Authors: Penny McCall
So she was hugging the backpack to her chest like a security blanket. So she felt like everyone was staring at her, and she was braced for somebody to race out of an alley mouth and rape and kill her. That was normal in a neighborhood like this . . .
Except when she relaxed enough to turn her head, she discovered that the neighborhood wasn’t all that bad. According to the phone book map, she was in East Atlanta, which didn’t seem so different from her neighborhood in D.C. It was an older neighborhood that had spent fifty years sinking into comfortable shoddiness, and was now being dragged back to real estate desirability by young, two-income couples who couldn’t afford Buckhead or the Highlands.
About half of the houses were still owned by working-class people without enough left over from the weekly paycheck for luxuries like house paint and screen repair. The rest of the houses were renovated to within an inch of their lives, ruthlessly landscaped, and probably equipped with the latest alarm systems. Trendy chain restaurants shared street space with blue-collar bars that had probably been there forever.
There was a good amount of traffic, but the sidewalks were pretty much devoid of human life. A wolf whistle came from a guy in a car idling at the next intersection, but it was halfhearted at best, like he had a rep to maintain, but what was on his mind was dinner.
The scarcity of threats was kind of disappointing, actually. It didn’t feel like her day was complete anymore unless somebody tried to murder her. Of course, there was always the possibility Jack would catch up to her and supply a halfway believable death threat. He had more than enough time.
She’d just missed the bus to Washington, she was informed when she arrived at the terminal. The next bus headed for D.C. wasn’t going anywhere for a solid eight hours. Aubrey picked up her ticket—good old dependable-as-tooth-decay Tom—and scoped out the bus station.
There wasn’t much to see. A ticket counter, some benches, restrooms, wide windows with buses outside them. Boring décor, lots of strangers, any of whom might be plotting her death.
She was still feeling naked without Jack, so she chose a bench that put her back to the wall and her front to the door. She rooted around in her backpack and came up with a small pad of paper and a pen, killing time by writing out a list of coworkers and acquaintances. Not that she needed a list to remember them, but she liked to be organized. The list was in alphabetical order, and she could cross them off once they were ruled out. By the time she finished her stomach was telling her she’d missed another meal, the clock on the wall told her it was officially day six of her ordeal, and the guy coming across the station toward her told her it was time to get nervous.
At first glance she might have mistaken him for Jack, lots of muscles, no neck, probably a lack of imagination. If he had a propensity for violence she was in real trouble because there was only one reason he’d be headed her way, and it wasn’t a good reason. Despite the molar-baring smile.
“Hey,” he said, sitting on her bench, next to her but not too close. “How’s it going?”
She didn’t say anything because she couldn’t think through the alarm bells going off in her brain. Or maybe that was her heart playing tennis with her tonsils—possible since it had jumped up into her throat the second she realized she’d heard his voice before. In the dark, at her house.
“Where you headed?”
“St. Louis,” Aubrey said off the top of her head.
He plucked the ticket out of her hand. “This says Washington, D.C.”
“Gosh, imagine that.” She took it from him, tucked it into her backpack, and hugged the pack to her chest. Not exactly body armor, but it made her feel marginally better.
“I have a car. I could drive you.”
“If you have a car, why are you at the bus station?”
“I, uh, just, uh, dropped my girlfriend off.”
Aubrey could all but see a lightbulb go on over his head. “Really? Where’s she headed?”
“New York.”
“New York’s not that much farther than D.C. Why didn’t you drive her?”
“Told you she wouldn’t buy it.”
The absurdity of the conversation had begun to give her a false sense of security. The man settling on her other side sent her back into adrenaline overload, and not in a ripping-clothes-off way. She only seemed to have that kind of adrenaline backlash when Jack was around. “Uncle Danny?”
“Yeah.” He leaned forward and gave her other bookend a look. “That’s Carlo, my idiot nephew. I told him you weren’t just going to hop in some strange guy’s car.”
“Women,” Carlo muttered in disgust. “They never cooperate.”
“You should have believed me,” Danny said in a verbal slap-down tone of voice aimed at Carlo. “He should have believed me,” he repeated more politely to Aubrey. “You got standards. I can tell.”
“A girl’s gotta have standards.”
Carlo crossed his arms over his chest. “‘A girl’s gotta have standards,’” he mimicked in a falsetto, head waggling back and forth.
“Ignore him,” Danny said.
Right, she thought, sliding Carlo a look. There wasn’t an overgrown playground bully with a gun breathing down her neck. “If you say so.”
“I’m glad you feel that way. Just walk out quietly and nobody’ll get hurt.
“Except me.”
“Including you.”
Aubrey rolled her eyes. What was it with these guys that they thought she’d fall for anything? “You’re the same people who were shooting at me a few of days ago, right?”
“Sure,” Carlo said, “but we weren’t trying to hit you. If we was trying to hit you, you’d be dead.”
“I hate to admit it, but the kid is right,” Danny said. “We only wanted to scare you.”
“Yeah, well, it worked. I’m not going anywhere with you.” The bus station had begun to fill up while they were talking. Church youth groups, families with kids and pet carriers, single individuals with duffel bags or rolling suitcases, panhandlers. Who knew so many people took the bus in the middle of the night?
Danny noticed her taking in the activity. “You ever been on a long bus ride?” he asked her.
She shook her head.
“Boring as hell. Best to sleep through it.”
“You won’t drag me out of here with all these witnesses.” Not to mention the transit cop who meandered through every now and then.
“Then we’ll wait you out. This place is going to get pretty deserted before long.”
“But all these people have seen me with you.”
“Even if someone takes the time to track them down from wherever they’re going, do you really think any of them will testify in a case that involves Corona? Would you?”
Not if she had a choice. And wasn’t it depressing to think that her disappearance would be so unimportant that no one would bother to look up potential witnesses? Not even Jack. Of course, Jack would have a pretty good idea what had happened to her, and the only thing he’d be sorry about was her going to her grave with the information he needed still locked in her brain.
Depressing—but also liberating. Getting a look at the whole picture again removed the last bit of guilt she was feeling for ditching him and following her own agenda. Now she just had to get rid of the hit men. “I don’t want to testify against Corona. I don’t know anything about him.”
“That’s not what he thinks.”
“So convince him. Tell him you grilled me. Tell him you tortured me and I didn’t know anything.”
“Can’t do that,” Danny said. “We got specific instructions.”
“Okay, but things change, right? Instructions have to be adjusted, interpreted.”
“Corona don’t like interpretation. Corona likes absolute obedience.”
“And fear,” Carlo chimed in. “He really likes fear.”
“And when he don’t get what he wants, he likes to find a way to discourage a repeat performance. Permanently.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Aubrey said, “but I’m still not going anywhere with you. Not voluntarily anyway.”
Danny scrubbed a hand over his face.
“You have a schedule to maintain?” Aubrey asked. “Hot breakfast date?”
He leaned close, lowering his voice and talking out of the corner of his mouth. “Cut me a break, will ya? The kid’s in training and you’re making me look bad.”
“There’s a training program for hit men?”
“Whaddya think, we’re born this way?” He made a two-handed gesture that took in his slight paunch, grizzled gray hair, and lined face. What he really meant, Aubrey decided, was the cold, knowing glint in his eyes. Not unlike Jack’s.
“It takes time to get this good,” Danny said.
“A little natural talent doesn’t hurt either.”
Carlo fielded the look she sent him, turning red in the face. “Y’know, lady, it ain’t wise to piss off a guy with a gun.”
Aubrey couldn’t help but grin. “Federal agents and hit men have a lot in common.”
“I was telling him the exact same thing this morning,” Danny said to Aubrey, stabbing a beefy finger in his nephew’s direction. “This guy you’re running with ain’t that much different from us. He just works for different people.”
“Not always.”
Aubrey frowned over Carlo’s comment, but she didn’t have time to think about the probability that the government availed itself of the occasional freelance criminal’s service. Or that government operatives like Jack might cross the line in the other direction when it suited their purposes.
She scanned the place, looking for any way out of this predicament. Finding none. “So, how do you train a hit man?” she asked, having no option but to kill time.
“You gotta learn to keep your mouth shut for one thing,” Danny said, leaning forward so Carlo got the glare along with the rebuke. “If he mouths off to the wrong person again,” he continued for Aubrey’s benefit, “I’ll have to take care of him. And then I’ll have to start over with some other doofus.”
“And Gramma would be upset.”
Danny heaved a sigh. “My ma raised him after his parents died in an accident,” he explained.
Right, Aubrey thought, an accidental murder. “It’s nice that you’re showing him the family business.” She settled in, arms around her backpack, head against the wall behind her, waiting out the stalemate. “So what’s the training program like? Do you guys have a trademark?”
Danny snorted out a laugh.
“I thought all hit men have trademarks. Like Zorro.”
“Guys who have a trademark always get caught,” Danny said, “and then every job they’ve done gets pinned on them. Best to stick with a bullet to the back of the skull. Simple, clean, effective.”
“Unless it’s an informant,” Carlo put in.
“What do you do if it’s an informant?”
“Those who betray the organization get their tongues cut out.”
There didn’t seem to be any verbal response to that. Aubrey was having plenty of physical response. She sat back and concentrated on putting that image out of her head before she had to resort to breathing into a paper bag. It was surprisingly easy to calm down. She’d been in some level of denial since Jack had abducted her six days ago. It seemed to work pretty well for her so she saw no reason to abandon the strategy now. And really, was there any point in dwelling on the worst possible outcome of this standoff when she refused to believe it would come to that?
“You don’t think of me as a betrayer, right?” she asked.
“Nah,” Danny said, “you’re an accident.”
“I hear that a lot.”
“It’s a shame we gotta give you a hard time, sis. I’m beginning to like you.”
“Likewise,” Aubrey deadpanned, earning herself another chuckle from Danny.
The conversation lagged after that, the three of them keeping their thoughts to themselves—or at least she and Danny were keeping their thoughts to themselves, Aubrey amended. She wasn’t sure Carlo had any thoughts.
“C’mon,” Danny said after a little while, “it’ll be a hell of a long night if all we do is sit here.”
But it would be a night she spent alive. Aubrey didn’t feel the need to point this out; she figured the hit men knew that already. “So what’s your nickname?”
Danny sighed. “You’re not gonna shut up, are you?”
Yeah, hit men were a lot like FBI agents. “We’ve got all night,” she said. Or at least until she found an escape route.
Danny heaved another sigh, this one resigned. “So, what, you read somewhere that all hit men have nicknames?”
“I got that from the news. Every time I see one of you indicted for murder you seem to have a nickname.”
He mulled that over for a minute, apparently deciding there was no harm in telling her, which didn’t bode well for her chances of shaking these guys off.
“Danny Caps,” he said. “Last name’s Caparelli.”
“Makes sense. How about him?”
“Not until his first kill,” Danny said.
Carlo huffed out a breath. “You keep saying that, but I might as well go work for Uncle Vito on the docks in Jersey for all the action I get hanging around with you.”
“We got a tradition to uphold,” Danny growled.
“Corona won’t have no trouble replacing me.”
“What, you want he should hire some Wop from Sicily?” Danny demanded, then sat back, ranting to no one in particular. “You hear about the jobs going out of this country, but nobody cares about all the damn foreigners coming in. You see how many people are walking around with protection these days? And it’s not like you can just open fire wherever you want.” He snorted. “My old man used to talk about how it was back in the thirties. You could cap your target right in the middle of the street if you wanted. You do that now and you’re likely to be taken out by some ten-year-old kid packing an Uzi. Now that would be fucking embarrassing. And don’t even get me stared on the goddamn Russkis. I say put the wall back up and lock them all back behind it where they belong.”