Actually, I was tired of guessing. She’d put me on the defensive with talk of Peter Mandretti, but she wasn’t the only one entitled to an explanation.
“Lilly, why did you climb out the window of my apartment?”
“Long story,” she said.
She quickened her pace, and I kept up. We were leaving through the chute that received patients brought in by ambulance. The long corridor was deserted at the moment, no emergency in progress.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“I left you a note on your computer. Didn’t you see it?”
“Yes. It didn’t explain anything. Don’t change the subject.”
We’d gobbled up a hundred feet of polished tile floor and were near the end of the corridor, ten feet away from the sliding glass doors and the driveway beyond. The walk was clearing my head, but I wasn’t completely myself. I probably should have started with questions about Manu Robledo and the Church of Peace and Prosperity International, but my head was pounding, and honestly the name just wasn’t coming to me.
I stopped her, laid my hands squarely on her shoulders, and looked her in the eye. “Lilly, are you involved in some kind of cult?”
“Cult?” she said, scoffing. “Seriously, do I strike you as a cult personality?”
“No, but…”
“But what?”
“The more I get to know you, the less I know you.”
“Well, isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black,” she said.
“Stop avoiding the question. Why did you run away?”
A white commercial van pulled up in the driveway outside the sliding glass doors. “That’s our ride,” said Lilly, pulling me along. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll tell you on the way.”
The glass doors slid open, and a blast of cool morning air hit me in the face. Lilly opened the rear door of the van and managed to get me to climb in first. The door slammed behind me.
Lilly was still in the driveway.
“Lilly!”
I tried to open the door, but there was no handle on the inside. The only windows were in the cockpit, so I couldn’t see Lilly, but I heard her slap the side of the van and shout, “Go!”
The driver put the van into gear, and we pulled away.
I was alone in the cargo hold amid blankets and cardboard boxes. A wire grate separated me from the cockpit, and I pushed away a stack of boxes to get right behind the driver.
“Stop!” I shouted.
“Relax and be quiet.”
I immediately recognized the driver’s voice, and a moment of eye contact in the rearview mirror confirmed it.
“Connie?”
My sister glanced over her shoulder and said, “Who else can you count on to save your butt?”
I caught her drift: certainly not our father.
“Get under the blankets and sit tight,” she said.
I hesitated.
“Do it!” she said. “We have to make sure no one sees you leaving the hospital.”
If Lilly was right-if the danger was to Peter Mandretti, not to Patrick Lloyd-I could see the wisdom in the plan. I grabbed the nearest blanket and found a spot by the wheel well in the cargo hold. The ride out of the parking lot was smooth and steady, not too fast and not too slow-nothing to arouse the suspicion of whoever was waiting to see if and when I walked out the hospital’s front door.
The tires hummed below me as I wondered exactly how Lilly and my sister had teamed up for this stunt. I wondered how long they’d been a team. More than anything, I wondered why Connie would have told her that our last name wasn’t Lloyd.
15
“I have to get the van back to the zoo, pronto,” my sister said over the hum of the engine. She was driving through lower Midtown, and the zoo accounted for both the funky odors in the cargo hold and the metal grate between the cockpit and me.
Working with exotic animals was the perfect job for Connie, a childhood dream she’d held since the same family trip on which Tony “The Snitch” Mandretti-our dad-had butchered Lewis Carroll’s poetry and offended every East Side nanny within earshot of the Alice in Wonderland sculpture. For all his flaws, Dad was big on family events. That one had turned out to be his last before putting on a wire for the FBI, testifying against the Santucci family, and disappearing into witness protection. Mom had refused to join him. Only after her death-more precisely, after the parole of a certain underboss who literally had an ax to grind with “The Snitch”-did my sister and I enter the program as Connie Ryan and Patrick Lloyd. The different surnames were for added protection. I was a young teen at the time, and my sister acted much older than her twenty-three years. I suppose it didn’t take a psychiatrist to explain why, years after that final family trip, Connie would end up working at the Central Park Zoo, and I would designate Alice in Wonderland as a place to meet my FBI contact.
The van stopped at a red light. Connie reached back, opened the metal grate between us, and offered me the passenger seat.
“We’re a good twenty blocks from the hospital,” she said. “I think it’s safe to say that no one saw you sneak away.”
I buckled up as she steered through the intersection, heading north through Midtown. Even in traffic, the zoo was just minutes away. I had a slew of questions for her, but logistics came to the forefront.
“What’s the plan after you return the van?” I asked.
“Don’t have one. Lilly called and said you were in trouble. Step one was to get you out of the ER. We didn’t get to step two.”
I glanced out the window, then back at my sister. “I didn’t realize that you and Lilly stay in touch.”
“We don’t. The last time I talked to her was when the two of you Skyped me from Singapore.”
“And she just called you out of the blue this morning?”
“She said she didn’t know who else to call. She was pretty much in a panic.”
“Exactly what did she tell you?”
“Basically that you got roughed up in the park last night, and that if we didn’t get you out of the ER immediately, someone would likely stop by and shake hands with your Adam’s apple.”
“That doesn’t sound like something Lilly would say.”
“I’m paraphrasing.”
I circled back to the “they” question. “Did she tell you who ‘someone’ might be?”
“After what happened to Mom, I don’t need to have it spelled out for me.”
The buzz of city traffic filled the silence between us. Mom was a complicated subject. She’d always told us how brave Dad was for turning against the mob, and yet she’d refused to join him in the witness protection program. She’d probably still be alive if she had.
“You’re saying it’s the Santucci family?”
“Who else?” she said. “It seems like every six months one of the thugs Dad put in jail is paroled. They refused to believe Mom didn’t know how to find Dad, and they killed her. What makes you think they’ll stop there? They are never going to stop looking for us.”
The Cushman connection had turned the Santucci family into old news in my mind, but I didn’t think Connie was ready to swallow what this was really about. For the moment, I stayed with her theory, since it provided a nice segue to my visit to Central Prison.
“What if we could convince them that Dad is dead?” I asked.
