“Is this all because of that dead girl?”
“Not really.”
“Her sister? That Maria, right?”
“Yeah, in a way.”
“I thought so. I always knew you'd been hit by the thunderbolt.” She clutched his shoulder, chucked him under the chin so he'd meet her eye. “You don't have much time. You can't stop now. You've got to finish it.”
He'd been thinking the same thing.
There was no other way out of it. They'd just keep taking runs at him until he was dead unless he took the fight to the Monticellis.
The sirens sounded to be about the same distance away. There were probably enough cops on the Don's payroll to keep them running in circles for the next half hour.
Grandma retreated back to the cellar and came up with an unopened box of.38 bullets and a handful of shotgun shells. He'd been in the basement maybe ten thousand times and had no idea where the shotgun might've been hidden.
He took the ammo and reloaded the pistol, grabbed up the shotgun, and started for the door. But something was still nagging him.
Turning at the last second, he asked, “Hey, how's everybody know your name anyway? You used to fool around with Don Monti back in the day, right?”
“Don't talk dirty. Now go and end this thing. And when I send you to the bakery from now on, you think you can just get a few
“Next time,” Dane said.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Walking through ICU past the gray wasted faces of families of the dying. His mother lay in a small room surrounded by machinery that loomed over her like gods of steel.
Her kidneys had failed and she was yellow and bloated with toxins. The machines forced her frail chest to continue breathing. They surrounded her, winking, watching, livid with screens everywhere so he could witness the gradual slowing of her pulse and her steadily decreasing heartbeat.
His mother had something to tell him.
The kid with the twisted head from across the hall was lying in the bed with her, saying Mama, Mama. Crying the way Dane should be crying but couldn't. Hugging her, his sutures and busted skull bones pressed against her breast.
Dane sat and watched the jagged raw red scars across the frontal lobe moving, reaching, wanting to leap the distance and crawl against Dane's flesh, digging down into his brain. Lying up against his own scars, connecting, mating, reproducing. Crashing in the metal doors and taking over.
What did you dream, Mama?
I dreamed an angel with golden wings as shiny as coins sat with me on the end of the bed. I watched the television for a while, but it wasn't on. I bled in the toilet.
You wanted her to tell you more about the angel but her mouth was sealed with tape around the tubes that forced breath into her lungs. You understood the men who went berserk in this situation and killed their loved ones. You could stand the sound of the buzzing and dripping and clicking around them, all designed to extend pain?
Dane couldn't speak and sat rubbing his mother's hand with his thumb. The rhythm seemed to calm him for some reason, while his shadow grew beneath his feet.
The boy with the sick brain spoke with a beautiful voice, in English and other languages Dane didn't know but could, for the moment, understand.
“Why are you here?”
“Because my mother is dying.”
“No, what kind of angel is it? Is it death?”
“Why is she seeing an angel that's come for me?”
“It's not a blessing. This is a burden.”
“You have no idea of what real sorrow is,” the boy told him. “Her sleep can never be pure. She will always struggle, restless here and elsewhere. Weeping for you, and later in hell.”
“Fuck off, kid!”
Thumb moving back and forth on your mother's yellow, bloated flesh. The machines speaking in ancient rhymes that haven't been translated in millennia.
The boy touched your scars, matching them against his own. You're glad that he keeps on talking.
“I don't want anything from you.”
“She's not your mother. She's beyond you now.”
“She's my ma.”
“She's my mom.”
Thinking about how easy it would be to snap the boy's neck, Dane waited for somebody to come save him. He waited for his ma to save him.
The kid's head came further apart, the sutures and staples pulling away.
Or maybe that was only Dane.
It was hard to tell, especially now.
Dane pulled the Caddy back up into Phil Guerra's driveway and the garage door opened. Phil stepped out holding a 9mm aimed at him.
Living up to his name. Bringing the war right out into the street to Dane, who dared to snatch the '59 dream car. Twice. The 9mm reflected in the fiery Magic-Mirror acrylic lacquer finish. The chrome grill blazed like a smelter's forge.
Phil was digging the moment. Getting a chance to stand there with his gun out, probably seeing himself in black-and-white, up on the screen with Bogie and Robert Ryan. He still moved pretty good even with the extra weight, easing out onto the driveway and making sure he was clear in case Dane tried to gun the engine and run him over.
“You don't want to ruin your spacious, curvy windshield,” Dane told him.
“Get out of my car, Johnny!”
“No. You get in.”
“I'm not kidding here, you punk!”
“I can see that, Uncle Philly. It's been a bad day all around.”
Phil leaned down and peered at Dane. The 9mm bobbed for a moment, then pointed downward. “What've you done, Johnny?”
“Climb in, I'll tell you all about it.”
“Nobody drives my car but me, damn it!”
Grinning at him pleasantly, Dane said, “Nobody but you, me, and the twenty guys that owned it before you. All the mechanics and grease monkeys and shop owners over forty-five years. You shouldn't be behind a wheel.
