Chapter 8 - THE BLACK SEDAN
The blood roared in my ears as I stared at the glowing phone screen in Marco’s hand.
Vanessa hadn’t kept her mouth shut downstairs. The moment she had walked back into that dining room, terrified of what we would find upstairs, she had told her father and Marco where we had gone—and Marco had immediately sent two men to West Addison to silence Sal and Gio forever.
“You touch my son,” Luca said, taking a step directly toward the barrel of the gun, “and I will tear you apart with my bare hands right now.”
“Stay right where you are!” Marco snapped, thumbing back the hammer of the thirty-eight. “Drop the watch on the floor, Luca!”
Luca pretended to lower his right hand to drop the gold pocket watch onto the rug, drawing Marco’s eyes downward for a fraction of a second.
That was all I needed.
I didn’t think about being a twenty-nine-year-old housekeeper making twenty-two dollars an hour. I thought about a seventy-one-year-old man who kept peppermints in the glove compartment for an elderly aunt, and a five-year-old boy in blue pajamas holding a Saint Christopher medal in the dark.
With both hands, I swung the heavy cedar floorboard panel I had picked up off the carpet straight into the side of Marco’s wrist.
The crack of solid wood hitting bone echoed simultaneously with the deafening roar of the revolver.
The bullet shattered the bay window behind us, showering glass across Vanessa’s wedding trunks, and before Marco could recover his aim, Luca lunged forward and drove his shoulder into his uncle’s chest. They crashed backward against the plaster wall, the gun skittering across the polished hardwood floor under the bed.
Luca didn’t stop until Marco was pinned face-down on the carpet, his knee planted squarely between the older man’s shoulder blades while he yanked the silk cords off the window draperies and tied Marco’s wrists tightly behind his back.
“Call 911 from the landline on that nightstand, Emma!” Luca shouted, grabbing Marco’s cell phone off the floor and sprinting for the hallway door. “Tell the police there are armed men heading to 4418 West Addison right now, and then tell them to come up to the third floor of this address!”
“What are you going to do?” I cried, already snatching up the receiver and dialing with shaking fingers.
“I’m taking Marco’s car in the driveway!”
“Wait!” I shouted as soon as I gave the dispatcher the West Addison address and dropped the phone. I grabbed Elena’s notebook and ran down the back stairs right behind him. “I know a shortcut through the alley behind Belmont that cuts four minutes off the traffic lights on Western Avenue!”
Luca didn’t argue. When we burst out the service door into the rainy courtyard, we didn’t even look toward the dining room where shouts of confusion were finally rising after the muffled gunshot upstairs. We jumped into Marco’s silver Cadillac parked near the garage doors, and Luca floored the accelerator before my door was even fully shut.
The tires screamed against the wet cobblestone driveway as we tore through the iron gates onto the street.
“Dial the landline at the West Addison house on Marco’s phone!” Luca barked, weaving between a city bus and a delivery van at seventy miles an hour through the rain. “It’s in the recent calls under Victor’s name!”
I scrolled through the call log with trembling thumbs, found the 773 number, and pressed call, holding it on speaker between us.
It rang once. Twice. Three times.
Pick up, Sal, I prayed silently, staring out the rain-streaked windshield as we blew through a yellow light on Belmont. Please pick up the phone.
On the fourth ring, the line clicked open—but nobody spoke. Instead, through the tiny speaker of the phone, I heard the unmistakable sound of heavy wooden footsteps on porch stairs and the splintering crash of a front door lock giving way.
“Sal!” Luca roared at the phone, his knuckles white on the steering wheel as we skidded around the final corner onto West Addison. “Sal, get Gio out the back!”
Two blocks ahead of us, under the amber glow of the streetlamp, a dark gray SUV was parked at a sharp angle across the driveway of the little gray bungalow, blocking the black Mercedes sedan from backing out to the street. The front door of the bungalow stood wide open to the rain.
And there was no movement inside the yellow-lit living room window.
Luca didn’t hit the brakes.
Instead of stopping behind the SUV, he aimed the heavy front grille of Marco’s Cadillac directly at the rear quarter-panel of the parked vehicle blocking the driveway.
“Brace yourself, Emma!” Luca yelled.
I threw my arms over my face just as three tons of Detroit steel slammed into the back of the SUV at forty miles an hour. Metal screeched and crumpled like tin foil; our airbags didn’t deploy from the angled hit, and the sheer force of the impact spun the empty SUV completely across the wet lawn, clearing the mouth of the driveway.
Before our car had even rocked to a stop against the curb, the wooden doors of the tiny detached garage at the back of the driveway exploded outward.
Sal hadn’t parked the black Mercedes in the open driveway where he could be boxed in—thirty-four years of driving for the Moretti family had taught him better than that. He had backed the sedan into the narrow wooden garage behind the house the moment we left in the cab.
Now, the big black Mercedes shot forward down the concrete driveway past the wrecked SUV, its headlights blinding the two men in dark coats who had just run back out onto the front porch of the bungalow with crowbars in their hands.
Sal hit the brakes right alongside our crumpled passenger door and threw the back door of the Mercedes open from the inside.
“Get in, kid!” Sal shouted over the roar of the engine and the distant wail of approaching police sirens three blocks away.
Luca grabbed my arm, pulled me out of the smoking Cadillac, and shoved me into the back seat of the Mercedes right before diving in after me. Beside me on the leather seat, wrapped in a thick wool blanket with Mrs. Gable’s arm around him, was Gio—safe, unharmed, and staring wide-eyed at Luca.
May you like
As Sal slammed the car into drive and pulled away toward the flashing blue lights of the squad cars turning onto the end of the block, I looked down at the floor mat between Sal’s seat and the back.
Sal’s dark driving coat was torn across the left shoulder, and a dark red stain was spreading rapidly across his white shirt cuff where he was gripping the steering wheel.
