do we know if they've reported back to Royce?" I ask.
Matteo puts his phone down. "I intercepted a communication from the motel's Wi-Fi.
Royce received a preliminary report last night.
The Marinos are confirmed gone. The asset is confirmed at the restaurant.
They have a physical description of Grace and a description of a male associate.
" He pauses. "The bartender gave them both before they killed him. "
My hand goes to the knife. My grip tightens on the handle until my knuckles ache.
"They were going to go back today," Matteo continues. "The plan was to enter the restaurant during the dinner shift, confirm the asset visually, and extract. Standard network protocol for unsecured placements."
"Extract," I say.
"Relocate. New city, new identity, new family, new pills. Grace disappears again. That was the plan."
"That's not happening."
"No," Leone says from the driver's seat. "It's not."
We drive. The motel is twelve minutes from the restaurant.
A two-story building on Columbus Boulevard, faded siding, a parking lot half-full of trucks and sedans.
The kind of place that rents by the night and doesn't ask questions and has a security camera system that stopped working three years ago and was never fixed.
Leone parks across the lot from Room 14. A gray rental sedan with Delaware plates is parked in front of the door.
"Claudio," Leone says.
Claudio opens the glove compartment and removes a suppressor. He attaches it to a handgun and checks the magazine and the chamber before he puts the weapon inside his jacket.
"Matteo," Leone says.
Matteo closes the laptop. He pulls a small black case from under the seat. Inside: a set of lock picks, a roll of plastic sheeting, zip ties, and a phone cloning device. He puts the case inside his coat.
"Carmelo," Leone says.
I pull the knife.
Leone looks at me in the rearview mirror. His face is hard, ready for the kill.
"Clean," he says. "Both of them. Then we're done in Philadelphia."
We get out.
Claudio takes the perimeter. He walks the length of the building, checking windows, checking exits, counting the occupied rooms by the vehicles in the lot.
He comes back with two fingers raised. Two occupied rooms on this side of the building.
Room 14 and Room 18. Room 18 has a pickup truck with Pennsylvania plates. Not ours.
Matteo handles the lock. Room 14 has a standard motel deadbolt, the kind that costs eight dollars at a hardware store. He's through it in six seconds. He pushes the door open three inches and steps to the side.
I go in first.
The room is dark. Curtains drawn. Two beds.
One man in each. The one closest to the door is the tall one, light hair, Delvecchio's description.
He's sleeping on his back with a handgun on the nightstand six inches from his right hand.
The other is the shorter one, dark hair, glasses folded on the pillow next to his head.
The tall one's eyes open when the light from the hallway crosses his face. He sees me and his hand shoots toward the nightstand. Claudio's suppressed round takes the hand out of the equation. The sound is a soft pop followed by the man's scream, which Claudio stops with a second round to the chest.
The short one is up. He's fast. He rolls off the bed and goes for the floor, for the bag under the bed, and I'm across the room in two strides and my boot is on his wrist and my knife is at his throat.
"The bartender," I say. "The man you took last night from the restaurant. Who gave the order?"
"Royce. Verification protocol. We were told to..."
"Shut up." I press the blade into his skin until a line of red appears. "The bartender wasn't part of your protocol. He was a civilian. He had nothing to do with the placement."
"He was a contact point. Royce said to use contact points to locate the..."
"His name was Javi. He was twenty-six. He walked her home every night because he wanted to. He had a mother and a sister. He didn't know anything about any of this."
The man's eyes are wide. He's looking at my face and he's seeing what Delvecchio saw and what Paul Marino saw and what every man sees when I'm holding a blade to his throat in the dark. The understanding that reasoning has ended and the next few seconds are the last few seconds.