Complete Corruption (Corruption #1-3) (63 page)

He shook his head as much as he could.

“Now you’re lying. Everyone wants to fuck her. I want you to lie to my face, you piece of shit.” I pulled the shoe out of his mouth. A trail of saliva followed. “You were going to do what, once you caught her?”

How he had the energy to spit in my face, I’ll never know, but I respected his nerve.

Paulie did not. He took his foot off Bruno long enough to kick him in the cheek.

I yanked Bruno up by the collar and pinned him to the side of the car, then got in his face, daring him to spit again. “You have no manners, Bruno. This a Sicilian thing?”

“Kill me. I dare you.”

“Tell me what you thought you were doing.”

“I was going to teach you a lesson,” he choked out. “Give her a little of what those Neapolitans gave Nella. In honor of the last one you killed.”

He said it through his teeth, biting back tears. He wanted to beg for his life. I could smell it on him, yet he was pushing me.

I was ready to be pushed. I’d killed a man the day before, and there was an inertia to violence. Once set in motion, it tended to stay in motion.

But vengeance didn’t have the same inertia. I was filled. I should have been enraged by what he said. Insulted. Offended to the core. But I felt none of that. As I squeezed my fingers tighter around his neck, what I felt was fear that by staying away from Theresa, I was creating a vacuum where other men would go, and they would use her to take action on their own vendettas. She wasn’t one of us, so they wouldn’t suffer any consequences. I was leaving her wide open, and the thought of something happening to her drove me insane.

Nothing seemed more natural and right than standing over Bruno Uvoli and taking his life. Because he was an animal, an affront, and mostly because he’d tried to hurt her.

In that moment, I decided to have her. To protect her. To satisfy the longing in my heart. For my own salvation. Once that was decided, I couldn’t kill the man. I had to earn her.

I pushed him against the car. “Get in.”

Paulie flicked his cigarette to the ground. “Where we going?”

“Sequoia,” I said. “I know a doctor who can take care of this little shit’s hand.”

“What the fuck?” Paulie exclaimed.

Bruno looked at me suspiciously.

“He’s going to send a message back to his people.” I dropped my cigarette and stamped it. “This vendetta is done. And unless you want to see more blood shed, stay away from Theresa Drazen.”

FIRST STREET PRECINCT

theresa

aniel put his key into the service elevator. I hadn’t been in it before, as it was used to transport suspects and convicts from the precinct offices to the prisons and courts.

Antonio looked at our escape route, at me, at the elevator, then back at me.

Daniel held the door open.

“If I didn’t know you better,” Antonio said, “I’d think you were setting us up.”

“You, I’d set up,” he replied. “If I could figure out how to bring you down without taking her with you.” He tilted his head toward me.

There seemed to be a sort of brutal honesty I hadn’t been aware of between the two men. As if they had a shared history.

“She stays here,” Antonio said. “I’ll come up with you. I’ll answer any question you have. But she goes to see her brother.”

Daniel appeared to consider something. He made all the right signs, gave all the right clues. A pause. A breath. Eyes slightly elsewhere but still present. A tap of the finger. As if he was checking things off a list I’d provided him, years ago.

I had no idea if he was faking or not. He’d gotten that good.

“Fine,” he said.

“No, absolutely not.” I walked up to Daniel until I was practically in the elevator. “You have nothing on him, or you’d have a rear flank of police and he’d be Mirandized already.”

“I never said I was arresting anyone. I said I wanted to ask questions. And his confession’s inadmissible considering the evidence hasn’t even been gathered yet and, thanks to him, my reputation in this town is shot to hell. So you can come, or I can force you. And I’m at the point where I’ve got fuckall to lose, so if I were you, I’d just come along for the ride.”

“She goes,” Antonio said, stepping past Daniel into the elevator.

Daniel held the doors open. “He’s right. You should go.”

Antonio leaned against the back wall and folded his hands in front of him. He knew the law. He’d let Daniel spin while I saw Jonathan. It was the smartest thing to do. But with Daniel between us and my lover boxed in, a little empty spot opened up. A spot that told me I was alone, adrift, not enough.

“No,” I whispered.

“You need to see Jonathan. You don’t have time for this,” Daniel said.

My sinuses suddenly pinched and tingled. “Is he all right?”

“No…” He drifted off as if trying to formulate the right way to say what needed saying, and unless he’d taken serious acting lessons, he wasn’t faking the distress in his voice. “He’s really fucked up. Bad. You have to see him by tonight, or it might be too late.”

“Too late? What kind of too late?”

He shook his head, and my chest tightened. “The worst kind. I’m sorry.”

“It was routine stuff when I saw him,” I protested.

“It happened fast. Look, I’m going to question you, I promise you that, but I like Jonathan, and you need to see him.”

“Go, Contessa,” Antonio said from behind Daniel. “I have this.”

I couldn’t save Antonio, but maybe I could. I wasn’t powerless. But if I told the truth, that I’d shot Paulie, I wouldn’t see my brother. I could admit to the murder at any time. Tomorrow. The next day. No amount of time would change the facts, but in that time, Jonathan could be dead.

Daniel moved out of the way, and the door started to shut. Antonio was cut into a straight line by the edge, then bisected, then almost gone behind the scratched metal door. He’d be gone in another fraction of a second, cut off from me by rebar and concrete, floors and ceilings, men and women who would become obstacles to my wholeness and safety.

I stuck my hand in the elevator door before it closed, and it bounced back with a rattle. “I’m coming up.”

“Theresa…”

“Contessa…”

I stepped in.

“I was trying to save you from grief,” Daniel said as the door slid shut again.

“Too late,” I said, standing next to Antonio. I watched the red numbers flip as we went upstairs into the belly of the LAPD.

theresa

ho is this?” Margie asked.

I was hunched in the corner of the precinct bathroom with Daniel’s phone. The first thing they’d done was take Antonio away and put him behind a door, and my sense of orientation went with him, as if I’d been airlifted and dropped into a foreign nation. My ex gave me his phone and told me to call my sister, whose first reaction to my voice had been silence. Her second had been disbelief.

“It’s Theresa, I swear. I—”

“We’re all going through five stages of a loss, here. Mom is still on denial and Sheila’s on anger, and you’re calling me like it’s hey-how-do-you-do time.”

“You’re in the same stage as Sheila.”

“What was Fiona put away for?” she asked.

“What?”

“Prove you’re you. And tell me who she was in with.”

“Oh, please, Margie, we don’t have time.”

The lights buzzed above me, casting the bathroom in a light that seemed to suck away brightness rather than add it. I’d put my family through hell. Avoidance was futile.

“She was put away twice,” I said, resigned to doing this. “Which time?”

“The first time.”

I couldn’t hear her tapping her foot, but I knew she was.

“Fiona went to Westonwood for stabbing her boyfriend. Jonathan was there for suicide. Both were caused by a girl named Rachel, who was my friend. Who Daddy seduced. Enough?”

She paused then spoke quietly. “Thank God. Thank thank thank God a million times you’re not dead. Where are you?”

“I’m at the First Street Station, on the bathroom floor.”

“You know what? I have no idea what’s happening with you, and I’ll care about it tomorrow. You need to be here.”

“I know. I’ll be there, I promise.”

“I’m not trying to be graphic. Just blunt,” she said. “Jon has irreparable damage to his heart. It’s not going to go well without a transplant. And maybe you don’t care. Maybe this new life you have is more important than the old one. That’s fine. But—and this is not for me, it’s for Jonathan—see him. Okay? Just see him. Then go back to whatever it was you were doing.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t make me come after you.”

“I’ll be there. I swear.”

“All right. Then you can tell me why you’re not dead.”

My bitter laugh bounced off the green tiles as I hung up. I had to be a big girl and leave the building without Antonio.

After washing my hands, I looked down and did what I always did since the night Antonio and I met. I checked my shoes. A little square of toilet paper was stuck to my right heel, still white and flat, hanging on for dear life, hoping for rescue from the trash.

Come on, Theresa
.

I picked it off. I should have thrown it away. But it reminded me of meeting Antonio, of those months and years before, when I felt incomplete, and how that had changed with him. I knew a piece of paper couldn’t bring that back. Only I could. But I couldn’t toss it without tossing the feeling away, so I put it in my pocket.

I took a deep breath and went into the hall. It was full of cops and lawyers, little metal carts with file boxes stacked high. Linoleum floors scuffed in the middle and shiny where they met the walls. I knew this place. I’d met Daniel here a hundred times, back when the doors didn’t mean a thing to me. Nothing behind them had been of interest.

“Daniel!” I said when I saw him opening one of the nondescript doors.

“Can you go to the waiting room?” he asked.

“No. I need to see Antonio, then I have to go to Jonathan. Then after that, you and I are going to talk about what happened at the Gate Club.”

“You don’t call the shots, Theresa.” He said it without reproach or vindictiveness. A man with toes everyone seemed to step on regularly, he said it so gently, I wondered if he was trying to ease me into a new reality.

“Phrase everything I just said as a question.”

“Mister Spinelli is occupied,” he said.

His insistence irked me, but I didn’t feel in a position to argue further. But I couldn’t just walk without talking to my Capo. If Antonio was occupied, it was probably Daniel who was occupying him, and there was a good chance he was behind the door Daniel was about to enter.

I stepped back. “Fine.”

“Don’t go far, Tinkerbell.”

I turned and walked away slowly. As soon as I heard the door squeak open, I spun on my heel and pushed past Daniel, through the door, and into an empty room with two folding chairs.

It was dark. The only light was from a window looking onto the adjacent interview room. Antonio sat alone at a metal table, in a beat-up wooden chair. If he knew the wall to his left was a two-way mirror, he didn’t show it by moving a muscle.

Daniel closed the door behind him. “You should go.”

“I’m going to bang on the window and shout.”

“No, you’re not. The room is soundproofed and it doesn’t look like a mirror on the other side, first of all, and second of all, you’re leaving.”

He reached for my wrist, but I pulled myself away before he could get a good grip. A door opened, and at first, I thought it was the door to the room I was in, but it wasn’t. It was the door to Antonio’s room.

Daniel muttered, “I didn’t want it to go like this.”

I glanced at him, his shoulders slouched, his eyes closed. I turned back to the interview room. Antonio was standing. In the doorway was a woman about my age and a boy of about ten. She had a cascade of black hair and olive skin. Her lips were full and sexual, and her limbs were lanky and long.

The boy.

Well.

The boy was a young version of the man I loved.

I lost the ability to swallow. Once I saw them, I couldn’t keep my eyes off Antonio. He could be stoic with the world, but he’d always shown his emotions to me. When he saw who entered the room, his face betrayed his heart. His joy was unmistakable as he said something in Italian.