I don’t spot cameras, but just in case, I keep my hood up and pulled tight around my face. A man walks toward me with a fluffed-up poodle on a leash, and I inhale deeply. Human, canine, all entirely normal. Judging by the perfume tickling my nostrils, they’re on their way back from one of the multitudinous grooming salons. The man clicks the unlock button on his key and is about to climb into a big brown Chevy Trailblazer.
I don’t want to hurt him—or get bitten by a poodle—but I have to risk it. I grab his face between my hands and stare into his eyes, overwhelming his will with mine. “I need your car, and you’re going to lend it to me. I’m real sorry. I’ll leave you some cash in case you need a cab. You won’t report your car missing until this time tomorrow, okay?”
He nods witlessly, and I shove some loose bills into his shirt pocket. I pat the poodle, take the keys, and exit like the proverbial bat escaping hell. It only takes me a few minutes to reach the motel, and as soon as I pull up, Luca emerges from our room, a sheet thrown over his head and shoulders and Pietro in his arms.
As he dumps my protesting brother in the back seat, I leave the motor running and dash back in for my packed bag. I look around for a few seconds, feeling a weird sense of fondness for the place. It might be a shitty motel room, but I had some great orgasms here.
When I get back outside, Luca is in the front seat, completely covered to protect himself from the sun, and despite the circumstances, I laugh. “You look like Casper the unfriendly ghost!” I exclaim, shifting the SUV into drive.
“Did you kill them?” he growls. “You better have killed them.”
“No. I didn’t have it in me to murder a puppy, even if I knew it wasn’t really a puppy. Where to?”
“Brooklyn,” he mutters from under his sheet, clearly displeased.
“Right. No sleep till Brooklyn it is.”
CHAPTER 19
LUCA
It takes us another nine hours to hit the outskirts of New York, mainly because we drive the kind of route only a geographically illiterate person would drive. I don’t need to tell her to be cautious. She automatically takes strange detours, stops off at random locations, and keeps an ever-watchful eye on the rearview mirror.
Pietro thinks Tomasso would have dispensed scouts to pretty much every town between Chicago and New York, assuming he figured out who I was and where I was headed. That’s a whole lot of assuming, and he’s not convinced his grandfather will know which Cosca I’m from.
“He’ll definitely figure out you’re Cosca,” he says from the backseat. “Because you look like a gangster. But you could be West Coast or Canada. Even Russian.”
“Canada?” echoes Rosa, next to me in the passenger seat now that it’s dark enough for me to drive. “They have organized crime in Canada?”
“Yeah,” her brother throws back at her. “It’s a global hotbed of the maple syrup black market.”
She laughs, and I see how they once might have been, these two, batting jokes around. I came into their lives at a time of conflict and trauma, but there are glimmers of what they used to share. I see her relaxing into it again, wanting it, maybe even needing the false comfort of the family who fucked her over.
I drive deliberately fast over a pothole in the road and grin when Pietro is thrown around and yelps. He still has no feeling in his legs and not enough upper body strength to stay upright, so the movement sends him flopping over his seatbelt like a puppet with its strings cut.
“You did that on purpose!” he shrieks, pulling himself back up.
“I know,” I reply. “You think he has people all over the country? How can even he stretch that far?”
“Well, he doesn’t need to be everywhere. He might hate technology, but he loves his damn maps. Has a whole room full of them, and he has a thing for you guys. He’ll have located the Cosca HQs on both sides of the US, and he’ll know where the Romas are in Mexico, the Milanos in… They’re still in Milan, right?”
I frown as I drive. Tomasso knows entirely too much. All this time, he’s been watching us. Learning, storing away information that nobody with a drop of human blood should have.
“He’ll start simple,” Pietro continues. “He’ll focus on routes from Chicago to New York, Chicago to San Francisco, and Chicago to the border. That’s a lot less to cover, and he’ll throw everything he has in all directions. It explains why there were only two of them, doesn’t it? He’s covering his bases, spread thin. Except now…”
“Now they know where we’re heading. Or at least in which direction,” Rosa finishes for him, her voice tinged with concern. I’m worried about her now. Worried that she feels vulnerable, that she doesn’t trust me enough to keep her safe. Worried that she’s right.
“The Grand Ball Sack,” she announces suddenly.
“What?” I ask, glancing at her.
She’s smiling, her fingers wrapped around her amulet. “That’s his new name. Tomasso’s. Grandfather is too good for him. So from now on and henceforth, in perpetuity forever and ever amen, he will be known as the Grand Ball Sack. He’d hate that, the pompous asshole.”
I laugh out loud and reach across to squeeze her thigh. Yeah, she’s doing better than I thought. The Grand Ball Sack. I like it.
We’ve detoured up as far as Yonkers, and now I’m navigating familiar roads through the Bronx, making my way to the bridge. Matteo is meeting us in Brooklyn, and hopefully he’ll have Moonface with him. Nothing relieves tension like a sloppy kiss from a pit bull.
“You’re sure nobody will find us here?” Rosa asks, not for the first time.
