Authors: Cassia Leo
I slap the hood of the blue Crown Victoria. “As long as you all don’t send any units to Marie’s until morning. It’ll be past midnight by the time I get there to break the news. She needs some time to process everything and get some rest. That’s all I’m asking.”
Verduta heaves a long sigh and shakes her head. “Eight a.m. tomorrow. She better be ready to talk. We still have two missing persons on our hands.” She glances around at the flurry of cops, detectives, and medics. “And don’t go trying to find them on your own. That’s our job, remember?”
I smile and nod because I know that last line was just for show. Verduta knows if there’s anyone who’ll find Rebecca, it’s me. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do. But first I have to tell Marie her husband is dead.
Shortly after finding out Bruno was transported to the hospital, just barely holding on, the helicopter arrives in a large field behind the farmhouse. I keep my chin down as I approach the chopper, then I pull myself in and breathe a sigh of relief. August is sitting there, his head in his hands as he leans forward.
“Relax,” I say, taking a seat next to him. “That was excellent timing on the FBI tip.”
I was going to kill August after he confessed his love for Rebecca to me a few days ago. Instead, I decided I could make August’s confused feelings work to my advantage. Besides, I didn’t think killing August would win me any favors with Rebecca. It may have even turned August into a martyr in her eyes, and I couldn’t have that.
August finally sits up and glances at me as he leans back. “They wanted to know why I’m working with you.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them what you told me to say: I can’t stand by and watch while you fuck this up. Someone has to make sure Rebecca’s found.”
I let out a hearty laugh and August smiles. “You little albino cocksucker. You always know what to say to bust my gut.”
His smile disappears. “What if you don’t find her?”
“I’ll find her.”
“You have to at least consider the possibility. What are you going to tell — ”
“I’ll
find
her!”
He turns away to look down at the city lights as we fly over Claremont. I take a deep breath to calm myself before I throw him out of the fucking helicopter. Then I lean back and shake my head.
Ten years. I’ve spent the last ten years modeling my life into a fishing net built to catch one big fish. Staking everything I had on my ability to lure in Tony so I could show him as much mercy as he showed my mother. I finally have him where I want him and what do I do? I throw away the last ten years for a woman.
Not even for a woman, because Rebecca’s not sitting next to me right now. I threw away my ten-year vendetta for the mere chance of seeing Rebecca again.
Losing a loved one will make you do crazy things. But falling in love with someone will make you completely insane.
“Your uncle is being transported to Connecticut tomorrow.”
August turns to me, his blonde eyebrow cocked in disbelief. “Is this another lie? Am I going to have to kill my mother or rip out my own beating heart and hand it over first? What’s the catch?”
I shake my head at his grandeur. “There no fucking catch. I said I’d bring your crook of an uncle back into the country if you did this for me and that’s exactly what I did. I’m a man of my word.”
He nods as he looks out the window again. “Why does it still feel like I lost?”
“Because you’re a cheating piece of shit, just like your Uncle Stewart. You never should have taken that girl up to your apartment August.” I smile as he clenches his fist, but he doesn’t look at me. “I’ve been waiting for Rebecca for eleven years. This was never going to be a fair fight.”
The helicopter touches down on the rooftop of Knox Security a quarter to midnight. I look at August and he looks scared as a teenage girl in a men’s locker room.
“Buck up, August. It’s time for phase two.”
“What’s phase two?”
“Phase two is where I bring Rebecca home and you look for a new girlfriend.”
4
Knox
The car pulls up to the two-story house on the corner of 80
th
Street and 19
th
Avenue and my gut clenches inside me. There aren’t many things that make me nervous. But knocking on Marie’s door at six minutes past midnight makes me feel like a fucking juvenile delinquent.
For some reason, I’m not at all surprised when Marie answers the door within minutes. As if she were sitting in the kitchen waiting for someone to knock on her door. She takes one look at my shirt, stained with Bruno and John’s blood, and the tears come fast.
I catch her in my arms before she can collapse. Holding her tightly against me, I can’t help but think of my mother. She would also be devastated to learn of John’s death. At least that’s one less heart I’ll have to break tonight.
Maintaining my hold on her, I close the front door and lead her into the dimly lit living room. I sit down on the brown leather sofa where John probably used to cheer on the Yankees. I squat down in front of her so my bloody clothes don’t soil her furniture, then I grab her hand.
“I’m sorry, Marie. I tried to protect him, but you know John. He likes to do stuff on his own. He doesn’t take orders from anyone.”
She stares at her lap where my hand envelops hers. The tears stream down her face as she silently contemplates this news. Finally, she squeezes my hand and looks up at me.
“I’ve imagined this day a million times, but I never imagined you’d be the one holding my hand.” She wipes her cheeks and takes a deep breath. “I don’t think either of us will be sleeping tonight. Come have an espresso with me. I want to hear all your best stories about John.”
I sit at the breakfast table in her pristine white kitchen while she prepares us both an espresso. By the time she arrives at the table with our drinks and takes a seat next to me, there’s not a trace of moisture around her eyes. Just like Rebecca when she came back into my life last month. Unwilling to crumble until I showed her how good it felt to let go.
“John took me to Henry’s chop shop when I was sixteen,” I begin and she shakes her head in dismay. “Wait, it gets better.”
“I’m sure it does. Go on.”
I take a sip of my espresso, taking a moment to breathe in the warm earth aroma, then I continue. “I had just gotten my driver’s license and I was desperate for a car of my own. My ma couldn’t afford to get me a car and she was always working.” I glance at her to see if she’s getting uncomfortable with me talking about my mom, but she just stares at the table. “Anyway, I was itching to start hustling for John.”
“I thought this story was gonna get better,” Marie teases me.
I chuckle then I continue telling her the story of how John helped me get my first legit car — a ’67 Ford Mustang. I spent every night and every weekend in my garage working on that car for four months until it purred like a kitten. All he wanted in return was to be the first person I took for a ride in that baby.
This story gives Marie pause. She stares at the tiny espresso cup in her hands for a moment, digesting the story of this simple gesture of kindness. As if she’s trying to reconcile the John in my story with the brutal John Veneto we see portrayed on the news or the philandering husband she’s loved since she was a teenager.
“You never really know someone, you know?” She wears a weak smile as she slowly spins the espresso cup in her hands. “I thought I knew the kind of bastard he could be. But it wasn’t until he thought he was going to prison for the rest of his life that I finally began to see the John I fell in love with twenty-nine years ago. The kid who walked me home every day after school and waited until I was seventeen before he asked me out. Who the hell was I married to all these years? Because it wasn’t that kid and it sure as hell wasn’t the man who got you your first car.”
“Marie, we all make mistakes. The important thing is that he loved you.”
“Love is not enough, Marco. Love is just a feeling. It only means something when it’s acted upon. And John had a real sick way of loving me.” She turns and looks me in the eye. “Don’t make the same mistakes we made. Don’t hurt my little girl.”
“I would never. And I’m going to find her, Marie. I won’t stop looking until she’s home safe.”
She closes her eyes and grabs the bridge of her nose, pressing her fingers into the corners of her eyes. Then she lets out a soft whimper and finally lets go. I sit with her a while longer while she weeps and shares a few stories with me. All the stories are about her and John when they were kids, but the last story is about me.
“I can’t believe I forgot to tell you this the last time you came here. A few years after Ella died, maybe four or five years, Lori Franco thought she saw someone who looked like you snooping around your old house. I told Johnny and he said it couldn’t have been you because you were living in some other country and you didn’t want nothing to do with that place. Was it you?”
I think back to the last time I snuck into Bensonhurst. It was five years ago. I’d been all over the world building connections as I started up Knox Security. It was my first night back in New York and I couldn’t help myself. I had to get a look at the old house. I wanted to know if the people who lived there looked happy. I wanted to know that it was possible for someone to still be happy in that house.
I had a crazy superstitious belief that if I looked through their window and saw a family watching TV together or having dinner together, that it would mean I had to give up my vendetta. Because my mother’s ghost was gone. She was at peace. I could let her go and move on.
But I looked through the window into that family’s living room and all I saw was a young teenage girl sitting on a sofa. She was hugging her knees to her chest and crying. She didn’t look anything like Rebecca, but I thought of Rebecca when I saw her. Then I thought of John and what he’d done to Frank Mainella. He wouldn’t want me to quit. He wanted Tony dead as much as I did.
“Yeah, that was me,” I say, swallowing the knot in my throat.
“That place got foreclosed on almost two years ago and nobody’s been in there since,” Marie continues as she gathers our espresso cups. “But I saw a couple of guys around there yesterday and I figured it was a couple of your guys.”
“You saw some guys around there yesterday?”
Her eyebrows knit in confusion. “They weren’t your guys?”
“Fuck!” Her eyes widen with fright. “I’m sorry, Marie. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just — I should have fuckin’ known!”
“You think… you think they have Rebecca there?”
I shake my head, trying to temper this insane hope churning inside me. “I don’t know. But I’m about to find out.”
I shoot up from my chair and head for the door with Marie on my heels. “Shouldn’t you get some backup or something? You can’t go there alone.”
“I’ve got one of my guys outside.” I turn around to face her when I reach the door. “Stay here. Don’t answer the phone and don’t answer the door for anyone. You got it?”
She nods and though I can see she’s worried sick, there’s a trace of hope gleaming in her eyes, as well. “Be careful.”
“I will.”
“And, Marco?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t show them any mercy.”
“I won’t.”
5
Rebecca
They’re moving us. Finally!
It took a little scheming on our part, and a couple of days of starvation, but Lita and I finally got them to move us out of this basement. Yesterday, we wrapped our breakfast of toast and eggs in large wads of toilet tissue and stuffed them into the toilet until it was completely stopped up. Then we slid our plates back through the flap in the door, empty and covered in blood-soaked tissue. The blood was actually from my finger. But it got their attention.
We finally heard one of our captors’ voices when the jerk came to pick up our plates and yelled, “What the fuck?” We screamed at him that we were both menstruating and the toilet was stopped up. We didn’t hear anything from any of them the rest of yesterday, and all day today.
We were beginning to think we’d made a grievous error, until they slipped a typed note, two silk hoods, and two pairs of handcuffs through the slot in the door. The note says to put our shoes on, then cuff one of our hands to the drain under the sink and use the other hand to put the hood over our head. They’re moving us tonight. Which means our plan worked!
They’re giving us ten minutes to get cuffed and ready for them to come down. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. This is our chance to make a run for it.
Lita’s gray eyes are dulled by the lack of food. She doesn’t usually skip meals. She usually eats six small meals per day. Her biological mother has diabetes and she insists that small regular meals will prevent her from getting it. Nevertheless, five days in a basement eating two to three large meals full of starch has given Lita major heartburn and deadly flatulence. Which has been a source of both tears and laughter for us in our basement prison.
“So you’re going to pretend to pass out from low blood sugar,” Lita whispers as we both sit on the wood floor beneath the utility sink and cuff ourselves to the drainpipe.
She’s the one with the family history of diabetes, but I’m the one who’s going to pretend to pass out. Not that we think they know anything about our family medical history. But I agreed to be the one who fake-faints because I’m the one who took an acting class at Hunter College. Something I’m seriously regretting right now.
“What if they don’t care that I passed out? Or what if they try to force-feed me some candy or something?”
“Then we’ll go to Plan B.”
“Which is…?”
“Scratch, claw, punch, and scream.”
I haven’t told Lita about the possibility that I might be pregnant. It just seems so unlikely with Knox’s history; vasectomy reversals don’t always go well. And I don’t want to see the pity or relief in Lita’s eyes if we find out later that I’m not pregnant. Because, yes, it will be disappointing. No matter how hard I’ve tried not to think about what it would be like to have a child with Knox, I’ve had nothing but time to think about that for the past five days.