Page 88 of Masked Don
“Santini is strong right now,” he says finally. “If I move early, I’m a dead man, and so is my family. I won’t do that. Not for you. Not for anybody.”
“I’m not asking you to move early.”
“Then here’s what I’ll give you.” He writes a number on a paper napkin and slides it across the table. “When it comes to it, and it will, you call that number. Not before. If you call before, I never heard of you.”
I fold the napkin into my breast pocket. “Fair.”
He drains his coffee and stands, dropping a bill on the table. At the door, he stops.
“Tell your waitress something for me.”
“She isn’t a waitress anymore.”
“Tell her anyway.” He doesn’t turn around. “Tell her I was ashamed of that room. I’ve been ashamed of it for five years.”
Then he’s gone, and the bell over the door jangles behind him.
We follow Donati because Stevie told us to.
Not in those words, not exactly. But her map led us here, her memories of a nervous man hovering near the east doors of my party. Vin Donati is one of Luca’s lieutenants, but going by what Stevie told us, he’s a lieutenant with a weak stomach for violence.
“Think about it,” she’d said. “He’s on Luca’s side. So why would he be so eager to get out if he wouldn’t have even been a target?”
Carmine had smiled with recognition. “Because he was scared. And scared men can be worked.”
So we’re off to find a way to turn him. If you turn a man like that, then you don’t need a war. You need an hour alone with him and the right leverage. That’s the plan. A quiet approach. We’re going to try the reasonable way one more time, because I promised her I’d keep reaching for it as long as reaching was possible.
Donati’s routine takes him to a parking structure off Northern Boulevard every Thursday, a card game on the third level, same time, same men. Carmine and I are waiting on the second level when the plan comes apart.
I feel it before I see it. Decades of this kind of work teach your body to know a room that’s gone wrong. And this parking structure has gone wrong. It’s too quiet. There are no men coming and going. And Donati’s car is sitting empty like bait.
Which is exactly what it is.
“Carmine,” I say. “We’re leaving. Now.”
We don’t make it to the stairwell.
The men come out from between the cars, four, five, maybe more. Muzzle flashes bloom in the concrete dark before I’ve even finished turning, and the sound is enormous in the expanse of the garage, a flat, percussive hammering that makes it impossible to think.
Carmine’s gun is up before mine, as always, his old reflex, and he drops the first man coming at us and shoves me down behind a nearby SUV as the windows explode in a shower of safety glass.
This is not a hit. A hit is quick, clean, meant to end before you know it started. This is a message. Luca wants us to feel it.
“Count,” Carmine grunts, back against the wheel well beside me, feeding rounds into the gun with hands that have done it ten thousand times.
“Six. Maybe seven. Two o’clock and spread.” My own weapon’s out now, the cold coming down over me the way it does, the thing Stevie saw at the party and couldn’t unsee, the thing with no softness to it. “They’ve got the stairwell covered. We go for the ramp.”
“The ramp’s open ground.”
“The stairwell’s a coffin. We go with the ramp.”
We move from cover to cover, the two of us laying down suppressing fire as we hurry from car to car. It’s the ugly strategy of a gunfight in an enclosed space, the desperation for distance between you and the shooters, and the life-or-death need for just a few feet of concrete barrier.
Carmine fires with precision, buying me time to move. He switches out his magazine, always prepared with backups. I put a man down at the base of the ramp, but they keep coming. Carmine takes one on our flank.
The air is full of concrete dust and the smell of gunpowder. For a few seconds, it almost works; we’re nearly clear…
Luca steps out onto the ramp above us. He’s here, himself, in a good coat, a pistol in his hand in a way that suggests he’s actually ready to get his hands dirty for once.
