Peril

but he couldn’t determine the likelihood of Stark doing one thing over the other.

But the real question, Mortimer decided, was why Stark had done anything at all. What threat had he perceived in the guy he’d caught tailing him? He was just an ordinary guy, according to Caruso. And yet Stark had gone after him hammer and tongs.

Why?

The answer came with such force and certainty that the word itself escaped Mortimer’s mouth and hung in the late-morning air like a strand of Marisol’s coal-black hair.

Lockridge.

TONY

He couldn’t stop thinking about Sara, about the fact that if something really had happened to Eddie, then she was in more danger than he could possibly have imagined. Before now he’d feared that one of his father’s goons might strong-arm her. It might stop at intimidation, or it might involve grabbing her arm and giving it a painful squeeze. All of that would be wrong, he knew, and none of it would ultimately work. You didn’t keep a wife that way. Well, some people did. His cousin Donny kept Carla that way. And, of course, his father had ruled with the same iron fist. But he did not want to be his father, or have a wife who lived with him the way his mother had lived with the Old Man, cringing, terrified, reduced to shadow, a mere reflection of her dread. He wanted Sara the way she was when he’d first met her. He wanted the young woman who’d stood alone before an old piano and sung her heart out. Her courage astonished him suddenly, the sheer grit she’d had to have just to do what she’d done that night. He had taken that brave young woman, so perfect, and chipped away at that perfection, coaxing her to the suburbs, reducing her to baby factory—or at least trying to—and then, when no babies came, he’d rubbed her face in this failure, as if she were the one who’d done everything wrong, she the one who’d ruined his life.

He went to his car and drove away, leaving his employees to fend for themselves. Suddenly it didn’t matter if they came in late, lay down on the job, misplaced some form, or sent a load of fish to the wrong restaurant. He’d run the business the way he’d run his marriage, under the sword of his father’s instruction. You have to show the people who work for you that you’ve got the muscle, his old man had told him. You have to show that woman who’s boss.

And so he’d done that, Tony thought. For sixteen years he’d worn the pants, laid down the law, gotten his way. And now he’d reached the end of the way he’d gotten, the barren crossroads of his life.

He drove aimlessly along Sunset Highway, all the way to Montauk Point, where he stood on the beach and watched the waves tumble one after another onto the vacant shore.

It was noon by the time he returned home. He hadn’t intended to go there. There were bars and diners where he could have sat through the afternoon, the night, even the early-morning hours. And yet, here he was, staring at the empty house, the gray, cheerless windows, imagining the bedroom where she’d never sleep again. But dire as that reality was, it was not nearly so dark as what might yet happen to Sara. He knew that she’d wanted only to leave him. She’d taken not a dime of his money. She’d left the Ford Explorer in the driveway. What else could her message have been but that she wanted nothing of him and nothing of his. She had wanted only to be rid of him and had probably never guessed that anyone else might be looking for her. Certainly she would not have dreamed that the Old Man would have hired some thug and set him loose like a dog in the woods.

Something moved behind his car. He twisted to the rear and peered through the back window, where he saw Della coming toward him.

“Hi, Della,” Tony said as he got out of the car.

A thin smile labored to hold its place on her lips, then expired. “I need to talk to you, Tony.”

“You want to come inside?”

She shook her head.

“Okay,” Tony said. “What’s on your mind?”

DELLA

She knew exactly what was on her mind, but the words were a problem. How do you tell a man that his father is a crazy old bastard, completely out of control and dangerous and who, at that very moment, was scaring the living hell out of her?

“Have you heard from Sara?” Tony asked.

She’d not expected the sudden change in his voice, the way the tone went from a question to a plea. But it was the question itself that caught her off guard. She’d come to tell him that his father had confronted her, and later her mother, and that these confrontations had really frightened her and so she’d decided that he needed to know about them. That was as far as she’d intended to go. Certainly, she’d had no expectation of admitting that Sara had called her, even hinted at where she was and what she was doing. But Tony had asked her outright, and so she knew that the moment had come—the moment of truth, they called it in the movies—when you had to confront the full and awesome nature of your peril or live a coward all your life.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I have, Tony.”

His eyes caught fire, and she saw in that instant the depth of his love and the torment of its loss. “Is she okay?” he asked softly.

“Yeah,” Della answered. “She’s fine.”

She expected a volley of questions to follow, hard and blunt, raining down upon her like a hail of bullets. But instead, Tony shrank back against the car, folded his arms, and let his head droop forward for a moment. “Good,” he said.

“I don’t know where she is,” Della said. “Just that she’s okay.”

Tony drew himself up and settled his gaze on the empty street. “That’s all that matters.”

She had never heard a man say a more wholly selfless thing. She’d thought he was like his father, filled with the Old Man’s seething violence, but now he seemed merely broken, and in his brokenness curiously baffled, like a man who’d been badly beaten in some bar brawl and was struggling to understand how the argument began.

“You and Mike,” he said. “You’re happy?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good.” He started to speak, then stopped, and in that awkward gesture Della saw the young man Sara had first met, so vulnerable and uncertain, seeking love, infinitely kind.

“The thing is,” he began, then stopped, glanced once again into the night, then back to Della. “Before you know it, things get out of hand.”

“They do, Tony.”

“And the years go by, you know?”

“They do, yeah.”

He gazed at his shoes, kicked lightly at the cement pavement. “So, that’s how it goes.” He studied the deserted yard. His face grew somber. “You think she might come back, Della? On her own, I mean.”

She shook her head.

“No, I don’t either,” Tony said. “So, what now? You got any ideas?”

“Just one thing, Tony,” Della said. “You gotta be careful about your father.”

“My father?”

“He’s scary, you know?” The rest burst from her in a torrent. “The thing is, I told my mother about him coming over. I know that before I told you he didn’t come, but he did. And, Tony, he was really scary, and so I told my mother about it and she went to see him ’cause it turns out they knew each other in high school, and so she figured she could put in a word for me.”

“A word about what?” Tony asked.

“Like, leave me alone. That kind of word. Because, the thing is, he grabbed me. When he came over that time. And so my mother went over to tell him to, you know, leave me alone, but she didn’t get anywhere with that because he was the same way to her. You know, like real threatening.”

“He threatened your mother?”

“He scared her,” Della said. “And she came back and she told me to just stay out of it because he—your father—he was . . . dangerous.”

“Dangerous,” Tony repeated softly.