As I cocked my wrist to throw the stone, something rustled behind me in the bushes along the riverbank. The gunman turned to see it and swung his pistol my way, holding it in both hands, firing twice. I hit the road, scraping my hands and elbows. Eyes flashed in the darkness behind me as a red fox dashed across the road to the Parkway embankment and disappeared near the base of a willow.
The gunman looked at me, half-naked, smeared with mud, lying on the road. “Don’t move,” he said. “I’ll shoot you, I swear.”
I stayed where I was. I could see all of him now and he certainly wasn’t Vito Di Pietra. He was all of five-five, slightly built and well dressed. Fine features. Delicate hands. It was the earnest young man I had seen at Meadowvale arguing with Alice Stockwell. His eyes were wide and the hand holding the gun on me didn’t look steady.
“So you’re Geller,” he said.
“And you’re Stefano Di Pietra,” I said. “Also known as Steven Stone.”
“Make one move and I’ll kill you.”
“I believe you.”
The thrashing in the river had stopped; there was just the sound of shallow water moving over rocks. The sound of traffic. The sound of Stefano’s breathing and mine.
“Ricky!” he called. “Are you okay?”
The silence was comforting to a point. If the Clip was dead, Ryan might be able to take Stefano down before he shot me. But even if Ryan were still alive, he only had one good eye. In the land of the blind that might make him hot shit, but here and now I couldn’t count on him. That left just three possible outcomes: rescue my own damn ass; pray to God to drop an anvil on Stefano’s head; or take it like a man and hope that Katherine Hollinger would avenge me like a demented angel.
“Ricky?” he brayed. No answer. “Ricky!” Still nothing. “God help you if he’s hurt,” Stefano said.
I had to keep him looking at me, not down at the river where Ryan might be moving. If he was moving. I stood up. Stefano pointed the gun at me. I held my ground and kept my hands where he could see them. I said, “It’s been you all along, hasn’t it? The little brother. The one who wasn’t supposed to be a player.”
“Only because they never let me.”
“Your brothers?”
“My father, too. Morons, all of them. They’d look at a truck full of medication and think, ‘Hijack it.’ I looked at the same truck and envisioned a fleet crossing the border.”
“Your father should have put you in charge.”
“Damn right. He named me for Don Magaddino, you know, because I was born the year he died. But I was small and sick a lot and mysteriously prone to being beaten up by my brothers. So my father made me the family bookkeeper, adding up numbers while my brothers ran the crews and made all the money. Got all the women. Played with the toys.”
“You hooked up with Jay Silver when you did your MBA?”
“Taking that course was the smartest thing I ever did. I started to really see how things could work if they were run by a businessman instead of a thug. I truly understood how huge the market could be for good, clean Canadian pills.”
“But when the law changed, you needed your brothers to keep the business going.”
“My brothers? What do they have to do with this?”
“Isn’t Vista Mar owned by all of you?”
“No. The Vista Mar Care Group is owned and operated by me.”
“But what about Buffalo?”
“What about it?”
“Who was running the operation on that side?”
“You still don’t get it, do you? When I say I run this show, I mean I conceived, coordinated and carried out the entire production.”
Executed would have been a good word too. I was glad he didn’t use it.
“My brothers never knew about it. Their confreres in Buffalo never knew about it.”
“Then how did Ricky-”
“Ricky was with me, you idiot! Me. Not Marco, not Vito, not anyone in Buffalo.”
“You could handle all the distribution with just one guy?”
“We didn’t need a big infrastructure,” Stefano said. “That was the beauty of it. It was already in place. This New Fifty club has chapters all over the Northeast. Full of people who’d go broke if they had to pay full fare for their meds.”
Only then did I solve the mystery Dante Ryan had engaged me to investigate. Stefano had put the hit on the Silvers. Killing Page had not had the desired effect. It only pushed Jay Silver into committing the same rash act: telling Stefano he wanted out. Maybe Silver was counting on their school ties to shield him from harm. He had probably never seen Stefano as I saw him now; coldly murderous and without affect.
Now I just had to live long enough to tell Ryan the news.
“Why did you hire out Jay’s killing?” I asked him. “Why pay fifty grand when Ricky could have done it free?”
“I wanted Silver and his family dead. I wanted the other pharmacists to know what would happen if they threatened me. And I wanted Dante Ryan kept busy while we took care of Marco. I was always afraid of Dante Ryan,” he said. “He never hit me or did anything bad to me-he never even threatened me-but there was something about him. The way he looked at me.”
“He looks at everyone that way.”
Stefano’s eyes darted toward the river and back at me. The silence was unnerving, but not to me. The longer it stayed quiet, the more sure I felt that Ryan had prevailed over Ricky. But where was he? Could he even see what was going on?
“Ricky killed Marco and his men?”
“I helped,” Stefano smiled. “Ricky shot Tommy and Phil when we came in, but we both shot Marco. Ricky shot him in the chest and I shot him in the head.”
“While he was asleep.”
“Asleep or drunk, it was hard to tell.”
“Good thing you were there to help,”
“Shut up! Every shitty thing he ever did to me-every time he beat me up or put me down or embarrassed me in front of friends because I was different-he’s lucky all I did was shoot him in his sleep.”
I heard a faint rumbling sound behind me and a light behind me cast my shadow along the road. Stefano looked over my shoulder and I turned too. A westbound train was coming around the bend, following the curve of the river. I looked back at Stefano and in the light cast by the train I saw a dark figure move up the riverbank behind him.
“Is Vito dead too?” I asked.
He nodded. “We took care of him just before we came to see you. Made it look like a robbery at a club he owns. Dad’s going to be awfully upset when he hears about it, the old vegetable. I might have to water him extra to help him get over the shock.”
I stood shivering in the rain, looking at this cold little bastard in his trim suit and polished shoes. The sound of the train grew louder. Then behind Stefano I saw Dante Ryan steal across the road, near the embankment that led up to the Parkway. What was he doing? Bailing on me?
The train blew a long loud whistle as it approached the level crossing. I heard bells ringing: the barrier lowering across Pottery Road. Ryan was behind the abandoned shopping cart, pushing it out of the weeds onto the road.
“Was Christine Staples in on it from the beginning?”
“Not quite,” Stefano said. “She actually did her job at first, tried to stop us from bringing goods across. But she turned out to be a most impressive woman. She saw things the way I saw them. She understood what the future could hold.”
Ryan was closing the gap between him and Stefano as the train drew closer, the sound of it getting louder, the light on Stefano’s face growing brighter. When Ryan was ten or twelve feet behind Stefano, he broke into a run.
