Peril

“I understand,” Caruso said, looking about the cramped office from which he ran the Old Man’s loan-sharking business.

“Okay, so, two-thirty,” the Old Man snapped.

“Yes, sir,” Caruso said, adding the time to a head already full of numbers, loans, payments, due dates, not one of which he had ever written down.

SARA

The Waverly theater was still in the same location, and Eighth Street had the same feel to it, and their familiarity brought small parts of her former life back to her. These parts were nothing she could put her finger on exactly, only the sense that she’d packed up her youth and now she could unpack at least a little of it. Maybe that was why she’d come back to the city. Because it was the closet where she’d first secreted herself, the hole she’d burrowed into, creating an identity to go with her new name.

For a moment she peered at the coffee shop across the street, watching silently as the patrons came and went. If they only knew, she thought. She felt the ghostly grip of Sheriff Caulfield’s hand on her bare shoulder, then other hands, no less ghostly but also no less palpable, the flesh of grasping fingers pressing into her flesh, sour breath in her face, the smell of drunken sweat, a man pushing her into the corn or down a narrow corridor, upright or weaving, dressed as a cop or barely dressed at all. With each memory she felt her own panic rise like a frenzied animal, trapped and panting, clawing its way out.

To keep it in, she raced to the corner, bought a paper, took it to the coffee shop and turned to the classifieds. The first order of business was to find a job, and so she looked for one among the long columns. As she searched, the paucity of her skills, how little she had to offer, grew ever more distressingly apparent. Finally, one job caught her eye. Receptionist. No experience necessary. She could answer a phone, she thought. She could take a message. She knew that thousands of others could do the same, but she hoped that somehow she’d come through the door at just the right moment, and this hope suggested to her just how depleted she was. Her only resource was now little more than a baseless grab for luck.

DELLA

She’d seen the man several times before, been introduced, shaken his hand, but even now his dark eyes seemed so lethal she could easily imagine a deadly acid spewing from them, turning human beings into mounds of glistening flesh.

“Good morning, Mr. Labriola,” she said quietly.

A smile labored to form on Labriola’s mouth, then gave up and curled into a frown. “Mind if I come in?”

Della stepped back and watched as he came into the foyer. He was not a large man, but there was something about him that seemed both huge and dangerous, like a boulder rolling toward you, grim and unstoppable. You either got out of its way, or it crushed you like a bug.

“You seen Tony?” His close-cropped white hair glimmered in the light. “He been over here?”

“No,” Della said.

“Too embarrassed,” Labriola said. “Okay, well, to make a long story short, that wife of his, she dumped him.”

“Oh,” Della said weakly.

“You ain’t heard about it?”

She felt like a deer caught in the crosshairs of a telescopic sight. “Well, I . . .”

Labriola’s bushy gray eyebrows arched menacingly. “You talked to her?”

So this is the moment, Della thought, this is the moment when the ground suddenly shifts and you find yourself teetering on the edge of a cliff. Her lips parted, but nothing came out, and in that instant of hesitation she saw Labriola’s face turn grim and stony.

“You don’t want to keep nothing to yourself,” he said. “ ’Cause I’m gonna find her, no matter what it takes.”

She heard Nicky cry, and the sound of his needful voice was like a spur gouging at her side. “She called me,” she said, her voice little above a whisper. “The day she . . . left.”

“Where was she when she called?” Labriola asked.

Nicky was crying loudly now, an insanely demanding scream. “I have to—”

Labriola grabbed her arm and squeezed. “Where was she?”

“I don’t know,” Della answered. “She wouldn’t tell me.”

“What time did she call?”

“I don’t know for sure. Late.”

“And she was already where she was headed?”

“I guess she was. It was tough to hear her.”

“Why?”

Della suddenly realized that she’d given out just that little morsel of information Sara had feared she might. “I don’t know.”

“You said it was hard to hear her.”

“Yeah,” Della said hesitantly.

“Traffic?”

“Maybe that was it,” Della said softly.

“She in the city?”

“I don’t know.” Nicky’s cries were like a screeching bird in her brain. “I need to change my son’s—”

Labriola’s grip tightened. “The kid can sit in it.”

Sit in his shit. Della knew that that was what Labriola meant, and with that understanding, she knew that she had plumbed the full measure of his brutality.

He brought his face very close to hers. “She in the city?” he repeated.

“She didn’t say.”

“She got a man? She fucking around on Tony?”

Della shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

Labriola eyed her for a moment. “Okay,” he said finally. He released his grip. “If she calls again, you gonna call me, right?”

Della nodded meekly and massaged her arm. “Okay.”

“You’re clear on that, right?”

“Yes,” Della answered faintly. “Yes, I am.”

“Good,” Labriola said. He grabbed a pen from his shirt pocket, then took her wrist in his iron grip and scrawled a number across her white flesh, the point of the pen jabbing with a hair more than the necessary force, so that she knew the little bite of pain she felt was the old man’s way of making a final point. “And Tony, he ain’t to know nothing about me coming here, talking to you, nothing like that.”

“Okay,” Della whispered. She cautiously drew her wrist from Labriola’s grasp. “I won’t tell anybody.” She felt crushed beneath him somehow, wriggling, Nicky screaming for her, confused that she’d not yet come to him. And yet she knew that she could not rush things with this man, could not show anything but her fear. “I won’t,” she repeated.

“If you do—” he began, then stopped, leaving her to conjure the consequences of crossing him.

“I won’t tell anybody,” Della said again. “Mike. Tony. I won’t tell anybody.”

Labriola stared at her silently, a smoky, hellish darkness in his eyes, so that she knew absolutely that there was nothing to stay his hand, nothing within him or without that could prevent him from committing whatever savageries he imagined.

“So, we’re clear, am I right?” he asked.

“Yes,” Della told him. “We’re clear.”

He turned to the door, then stopped and again faced her. “She tell you anything about why she run off?”

“No,” Della answered quietly.

To her relief, Labriola appeared satisfied.

“Okay,” he said, then opened the door and stepped out onto the small porch. His blue Lincoln Town Car rested at the curb, and Della watched as he trudged toward it, all the world curiously silent during the few seconds