Complete Corruption (Corruption #1-3) (83 page)

“Paulie,” I said, my voice drowned out by the klaxon.

He didn’t answer. He never would.

I backed out. I wasn’t there to make my soul right. I was there to find Antonio. In the reflection in a chrome tray, I saw a dark-haired woman come from around the corner. I dodged and ran to the stairwell.

I clutched my clipboard and fought the traffic to go to the stairs to find the cardiac unit on the fourth floor. Once I got to the third floor, the mad dash stopped. The alarm stopped.

Up on four, nothing had changed. Had the drill only been on the second floor?

As I approached the waiting room my family was in, a cheer went up from them and my blood rushed with the tingle of adrenaline. There stood a version of my family I’d never seen, because the Drazens didn’t huddle in a group hug so tight you couldn’t identify every participant. They didn’t jump up and down together at this time of night. Not my mother. Not Sheila. My father wasn’t inside the hug’s circle but stood with his hands pressed together, head bowed over them, eyes closed as if in prayer. A part of my brain became electrified when I saw my father in that pose.

“Dad!” I ran to him.

He didn’t move. I knew he’d seen me before he closed his eyes over his hands. “Daddy, what have you done?” I asked.

I smelled Antonio, and a forest, and saw my father with the sounds of a thousand birds behind him.

The memory had been activated by an algorithm of input.

The memory of the boy in the forest. The one who came all over my shirt and slapped me. The one who had been found at the bottom of a ravine with a broken neck. The first boy who kissed me like a man. The first one who got his fingers inside me and shocked me by making me come. That boy. I’d laid his death in my father’s lap, because all the facts clicked together, but when Dad folded his hands in prayer because Jonathan was obviously going to live, the whole memory came to me. I’d blamed my father not because he was capable of murder, but because I hadn’t been able to deal with the fact that I was.

The ravine, and the boy twisted at the bottom, and Dad next to me with his hands folded and saying, “What have I done?”

Me, looking at my own hands and feeling their power. A brown button sat in the center of my right palm. I’d pulled it off when I’d yanked the boy by the shirt and thrown him over a cliff. It was so clear now. Dad had arranged a meeting to simply threaten him, and I’d shown up. I’d swung him by the shirt, using his weight and surprise against him, and let go. Just let go and watched.

“What have I done?” he’d said. Dad had wanted to know what kind of animal he’d raised.

I’d killed that boy. I’d killed him for leaving a swirl of prematurely released semen on my shirt and slapping me. I’d killed him for our shame. I’d been a murderer way before I met Paulie Patalano.

Antonio hadn’t made me a killer. Violence was in my blood, my skin, the sinews of my heart.

Dad put his hands down, and the memory shattered, like a painted window broken to reveal an entire landscape beyond.

He opened his eyes. “They found a heart. He’s going to be fine.”

I pressed my hand to my chest as if checking for my own heart. “I need to know,” I said while no one was listening. “Antonio. Where is he? What deal did you make?”

“Two of my children are saved tonight,” he said. “That was the deal I made.”

If I stayed to grill him further, I would get sucked into my family’s joy, and I didn’t have time. Antonio didn’t have time.

theresa

 didn’t know where I was running to with my stolen clipboard and nothing but forward momentum. He had to be alive. Had to be. The life would be sucked from my world if he was removed from it. I had hope, and I clung to it like the last dollar to my name. He had to be alive. He had to be. I trusted him to live.

Jonathan would be okay, and my family would be all right. Antonio had to be fine. I was so mad at him for leaving me in that break room, but I would forgive him and let him fuck me like a rag doll.

I hurled myself down the steps and into the waiting room next to the vending machine Antonio had fed a twenty-dollar bill an eternity ago. My face was bathed in sweat and tears. I couldn’t breathe from running toward then away from the make-believe fire, and my ears rang from the alarm. I passed the colorful box of shiny plastic food, all screaming for attention. Something about it made me stop in my tracks. All the crinkly packages held upright by black coils were the same. Or not. I didn’t remember the food, because Antonio had been so beautiful with two-day scruff on his cheeks and his sparkling eyes. And his hands, breaking open the granola package… the way the fingers had articulated, the sheer power and dignity of them. Later, I’d learned to love the grace with which those hands managed small things because I knew how rough they could be.

The vending machine wasn’t interesting. The memory of my resistance to Antonio was, as was the sobbing of the woman next to it as she crumpled a bunch of papers in her hand. That was why I was attracted to the machine. It wasn’t the memory of Antonio or the brightly packaged non-food. It was the woman. It was Valentina.

My ribs took on a life of their own, squeezing the air from my lungs as if I couldn’t breathe without the help.

She wasn’t supposed to be sitting on a blue plastic chair by herself, crying. Antonio wouldn’t leave her like that. Not for a minute. Not for as long as it took me to stare at a bunch of snacks.

That only meant one thing.

Donna Maria had been telling the truth. She had him.

“Valentina?” I sat and said her name at the same time, putting my arm around her. “Where’s Antonio?”

She looked up and saw me, her eyes at the bottom of deep, salty puddles. She rattled something off in Italian, hands waving, mouth wet with tears and spit. I looked around the room. Sick grandmothers. Wailing babies. One woman so pale I thought she was wearing a mask. No one cared that a beautiful woman was crying her eyes out.

“Valentina, English, please. Antonio? He was coming to get you. Have you seen him?”

She shook her head. Spit out more Italian. All I understood was the name “Tonio” and the emotion, which read something between regret and resignation.

She wasn’t functioning, and more than anything, I needed her to function, at least well enough to tell me that Antonio had left us both for a life on the run, or a third woman, or some other attempt at vengeance. I didn’t even care what it was. Didn’t even worry about “us” but about the worst-case scenario, which I refused to even tell her.

I set her papers aside and took her hands. I tried to remember his voice, his tone, how he broke through her walls of panic and despair.

“
Shh, Tina, tesoro. Shhh. Cinque secondi
.
Non dire nulla
.
Respira
.”

She heard me. She must have. She took a breath through her mouth. It hitched, choked, but I saw the concentration in her face. She looked right at me, as if trying to seek out strength in me she didn’t have for herself. I tried to project Antonio-like confidence as I made a show of taking another deep breath. She followed, her second breath hitching that much less.

“
Bene
,” I said. “Another.”

We breathed together three more times. She swallowed. Breathed. Sniffed. Dug an overused tissue out of her sweater sleeve and wiped her nose. When she looked at me again and sucked her lips between her teeth as if there was something she wanted to say but was now calm enough to be ashamed of, I panicked.

“Okay. Tell me. Do you know where Antonio is?” In my heart, I still hoped she was crying because he’d broken her heart, not because I liked seeing her hurt but because the other option was terrifying.

“I don’t know.” Her face started melting again.

I squeezed her hands so hard it must have hurt. At least, that was the intention. “Have you seen him?”

“No.”

I needed an open-ended question that went away from Antonio and back to what Valentina knew.

“Why are you crying?” I asked.

“I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“First Daniel. Did they kill Daniel?”

Who? Daniel? That had been years ago. I had to shake myself from thoughts of Antonio to remind myself of the last time she’d seen Daniel. He had been hanging upside down from a beam in his ceiling. Then I pictured on the floor, face red, grey strips of duct tape glue on his cheek.

“He’s all right. We got to him.”

She broke down in fresh tears that didn’t have sorrow or desperation in them, only relief. She put her head in her hands, and I stroked her back. I didn’t have a second to let her release, but I didn’t have a choice but to let her feel it.

“He’s fine,” I said softly. “He has a headache.”

“They took me away. And my heart gave out. It does when I have stress. They didn’t know whether to bother letting me live. They had me in the room.” Her arm went straight, pointing at the place she was describing, which may or may not have been in that direction. “They didn’t know I have some English. So I just listened. I tried not to give away my face. And they were saying…”

She was going to break down again.

“Stay with me,” I said.

“They had him go to the wrong room. They were going to take him away and…” She tilted her head and pivoted her hand around her wrist as if trying to think of a word. “
Sbudellarlo
.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

She made her fingers into a plane and pointed the edge of it toward herself, moving her hand up and down. “Cut him open. My sweet husband.”

She broke apart again, and no amount of breathing was going to get her back. She fell into my arms even though I was in no condition to comfort or soothe her. I just stared at the side of the vending machine, eyes wide and blank. The personality I’d cultivated for thirty years poured out of me, and I was empty. Nothing but a vessel for that other self I’d just discovered. The animal. The huntress. The savage. Though I thought that primitive woman would rend everything in her sight to achieve her ends, she surprised me. A cold calm took the place where panic and uncertainty would have been.

I was a stone. In part, I had to be or I’d break, thinking of Antonio dying. But also, if I was to avenge him, I had no time to turn into Valentina.

I took Valentina by the chin and forced her to look at me. “I’m putting you in a cab to Zia’s. You stay with her.”

Her head shook as much as my fingers allowed.

I let go of her chin. “You can go somewhere else beside Zia’s, but—”

“Where are you going?” she interrupted.

“To find him.”

“Where?”

If I said “Wilshire and Western” or “under Santa Monica pier,” she wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I could have made up anything and at least answered the question to her satisfaction, but she was illuminating a point. I didn’t know where I was looking.

And she knew it. The bitch. She looked at me with a smug little face I wanted to crack open.

“You know,” I said.

“I want to tell the men. This is not the place for us. You’re going to get him killed.”

“The men?” I set my voice to a sotto growl. “They abandoned him. They sold him. Every one of them.”

Except Otto. Maybe. He was I-didn’t-even-know-where at that point.

“They said it though?” I asked. “They said where they were taking him? They said the whole plan?”

“All of them?” she asked by way of an answer. “There isn’t one of his men to talk to?”

“No. Did they say it in front of you? Just tell me what they said without the particulars.”

“We should call his father then.”

Was she serious? She wanted to call a man across the world who may or may not have approved his son’s assassination? She needed to go back to the fabric factory.

“I don’t have a cell,” I said, and the ridiculousness of her idea seemed to hit her.

She looked helpless again, trying to twist her mind around matters that were beyond her scope. She was an innocent. A nag and a righteous poseur, but not evil. And not particularly direct or approachable when sober. She was a traditional girl with traditional ideas about what she could do by herself.

“How far away is Whittier?” she asked.

I didn’t react. I didn’t let blood flow to my face or shift my posture. Instead, I shrugged.

“We’re on the west side of LA, more or less,” I said casually. “Whittier’s on the east side, over the river. But not too far over.”

“Are there trees?”

“The preserve has trees.”

“They were arguing about whether to hang him from a tree or do it at the compound? I pretended to be asleep. What they were saying? It was sick. My heart was sick. Even thinking of it now. I want to throw up.”

She wasn’t alone.

“Whose compound?”

“If I tell you, I want to be sick again. I want to tell someone who can stop it from happening.”

“Whose compound?” I repeated, throat dry, ears pounding, adrenaline making it nearlu impossible to stay still.

“The old woman.”

That was enough. I had it.

Breathe.

Touch St. Christopher.

Run. Run for the phone like a long-limbed animal on the Serengeti. Run like everything you love is on fire. Break the ground beneath your feet with the power of your steps. Stretch your gait past the length of your entire body. Fold space with your speed. Breath fire. Eat air. Take off. Fly
.