Chapter 10 Maria
Breathe, Maria, I told myself as I watched the cop car from the window.
The two officers who had escorted me got into it and left.
My heart was still panic-beating, my chest painful.
I could not stop replaying the scene where Elio had pulled the trigger twice.
I’d been standing right behind him, and it was only after seeing him do that did I realize that I was deluding myself into thinking that I knew this man at all.
I knew nothing about him.
That entire date, I didn’t even know if he had a gun. And then he’d taken it out and threatened a man in front of me. Not only threatened, but he’d beaten Jimmy across the face.
But you liked that he stood up for you, came a reply from within.
The dark voice, I called it. It had been a part of my mind for as long as I could remember, always playing the devil’s advocate, always making me think that the bad guys I was writing reports on were not really bad guys.
That voice had always made me double down and do more research so that I could silence it—prove that the bad guys were definitely bad guys.
But here, I could not shut that voice up. Some part of my mind was listening to it, believing it to be true. I knew one thing for sure. Jimmy Donaldson was not going to come after me. Not after what had happened in that arcade.
When shit like this happened, it made me want to instinctively pick up the phone and call my mom. But that was a bridge better left burnt. I wasn’t going to go back there, so why call? It would only hurt to have to listen to her voice, get roped into her web of lies, so why call?
It made me wish that I had friends. Real friends and not work friends, friends I could call and tell them about the terrible things that were happening in my life.
Friends who would listen and not judge, listen and give me a shoulder to cry on instead of discussing the upcoming Pulitzer awards for best journalism.
Friends. Like in the movies. Like in all the books I’d ever read.
He was a friend. For a brief, crazy interlude in my life, he was a friend. A friend who had not only listened to me, but had anticipated my needs. A friend who had felt me. Been there for me when I actually needed him. And to think that it had only been one day.
A friend who had protected me. Yes, we’d flirted like crazy, and when we’d fucked, we’d fucked like crazy, but there was more to him than that. More than chemistry. There was some profound thing that I suspected the spiritualists of the world all knew and kept secret.
Something every lover, poet, and philosopher knew but never made public other than by the faintest of allusions. Subtle truths dressed up as lies so that those in the know would get it, and those not in the know would just gawp at the profundity, scratching their heads like apes.
Thinking about him and how fast he’d turned colors made my heart hurt. And I sat there where he’d sat earlier that day, and I cried looking at the empty beer bottle he’d left behind.
The maddening thing was I didn’t even know what I was crying over.
There’s only so many tears a girl could cry. Or so I told myself as I got up from that damn sofa and decided to get into the shower for the second time that day and drown my sorrow and confusion in boiling water.
There was something amiss, I thought as I stood there in the steam, catching my reflection in the fogged-up mirror.
There was something that wasn’t making sense.
The Elio I’d come to know in a day was not the same person who had pulled the gun and destroyed Jimmy’s trucks, whatever the hell that latter part meant.
Besides the obvious part where he was Don Romano’s son. Of course that was glaring oversight on my part. Of course he’d have a gun on him. Of course he’d travel with a security detail, get into restaurants without a reservation. Of course to all of that.
But when he was doing all of that with me, he wasn’t pretending.
When he pulled the gun out and shot the empty air twice—that’s when I knew he was pretending. It was not him.
I could very well be a delusional woman, and perhaps right now I was letting delusion take the wheel, but I needed to discern fact from fiction.
My journalistic instincts kicked in as soon as I got out of the shower and into my pajamas.
I fired up my computer. There was one place you couldn’t hide in today’s world, and that was the internet.
Privacy was the biggest currency, and billionaires had little of that currency.
There was your irony. The rich of the world had to book entire islands to keep their weddings private, whereas poor people all over the world got married in private.
As a journalist, I had explored the depths to which these billionaire types would go for the sake of privacy, from multimillion-dollar underground bunkers to owning entire islands.
If Elio was hiding something, it was bound to be there online. Even if it was his real identity, the one not even his father knew, the part of him that I’d glimpsed.
Down I went into the rabbit hole, spending more than three hours chasing obscure links about Elio Romano, his exploits, and the past that he had been hiding.
When I was done, it was one in the morning, and I knew one thing. I had to confront him with the truth. He owed me an explanation. More importantly, I demanded closure.
I was still in my pajamas, sleep evading me in every capacity, when I decided to get in my car and drive over to his compound. I took my laptop, grabbed my keys, and opened the door.
What I did not expect to see, standing in the hallway, was the stranger with a devilish grin on his face. I gasped and stepped back, but the man put his hand through the door and pushed it open, stepping into my apartment.
“So you are Elio’s new plaything,” he said, toothpick in mouth, his gray hair gleaming in the scant light of my apartment.
He was an old man, well into his fifties, wearing an expensive blue suit with silver stripes.
His glasses took up most of the space on his face, but they made him look menacing.
The frame tilted upward, and the shadow it cast over his face made him seem like a demon.
“Who are you?” I asked, my heart hammering.
“Please don’t ask questions that aren’t going to help you. While you’re at it, please don’t scream. It’s only going to wake up everyone in this building, and then I’ll have to kill everybody.”
He reached for my laptop, but I clung to it. The smile disappeared from the man’s face. He sneered as he took long strides toward me, grabbed the laptop, and threw it across the room. It smashed into the fridge and broke in two, its screen cracked.
“There you go. None of your snide articles anymore,” the man said, grabbing my wrist and squeezing his fingers around my skin painfully. He pulled at me. “Now I can make this easy for you, and I’ll only hurt you a little, or I can make this hard for you, in which case I shall hurt you a lot.”
Now was not the time for tears or screaming. I had to keep myself calm, even though every instinct in my body begged me to raise an alarm.
He pulled me by my arm and led me down the stairs. My legs felt like jelly going out of the apartment. There were people around. They were seeing what was happening. And yet none of them did anything as the man pushed me into his truck.
“Terribly unfortunate for you to be caught in the middle of all this,” the man said as he got in the truck, sitting beside me. “We pretend to be more than beasts, but there’s no denying our nature.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. I’d hoped my voice would come out strong, but it came out as barely a whimper.
“That’s what I find funny, Ms. Thurman. You don’t know who I am, and I find that insulting.
I think it’s got to do with the fact that I look remarkably different from my pictures.
All the dozens of vengeful, spiteful articles you have published about me in your little paper, and you still don’t understand why this is happening to you. ”
The puzzle piece fit too late, and by the time I figured out that this was Dresden Harrow, there was nothing I could do about it except hope that Elio would come after me.
But the Romanos were just influential in New York.
Dresden Harrow was the biggest businessman on the East Coast. It should have made sense sooner that he was behind Jimmy this entire time.
“Understand that this is nothing personal,” he said, looking at me as he lit a cigarette.
“This is not a kidnapping. I am not holding you for ransom. This is the end of the line for you. A valuable lesson for Elio Romano. It’s about time he learns that no matter how big he thinks he is, there’s bigger fish. And then there’s me, the fisherman.”
The car had black tinted windows. I could see nothing outside. All I was aware of at that moment was just how stifling the cigarette smoke was.
Breathe, Maria, I told myself, but to no avail. In the wake of the acrid smoke, all breath was poison.
When they took me out of the car, they did so with deliberate force, bruising my arms. There was a black cloth bag on my face.
I could see nothing, smell nothing. But I could hear quite well.
We were in North Creek. From the sound of the ships to the sound of the factories and the trucks backing out of warehouses, it was clear we were in North Creek.
I was dragged on my knees, pulled brutally, pushed, shoved, until I was in an enclosed space. An echoing hall. Cold.
He took the bag off my face, standing there on business, holding a hammer in his hands, another cigarette between his teeth.
“Oh, this?” Dresden asked, pointing at his hammer.
“It’s not for you just yet. I’m going to take my time with you.
Record the whole thing. Send it to Romano et al.
Send it to your boss. That’ll shut up the presses.
Send it to the mayor. He’s a kid, this fucking mayor.
A murder or two as a consequence of his actions is going to bring to his notice why he shouldn’t go about messing with us old-timers. ”
“Don Romano will have your head,” I spat defiantly.
“Don Romano is a weak, decaying man who doesn’t even hold any of the power he once did.
An impotent fuck trapped in his mansion.
Maybe after I’m done with you, I shall make my way to him, remind him of the good old days of turf wars, vendettas, revenge, and death.
Maybe that’s what’s going to stir him awake. ”
He left me there, all alone in the hall, tied to a chair, talking on his phone, swinging his hammer, smoking his cigarette.
Dresden Harrow, the most corrupt businessman on the East Coast. On the run from the Feds and the IRS, more ghost and myth than man, here he was, holding me captive.