Peril

underwear, barefoot, vulnerable.

“I need a name,” Stark said.

The feet moved, but there was no other response.

“Who sent you?”

Stark waited for a reply, though he knew it would be incoherent, at most a grunt. The tape would make any more articulate response impossible.

“Are you the woman’s husband?”

The man strained against the bands that held him to the chair.

“Or do you just work for him?”

The man’s head trembled, and beneath the tape his lips fluttered briefly then grew still.

Stark stepped over and raked a single finger down the man’s jaw. “Who do you work for?”

The man made no effort to speak but only glared silently, his jaw now set and rigid, like a fighter readying for the blow.

“Did you really think you could do it?”

The man shifted his eyes to the right and stared at the room’s blank wall.

“Did you think I would lead you to a woman and then let you hurt her?”

The man drew his gaze back to Stark, staring at him intently, as if trying to see into the working of his brain. Then he closed his eyes.

EDDIE

In the darkness Eddie tried to imagine the man who stared at him from just beyond the closed lids of his eyes. He couldn’t see him, but he knew he was there, towering over him. He could hear his steady breathing. Slowly, the man himself swam out of the darkness, vaguely translucent, an afterimage in Eddie’s mind. He was tall with silver hair, and his eyes were blue, and he wore clothes that Eddie had only seen in movies and on brief trips to midtown Manhattan. He was one of those people, the ones who controlled things, and beside whom everyone else felt small.

And he was smart too. Eddie knew that much. He’d turned the tables on him, accused him of following him so he’d be there when Tony’s wife was found, be there because he was going to hurt Tony’s wife. I know this game. That’s what the man had said. I fell for it once, but never again. But none of that was true. Eddie knew that much. None of it was true because the man with the silver hair was working for Tony’s father, one of his thugs, a guy he’d hired to track Sara down.

In his mind Eddie recalled Sara as she’d appeared the last time he’d seen her. She’d seemed sweet and lovely, and she’d smiled at him and said hello but he knew that even if she’d hardly noticed him or treated him badly he’d still be holding out the way he was because it really wasn’t about Sara. It was about Tony, this guy who’d stood with him when his father died, and sent him a Christmas card, and sometimes took him out for a steak and fries. Tony, who’d visited him in the hospital when he got hurt on the job and seemed to know when he needed a hand. Tony had done all of that despite the fact that he was busy and his business was in trouble and he had worries of his own, and so it was clear to Eddie that you knew who your friends were not by their favors but by their sacrifice.

“Who sent you?”

He opened his eyes and the silver-haired man was peering at him, his face very still and menacing, like a snake poised to strike.

“Who sent you?”

The silver-haired man ripped the tape from his mouth with a fierce, violent jerk.

“Who sent you?” he repeated, now very sharply.

Eddie closed his eyes again and thought of Tony at his side, and it seemed to him that in the end a friend could be judged only by how much he was willing to lose. He drew a steely breath, opened his eyes, and glared defiantly at the man whose face was very near him now, and in which he saw a terrible capacity for violence. He never used bad language, but just this once it seemed okay.

“Fuck you,” he said.

ABE

He sat down behind his desk and stared at the pile of bills, the liquor stacked high in cardboard boxes, the calendar that hung from the wall like a condemned man. Nothing would change in this room, he thought, if nothing changed in his life. Someone would simply come in one day and find him curled over the desk or sprawled on the floor. That was the curtain he saw. End of Act Three.

And so he reached for the phone and dialed Lucille’s old number.

“Hello.”

“Samantha, it’s Abe.”

“Oh, hi.”

“Listen,” he began, then stopped and drew in a quick, uncertain breath. “Listen, about tonight. I thought maybe you should start off with something lively.”

“Okay.”

“Something to get their attention, you know. And then maybe end it with a ballad. Tug the heartstrings, you know?”

“All right.”

There was a pause, and he knew she was waiting for some final word. He considered his options for a moment, then charged ahead like a man out of the trenches.

“And one more thing,” he said. “I was thinking maybe we could have dinner before you come to the bar. You know, talk things over. Then we could go to the bar and maybe we could sit around awhile, and then, whenever you feel like it, you get up, do the songs.”

“Okay,” she said.

He gave her the name of the restaurant he’d already chosen just in case and told her to meet him there at eight. When she said fine, he hung up and sat back in his chair with a modest sense of achievement, not the thrill of winning the race, but at least the knowledge that when the starting gun fired, you came out of the gate.

DELLA

It was her business, she thought, but what could she do about it?

She sat at the table, Nicky now sleeping soundly, and smoked the first cigarette she’d had in three years. She’d bought the pack at the convenience store on the way back from her mother’s house, asking for it guiltily, like a teenager hoping the orange-haired clerk behind the register wouldn’t demand proof of age.

After that she’d driven directly home, put Nicky down for his afternoon nap, then wandered into the kitchen to light up. She knew why she was smoking. Nerves. She couldn’t get the look on her mother’s face out of her mind, the terrible, hopeless fear she’d seen in the old woman’s eyes. And something else too, Leo Labriola, the way he’d grabbed her arm and written his number on her wrist. The remembered violence of that act, the nip of the pen in her flesh, now seemed more real than anything around her. He knew his business, Labriola, she thought, knew exactly how to terrorize people, make them cringe.

Labriola was capable of anything. That much was absolutely clear now. Whatever feeble hope that he was all bluff and hot air, a posturing old man who could rage and bluster with the best of them but in the end do nothing, all she’d used to convince herself that Sara wasn’t really in danger, all of that was gone, and she was left only with the certain knowledge that the danger she was in was even deeper than she’d supposed. Not only would Labriola hurt her, he would enjoy doing so, and that enjoyment would itself blossom and expand, urging him to greater outrages against her. He wouldn’t just kill her, Della decided, he would torture her. He would beat her up or burn her with cigarettes or pass a blowtorch up her arm or use a chain saw the way Colombian drug lords did to the people who crossed them. She’d read about these things in books and magazines, and she knew they were true, that some people were capable of indescribable cruelty, and that Leo Labriola was that kind of man.

She crushed the first cigarette into the saucer she’d commandeered for an ashtray, then lit another one and tried to find a way out of the situation that would somehow save everyone from harm. It was all she wanted, just