Headstone City Part 30

Dane tightened, holding the shotgun in one hand, setting himself. He s.h.i.+fted so he could swing on Big and take his head off with no trouble.

Big Tommy Bartone wasn't an idiot though, not anymore. "You want to live like that, Johnny? Never relaxed? Always on your toes?"

You could do worse. Dane thought about his life up to this point and how he'd walked through so much of it without giving a d.a.m.n about anything. Like Vinny said, they'd already met death and gotten tangled in the veil. "It's something to do."

Delmare said, "The police will be here soon asking questions about everything that's happened today. You need a cover story for why you're not at home."

"Call the Marriott in Mount Laurel. I'll hole up there for a few days, then come back. I'll tell the investigators I had to hide for fear of retribution."

"Who do we say whacked Roberto?" Tommy asked.

Delmare liked using his mind, letting his instincts run. "Joey Fresco. Joey did it all. He had bad debts catching up to him. He used to visit the Ventimiglia casinos a lot and owed them at least twenty large. We say he was a traitor who went to work destroying our organization from the inside." Delmare gestured with his chin toward the Don. "He did this. And Berto. He also murdered Vinny. We lay it all at his feet, and we implicate the Venimiglia family in doing so." Staring into Dane's eyes now. "You were Vinny's best friend. Joey Fresco knew you'd come after him, so he tried to ice you in your grandmother's house. But you were faster and killed him."

"Actually, she did."

"Holy f.u.c.k," Big Tommy said. "I gotta meet this lady."

Dane asked, "Does this place have a large kitchen?"

"What?"

"Is there a lot of room to move in the kitchen?"

"The h.e.l.l are you doing talking about the kitchen for?"

"Just answer me."

"Yeah, it's huge."

"Good, my grandmother will like it."

He imagined Grandma Lucia moving into the mansion, settling in upstairs, an old-world cafone peasant woman surrounded by all this wealth. So long as Dane had the strength to keep it all.

He'd get Pepe over here to act as his capo, help sharpen up these poor examples of la cosa nostra. Who knew, maybe even Fran, with all that awful hate inside her, could be put to good use. If not, then he'd have to kill her. He didn't want somebody like that walking around anywhere near him in this town.

Delmare stared over Dane's shoulder. Dane turned and looked down the corridor.

And there she was.

Maria Monticelli.

With her insanely black hair coiling and twining to frame her dark and eternal eyes, the luscious angles of her body shown off to perfection. Her blouse open one b.u.t.ton too far. The hem of her burgundy skirt caught over her knee to give an enticing view of what he'd dreamed about most of his life. If this wasn't love, it was the next best thing.

This is what you've always wanted.

She moved from the bottom of the staircase, looked at her murdered daddy in the chair. She said nothing, but took another step closer. He breathed her in. His chest was constricted with the insane excitement of being so close to her again.

Of course you would murder men for her. You'd have to be crazy not to.

He drew the bloodstained box from his pocket and opened it, held the diamond ring out to her.

"What's this?" she said. "You . . . you're asking me . . . ? You-?"

"Yeah."

Those lips, drawing him in, as if he'd traveled a thousand miles but somehow the journey got easier with each step. Leading him to stand before her. The funny guy who wasn't so tough.

She said, "Everything you did today, Johnny. What they've been saying. About my brothers . . . and my father-my daddy?"

"Yes, Maria."

Everybody just stared at him, maybe waiting for her to give the order to kill Dane.

Dane scowled at one of the toughs. Just another kid really, no more than twenty or so. Dane said, "You. You just got promoted. What's your name?"

"Nunzio."

Jesus, all these old-world Italians and their names from the Olive Oil villages. "All right, Nunz, I want you to take the Don out of here. Use the Caddy out front. Vinny's in the trunk."

"Holy f.u.c.k," Big Tommy said.

"Bury them wherever you get rid of bodies, Big. The Meadowlands? Fresh Kills?"

"Yeah, Staten Island. There's no room behind Kennedy Airport anymore."

"Go take them." Gesturing to the muscle. "Both of you help him. Remember the spot though. In a couple of weeks we'll drop a call to the police, have them found and brought home. Give them a big funeral." They deserved that, and both of them would've understood this had to come first. "Afterward, I'll have a list of more to do. And your salary's just been doubled."

"Everybody in the organization?" Delmare asked.

"Everybody in this room. Get the troops together in the morning. I got a few things I can teach them."

"Do you mean military tactics?"

"Yeah."

"What are you planning to do?"

"To pay a visit to the Ventimiglias. We're going to take out Vito Grimaldi."

"But why? They haven't done anything. By implicating them with all these recent crimes, they'll be smeared in the media and under continuous investigation for months. There's no reason to take a stand against them."

Dane looked at him. "They're the last rough crew around."

"Yes, that's right."

"So that's the reason, Georgie."

Everybody grateful now. The two thugs with the same expression on their stupid faces-giddy, sensing major changes ahead. They grabbed the Don's body and hustled him down the hallway and out the door. Big carried away the blood-smeared chair, and that was the only evidence that the Don had died in his own living room. Georgie nodded and left for his office.

Dane turned to Maria and saw real fright in her eyes.

He stepped closer and saw the l.u.s.t there too, the reverence.

Rispetto.

She was looking at him as if noticing him for the first time since he was a child, and she was.

It made his pulse hammer and the sweat flood down his back. He took her gently but a.s.suredly, encircling her waist and drawing her to him. She held her ground for an instant, then flowed against his body, squirming there, then yielding.

"Do you still want to be an actress?"

"I never really cared much about that," she said. "It was something to dream about until something else better came along."

He thought of her on the screen, sharing her with the world, ten thousand theaters filled with squirming men, guys at home with their VCRs all freeze-framed on her. "Good," Dane told her. "I need you here."

"You need me." Her face softening even more, so beautiful that he could barely control himself.

"I always have."

"I've been waiting for you, Johnny."

JoJo had been right. We all got one thing in the world that we love more than anything else. That makes us do what we do and makes us who we are.

He led her upstairs, kicking in doors until he found her bedroom. As he kissed her throat he saw the photo of JoJo Tormino behind her, on the night table. He eased her down on the mattress, reached over, and slapped the frame to the floor.

She unbuckled his belt and he said, "JoJo loved you. I promised him I'd tell you that."

"I don't give a s.h.i.+t," she whispered, and Dane rolled her back on the bed and was on her.

The boy with the sick brain happily bounded forward from a corner of the room, perhaps finally ready to tell Dane whatever it was he'd been trying to say. An angel with golden wings as s.h.i.+ny as coins sat on the edge of the mattress, supplicant but silent, a burning sword in its right hand. Dane lay with his love and let out his first real laugh in thirty years against her throat as he waited for the kid so much like himself to again mutter all the grievous, joyous, secret languages of the profane and fitful dead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

TOM PICCIRILLI is the author of fourteen novels, including November Mourns, A Choir of Ill Children, The Night Cla.s.s, A Lower Deep, and Coffin Blues. He's had over 150 stories published, and his short fiction spans multiple genres and demonstrates his wide-ranging narrative skills. He has been a World Fantasy Award finalist and a three-time Bram Stoker Award winner. Visit Tom's official website, Epitaphs, at www.tompiccirilli.com. Tom welcomes email at

OTHER BOOKS BY TOM PICCIRILLI.

NOVELS.

November Mourns A Choir of Ill Children Coffin Blues Grave Men A Lower Deep The Night Cla.s.s The Deceased Hexes Sorrow's Crown The Dead Past Shards Dark Father COLLECTIONS.

Mean Sheep Waiting My Turn to Go Under the Knife (Poetry) This Cape Is Red Because I've Been Bleeding (Poetry) A Student of h.e.l.l (Poetry) Deep Into That Darkness Peering The Dog Syndrome & Other Sick Puppies Pentacle NONFICTION.

Welcome to h.e.l.l Don't miss Tom Piccirilli's exciting next novel

coming from

Bantam Books

in Fall 2006.

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On sale fall 2006 Killjoy wrote: Words are not as adequate as teeth.

Incisors are incapable of lying. If I pressed them into wax or paper or fish or flesh you would know my meaning, the constraints of form, and every trivial fact there is to be found. Words are deficient, even impractical, when attempting to convey the substance of true (modest) self. Deed is definition. We are restricted by mind and voice but not in action, wouldn't you agree? That we can never completely express that which is within. That sometimes the very act of feeling isn't enough to encompa.s.s all there is to feel. Frenzy is trying to explain your behaviors to yourself. I suspect I have yet a long way to go at the art of becoming human.

Remember Schlagelford's great treatise on the fear of non-existence. He spent some thirty-seven years of his adult life with his left hand clamped to his left thigh (trouserless, of course). Despite his grip cutting off all circulation in that leg until it withered, blackened, and eventually had to be amputated (and the hand, no more than a frozen talon, had grown useless, and continued to squeeze the phantom limb), at which point he gripped his right thigh with his right hand and had to write his last major work, The Season of Femoral, with quill champed between teeth, still he was content.

Satisfied in his knowledge of personal existence in a world without enough promise or structure.