Headstone City Part 27

"Is this all because of that dead girl?"

"Not really."

"Her sister? That Maria, right?"

"Yeah, in a way."

"I thought so. I always knew you'd been hit by the thunderbolt." She clutched his shoulder, chucked him under the chin so he'd meet her eye. "You don't have much time. You can't stop now. You've got to finish it."

He'd been thinking the same thing.

There was no other way out of it. They'd just keep taking runs at him until he was dead unless he took the fight to the Monticellis.

The sirens sounded to be about the same distance away. There were probably enough cops on the Don's payroll to keep them running in circles for the next half hour.

Grandma retreated back to the cellar and came up with an unopened box of .38 bullets and a handful of shotgun sh.e.l.ls. He'd been in the bas.e.m.e.nt maybe ten thousand times and had no idea where the shotgun might've been hidden.

He took the ammo and reloaded the pistol, grabbed up the shotgun, and started for the door. But something was still nagging him.

Turning at the last second, he asked, "Hey, how's everybody know your name anyway? You used to fool around with Don Monti back in the day, right?"

"Don't talk dirty. Now go and end this thing. And when I send you to the bakery from now on, you think you can just get a few cannoli and some sfogliatelle and come home again without causing so much trouble?"

"Next time," Dane said.

TWENTY-SEVEN.

Walking through ICU past the gray wasted faces of families of the dying. His mother lay in a small room surrounded by machinery that loomed over her like G.o.ds of steel.

Her kidneys had failed and she was yellow and bloated with toxins. The machines forced her frail chest to continue breathing. They surrounded her, winking, watching, livid with screens everywhere so he could witness the gradual slowing of her pulse and her steadily decreasing heartbeat.

His mother had something to tell him.

The kid with the twisted head from across the hall was lying in the bed with her, saying Mama, Mama. Crying the way Dane should be crying but couldn't. Hugging her, his sutures and busted skull bones pressed against her breast.

Dane sat and watched the jagged raw red scars across the frontal lobe moving, reaching, wanting to leap the distance and crawl against Dane's flesh, digging down into his brain. Lying up against his own scars, connecting, mating, reproducing. Cras.h.i.+ng in the metal doors and taking over.

What did you dream, Mama?

I dreamed an angel with golden wings as s.h.i.+ny as coins sat with me on the end of the bed. I watched the television for a while, but it wasn't on. I bled in the toilet.

You wanted her to tell you more about the angel but her mouth was sealed with tape around the tubes that forced breath into her lungs. You understood the men who went berserk in this situation and killed their loved ones. You could stand the sound of the buzzing and dripping and clicking around them, all designed to extend pain?

Dane couldn't speak and sat rubbing his mother's hand with his thumb. The rhythm seemed to calm him for some reason, while his shadow grew beneath his feet.

The boy with the sick brain spoke with a beautiful voice, in English and other languages Dane didn't know but could, for the moment, understand.

"Why are you here?"

"Because my mother is dying."

"Hebben u gezien de engel met gouden vleugels?"

"No, what kind of angel is it? Is it death?"

"C'est un ange signifiee pour vous."

"Why is she seeing an angel that's come for me?"

"Parce que vous etes beni." The kid hissed his words, full of a promising but terrible emotion.

"It's not a blessing. This is a burden."

"You have no idea of what real sorrow is," the boy told him. "Her sleep can never be pure. She will always struggle, restless here and elsewhere. Weeping for you, and later in h.e.l.l."

"f.u.c.k off, kid!"

Thumb moving back and forth on your mother's yellow, bloated flesh. The machines speaking in ancient rhymes that haven't been translated in millennia.

The boy touched your scars, matching them against his own. You're glad that he keeps on talking.

"Was wunschen Sie von mir?"

"I don't want anything from you."

"e bonita. Eu quero-a. Voce no merece uma mulher to maravilhosa. e minha. Me. Me."

"She's not your mother. She's beyond you now."

"Mere. Mere."

"She's my ma."

"Mia madre. La mia madre!"

"She's my mom."

Thinking about how easy it would be to snap the boy's neck, Dane waited for somebody to come save him. He waited for his ma to save him.

The kid's head came further apart, the sutures and staples pulling away.

Or maybe that was only Dane.

It was hard to tell, especially now.

Dane pulled the Caddy back up into Phil Guerra's driveway and the garage door opened. Phil stepped out holding a 9mm aimed at him.

Living up to his name. Bringing the war right out into the street to Dane, who dared to s.n.a.t.c.h the '59 dream car. Twice. The 9mm reflected in the fiery Magic-Mirror acrylic lacquer finish. The chrome grill blazed like a smelter's forge.

Phil was digging the moment. Getting a chance to stand there with his gun out, probably seeing himself in black-and-white, up on the screen with Bogie and Robert Ryan. He still moved pretty good even with the extra weight, easing out onto the driveway and making sure he was clear in case Dane tried to gun the engine and run him over.

"You don't want to ruin your s.p.a.cious, curvy winds.h.i.+eld," Dane told him.

"Get out of my car, Johnny!"

"No. You get in."

"I'm not kidding here, you punk!"

"I can see that, Uncle Philly. It's been a bad day all around."

Phil leaned down and peered at Dane. The 9mm bobbed for a moment, then pointed downward. "What've you done, Johnny?"

"Climb in, I'll tell you all about it."

"n.o.body drives my car but me, d.a.m.n it!"

Grinning at him pleasantly, Dane said, "n.o.body but you, me, and the twenty guys that owned it before you. All the mechanics and grease monkeys and shop owners over forty-five years. You shouldn't be behind a wheel. You're going to flatten somebody someday soon, some lady pus.h.i.+ng a carriage in a crosswalk. I'm a driver, you know that. Let me drive. Come on, Phil, just a quick one around the neighborhood, then it's all yours again. Don't be a p.r.i.c.k like your father just because he never let you behind the wheel when you were a kid."

That touched a nasty nerve. Phil grimaced and his eyes swirled. He'd at last gone all the way to the wall, and Dane took a weird sort of pride in that. "You got b.a.l.l.s talking about my old man."

"We all speak our piece eventually."

Look at him now. His rug hung too far to one side, like he'd been sitting in the garage with his head leaned up against the workbench, waiting through the night for his car to come home.

Phil slipped up to the door and carefully maneuvered it open like it might be wired with explosives. He pointed the gun at Dane's chest and, in a lingering manner, his face crumbled. The hard veneer cracked loose and he seemed on the verge of walking away. "What's the shotgun in the backseat for?"

"Persuasion."

Phil really had been a pretty good cop once. He was careful enough to keep the 9mm trained on Dane the entire time he was getting in.

"You been smoking in here? Jesus f.u.c.kin' Christ!"

"Sorry," Dane said. "That was rude, I apologize."

He meant it, and Phil understood that, his expression softening even more. It didn't take much to start a blood feud, and equally little to let it slide. The 9mm dropped into his lap, then down between his knees.

Dane drove leisurely around town, teaching Phil Guerra how it was actually done. Without all the frenzied squealing turns and near misses. The screaming pedestrians and Chinese delivery guys.

This was how you drove a '59 Cadillac.

The rocket tail fins and jet pod taillights cleaving through the asphalt ocean. Grille glittering like the eyes of every mook who'd never ride in such a luscious and exquisite car, never climb into a saddle as sweet and flawless. Ma.s.sive front b.u.mper churning aside all doubts and fears, debts and misgivings.

Phil felt it too. He visibly calmed, the corners of his mouth relaxing, and after a deep breath let out a singsong, throaty hum.

Smooth and effortlessly. Dane looked at Uncle Philly again, with the fake silver hair and the perpetual false tan. The years dug into him as a testament to resilience. The expensive leather shoes, jolly fat cheeks, thinking what his father might've looked like now if the man had lived this long.

How would he have taken to retirement? Would he have phoned Dane in the joint? Could a cop like that come and see his own son? The myth of his old man would always be too great for Dane to comprehend fully. That wreck of a spectre sitting in the center of the bed, his pulse leaking, those eyes unfamiliar.

"I knew you never should've come back to the neighborhood," Phil said. "I still have that money waiting for you, if you want it."

"No thanks."

"I told you and I told you that it wasn't the safest place for you!"

"What can I say?"

Dane didn't feel the need to bring up the fact that it was obviously safer for him than it had been for Berto Monti or Joey Fresco or JoJo Tormino.

"Why'd you do it?" Phil asked. "Snuff Roberto Monticelli?"

There wasn't much point in denying culpability anymore. "He wanted it that way."

"They won't rest now. That crew."

"They're all slow, lazy, and stupid."

"They have money and numbers."

"That's not enough," Dane told him. It was obvious, but hardly anybody saw it. He turned, wondering if Phil might make a move, try to take Dane down himself and get in good with the boss. But the 9mm didn't come up into sight again.

Uncle Philly, sitting there, was just an old man, with his hair slipping down farther over his left ear. None of the bra.s.s or fire anymore, not even the usual, natural belligerence. The guy's shoulders so slack it looked like he might slump over and go to sleep with his head resting on Dane's arm.

They parked in the same spot where Dad's crusier had been found, the man inside, his temple leaking endless dreams. Five police cars were out in front of Grandma Lucia's house down the block, but they hadn't barricaded the street and no cops approached the Caddy. What s.h.i.+tty police work.

"Why did you kill my father?" Dane asked.

Phil's lackl.u.s.ter expression seemed more beaten down than anything, like this was only another wearying subject. "What the h.e.l.l is this now?"

"I want to know."

"Johnny-"

"Was it because he found out you were in the Montis' pocket? Is that why you did it?"

"Found out?" A dismal, steady t.i.tter almost worked up into a chuckle. "He always knew that. So what? You think your dad was clean? Hey, he didn't take as much as most guys, but he took his share. We all did."

"Like you said, you ought to get something out of twenty-five years besides a gold watch."

"Yeah. But . . . Johnny, you been thinking I killed your old man? Since when?"