Complete Corruption (Corruption #1-3) (86 page)

The first shot came from below. I spun to look over the railing before the sound was done echoing. A man dropped.

“I’m just an old woman,” Donna Maria said, coming up next to me with the baby. “This breaks my heart.”

Another man came. And another. The only one I could identify was Antonio. The rest weren’t even men but shadows.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she continued. “It was supposed to be a business.”

There was a dead pause below. A weighted moment when everyone froze.

I had a job. Donna Maria had made me forget it, and if she wanted to kill me for doing it, that was okay. I just had to clear the way for Antonio until he was safe. I could figure out what to do with the misplaced mob boss in a minute.

I held out the gun and took a shot at the last man who came out. It was dark, and the angle was impossible. I think I killed one of the animals, or a dandelion. But the last guy out looked up at us and took aim. I shot at him to draw fire, stepping back when he took aim. I popped off another one, with the
clack clack
of Antonio’s shots in the background, and Donna Maria buckled next to me.

Fuck.

The baby dropped headfirst, and some biological instinct made me reach for it, even with the gun still in my hand. I couldn’t fight evolution. I got close to Donna Maria as she fell to get my hands under the baby, feeling badly for forgetting to drop the gun, realizing how light the baby was, how smooth its face, how oddly peach.

It was a doll.

And I was close to her. Close enough for a blade to land inside me, releasing pain that shot outward as every cell in my body screamed. Close enough to see the pleasure on her face when she jerked the blade upward so hard my feet came off the floor.

I dropped the doll.

Donna Maria relieved me of my gun. “Thank you,
troia
.”

How long would it take to die from a stab wound? Long enough to see Antonio’s face below, his mouth a circle of terror as I bent over and blood fell from me.

I’m sorry.

I didn’t actually say that. I wanted to. I felt my failure deeply. Antonio put his hands out, and I think he cried out. I think something came from him, but I was suddenly deaf from the rushing in my ears.

Lorenzo turned away from Donna Maria and me and faced Antonio, pointing his gun at him for his territory and his crew. His kingship.

Antonio! Watch out!

I didn’t actually have the strength to say that either.

A flash of light and a pop came from Zo’s weapon. Antonio spun.

And fell.

And stayed fallen for a millisecond too long.

In the rising light, with his knees bent and his gun two feet from his hand, he stayed down, the ground under his head gelling with mud-pattered blood.

I screamed
Antonio!

But nothing came out. The scream was sucked back into my gut in the form of pain.

The light in my life had been taken from me, and I wanted only one thing in the world. To die. And to kill. Because inside the pain and the furious rush in my head was a cold place that needed to be taken care of.

I was on all fours. Breathing hurt. Living hurt. My legs shook uncontrollably, and I coughed a stream of blood, heaving air and moisture back in.

I looked up. Donna Maria stood over me. She didn’t look old. She looked twenty. Forty tops. She looked like a woman untouched by her own mortality. I grabbed at her, my hand slipping down her corduroy pants. I was pathetic. But I grabbed for her again, and she stepped back.

I had her by the ankle when she stepped back, but I didn’t have enough strength to keep my grip. My hands weren’t doing what they were supposed to. They were dying, and the life flowing from them did so in waves. I’d caught her on a fisted wave when my hands were grasping and flattening, rigid and slack, completely out of my control. She fell.

My crawl slowed, and my body came closer to the ground. Something scraped.

Donna Maria grumbled and got up on her elbows as if she were lying on the beach, getting the sun. “This is over, my girl. All this foolish nonsense.”

The scraping under me. The knife. She’d left it in me. I swiped at it. Missed. My hand had gone flat.

“You don’t belong here,” she said. “Coulda told you that. Coulda told that
stupido
downstairs with his face in the mud. You till your own soil. What are you going to do with that knife? Anything?”

She had my gun in her hand. She put it against my head. It didn’t feel cold. I must have been freezing. I got a grip on the knife and jerked it out.

Pain engulfed me for a second. Stuff started swimming, and I stopped having coherent thoughts. I was going to black out.

Get it together, Theresa.

People came onto the veranda. Men. I didn’t know who. I couldn’t look at them and finish this job. My fist clamped around the hilt of the knife.

Donna Maria pulled the trigger.

Click.

There were no bullets left.

With my last breath of life, in the interval between milliseconds, where atoms play and thoughts happen so quickly they’re lost before they’re remembered, I lunged for her throat, knife in front of me. Because I was a killer in my heart, the knife understood what I wanted and lodged itself right below her jaw, where life pulsed.

She didn’t even yell. She just sprang forward, blood spurting, mouth open in a soundless scream. I did the impossible and got on my feet. Zo stood in the doorway, meek and boring. Harmless, except when he wasn’t. He’d shot Antonio, and I couldn’t touch him. His world would continue, and Antonio and I had died together, as promised. I felt a profound loss as my last real emotion, and I understood what drove vengeance all of a sudden.

Envy.

That a wrongdoer would continue with their life while you could not.

That they took something and walked away unscathed.

That they had everything and you had nothing.

Envy. So insidious it could disguise itself as anger or righteousness and travel over seas and mountains to see itself satisfied.

Not having the strength or balance to support myself, I spun around. The edge of the railing bit my side, then nothing nothing nothing as I fell.

The ground.

Hard.

Harder than anything I’d ever felt.

Stuff crunched.

A bag of chips.

The bag was fine.

The chips.

Crushed.

But my name.

Contessa
.

The mud hadn’t made the ground any softer.

At the bottom of a ravine, a stupid boy twisted.

I’d felt nothing.

Oh my God, Theresa.

Oddly empty.

I’d killed him.

That hard earth under him.

Broken like a bag of chips.

I will kill them
.

What had I done?

Wrong.

I’d done wrong.

And Paulie.

Who loved.

Who hurt.

And I felt.

All of them. I will God oh god oh

Regret.

Theresa. Theresatheresatheresa

My family would have to grieve again.

Margie would hate herself for giving me the car.

And Antonio would blame himself forever.

He would kill someone for this.

And that was hell enough.

To be loved so well.

That your death inspires regret.

And envy.

And you die swimming in it.

I opened my eyes. Everything was hard to do. Especially this. Opening my eyes. Breathing. Swallowing blood. But I knew the voice, and I had to see the sweet brown eyes and the lips curved for love one last time.

“Capo,” I said. I think.

He had blood over one side of his face, under a gash where the bullet had swiped the side of his head. His mouth was twisted in a rictus of anger and sadness. I wanted to kiss it happy.

“Contessa.”

“You’re not dead.”

“No, no. A scratch.”

It was still bleeding. I couldn’t see much, but I thought I saw bone.

“Please,” I said, guts twisted so tight I could barely get the word out. “Do something for me.”

“Anything.”

I realized when I heard the sincerity in his voice that the rush of white noise in my ears was gone. I didn’t know if it was the fall or if hearing Antonio’s voice was God’s last gift to me for something I couldn’t give words. Not yet. Not until he promised.

“No revenge,” I said. “Do not avenge me.”

“Theresa—”

“Say it.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to see past all that.”

He moved my hair from my face. “I can’t see in front of me. You are my life. I have nothing to hope for without you.”

“Promise me.”

He didn’t answer. My lungs weren’t holding air, and he was holding himself together with thread. Even in my state, I could see it. I could catch him now. I could get him to promise, then I could remember the thing and I could rest and—

“Promise.” I barely breathed it.

He waited forever to answer, as if he couldn’t lie to a dead woman so he had to make sure he’d only speak the truth. I kept mouthing the word, waiting for a response, but it got harder with every repetition. Because. The thing.

Promise promise promise

“Yes,” he said. “I promise.”

“No vengeance?”

“
Come vuoi tu
.”

The thing was the flood of memories of my years on earth. The adult years between the boy and his fingers and the man with the espresso eyes. All those years I was good. All those years I’d chosen happiness. I remembered my sisters and school, and pretty dresses and stupid kindnesses. Katrina. My brother. Rachel. The assistants I’d trained and the good, honest, ethical years of work I gave. None of it made up for what I’d become, but my life hadn’t been a waste. Hadn’t been a lie.

“Thank you.”

I started falling before I even pronounced the first syllable, the gratitude catching my fall into a blackness that grew into the darkness of a truck that smelled like gunpowder and pine, rumbling from Tijuana to Los Angeles. I remembered olive orchards and a life not lived. The wheels under us
hup-shh hup
like a heartbeat. Antonio above me, stroking my eyelids closed and whispering,
This is the day they went to live in the olive orchards. When you close your eyes for the last time, this will be this day you remember as the first day of the long happiness of your life. You will smile your whole journey to heaven.

daniel

here’s an old Italian saying. I can’t pronounce it, and I’m probably misquoting it entirely, but it goes, “When the snake is dead, the venom is dead.”

I don’t think that’s true. Not in every case. For me, the venom died when I thought Theresa was dead after the wedding. For Antonio, when he was leaning over Theresa on Donna Maria Carloni’s compound, I knew his venom was dead. He was broken. Utterly broken.

It was a fucking mess, the whole thing. I’d rushed to the compound as soon as I realized the sheriff’s office wasn’t going to call the feds and no one gave a shit because the snake had paid all of them to leave her alone on her land.

I knew that because I’d gotten my share.

I’d seen Valentina chewing her nails on the side of the road. She stood near a silver Mercedes that had been having a make-out session with a chain-link fence and barbed wire. She couldn’t explain a word in English, so I put her in the car and took her into the compound, following the divots she’d made with the gate.

I took her hand. I hadn’t touched her before, but I had a feeling her husband was dead. She broke down crying. I didn’t love her then, but I thought I could, maybe. If I got out of that compound in one piece. They’d already trussed me up and hung me from the ceiling. These families weren’t known for lowering the stakes from encounter to encounter. I was unarmed, unskilled, and I’d be unaccounted for for a long time if they decided to bury me here.

In retrospect, I was either really brave or really stupid. At the time, I’d felt as though I didn’t have any choice but to, at the very least, witness what was happening. Jesus, what a way to get myself killed.

But I kept going. I told Valentina to stay in the car, and she drew the tops of her fingers under her chin and flung them at me. I think she was telling me to go fuck myself. Must have been, because she got out with me.

I’d never seen the actual compound. It was more modest than I thought it would be, and it was a wreck. In the front yard, two women and four children, from twelve to a few months, huddled in the morning light.

“Are you all right?” I asked one of the women. I recognized her as Irene Carloni.

They didn’t answer.

“
Stai bene?
” Valentina asked.

Irene, who I knew spoke English, made the same motion Valentina had, a drawing of the fingers under the chin.

“
Omertà
,” Valentina said as I headed into the house. “They will never say.”

I smelled gunpowder, heard the batshit squeal of small animals, and ran out to the back. I saw a man’s body, his face in the mud. Simone Fiore and Lorenzo Desano stooped together. Hutches of animals. A bloody grate. My eyes fell on Antonio Spinelli, on his knees next to Theresa.

Blood, everywhere. I mean… everywhere and—