Dead to Him novel · Chapter 2 of 16

Chapter 2: Not Relevant

In the doctor's basement Giovanni dismisses the scar Kasia got saving his life and lets Serafina mock her pregnancy on speakerphone, then the phone rings at dawn.

No reply came.

Giovanni checked his screen twice in the car and put the phone face down on his knee.

I sat beside him in the back seat.

When he walked out of the warehouse, something pulled at me, hard, from the middle of my chest.

I tried to stay with my body.

I couldn't.

Wherever Giovanni went, I had to go.

At noon we went down the back stairs of Luca's clinic on Federal Hill.

The basement room was white tile and steel, with a drain in the floor.

My body lay on the table under a sheet folded down to the collarbone.

Luca looked like he hadn't slept.

Giovanni leaned on the wall by the door with his arms crossed.

"The acid was after death," Luca said. "The rest was before. She was awake for most of it."

"Do you have anything I can use?"

"Maybe."

Luca lifted my left hand with both of his.

He turned the wrist up to the light.

A white line ran across the inside of it, six inches long, old and neat.

"This is healed. Months old." He looked closer. "Could be self-harm."

Giovanni glanced at it from the wall.

"Not relevant. Focus on who killed her."

Not relevant.

I had gotten that scar saving his life.

It was July, eight months ago.

The Varanos and the Gallos had agreed to sit down at Il Porto, the place on the water with the blue awnings.

Wives didn't go to those dinners.

But that morning Serafina had found me alone in the garden.

She'd smiled at me with her sunglasses pushed up in her hair.

"Tonight could get ugly," she said. "If I were you, I'd say goodbye to Gio. Just in case."

She looked too pleased when she said it.

So I followed him.

I sat at the bar in a scarf.

I saw the man behind the pillar before anyone else did.

He had a gun low against his leg, and he was looking at Giovanni's back.

Sal Pugliese was already down by then, shot through the shoulder, trying to get up.

I had a steak knife from the bar in my hand.

I cut my own wrist, deep, and threw myself at the gunman.

I got my blood across his eyes.

He fired blind into the ceiling.

Sal got his arm up and shot him from the floor.

Giovanni turned around to find a dead Gallo man behind him and no idea why.

Serafina came running in five minutes later, crying, and grabbed his arm.

"Oh my God, are you hurt? I tried to warn you!"

She'd told the Gallos where he'd be sitting. I was sure of it.

I could never prove it.

I told everyone I cut my wrist on a broken glass in the kitchen.

Giovanni never asked me one question about it.

He was busy holding Serafina while she shook.

Now, in the basement, his phone started to play a song.

It was an old Italian love song.

Serafina had put it on his phone herself, as her ringtone.

His face changed before he even answered.

"Hey, sweetheart."

His voice went soft.

I'd heard him use that voice with her for two years.

He'd never once used it with me.

"Gio! Someone told me about the warehouse. Are you okay?"

He put her on speaker and set the phone on the steel counter so he could pull his cuffs straight.

"I'm fine. It's a mess I have to clean up. A body."

"That's horrible."

She let a little pause go by.

"Did Kasia sign the papers yet?"

His mouth went flat.

"She's not answering her phone."

Serafina sighed into the speaker. It was a long, pretty sigh.

"She's sulking, Gio. She wants you to come find her and feel guilty. You know what she's like. The little mouse runs and hides."

"I know," he said. "She even told me she was pregnant."

"Oh, that's sad."

Her voice stayed sweet.

"A fake pregnancy? That's a new low, even for her."

Luca's hands had gone still on the sheet.

I stood across the table from them both.

My child was dead inside the body between us.

They were laughing about us.

Giovanni picked up the phone and took it off speaker.

"I'll call you later," he said, and hung up.

Luca waited until the screen went dark.

"Gio. The way she was hurt, this wasn't random. It was personal. Somebody hated her."

The door opened and Nunzio Abate came in with a tablet.

He ran security for the whole family.

"The warehouse cameras were off from one to four in the morning," he said. "Somebody used the alarm code. Clean job."

"Professionals," Giovanni said. "So it was a hit."

Yes, Gio.

Paid for by the woman you just called sweetheart.

I had seen her face in the boat shed.

I had watched her pull on her gloves.

Nobody in this room could hear me say it.

The men went out with their tablets and bags.

Luca put the rosary back in its plastic bag with slow, careful fingers.

The little olive-wood cross turned in the light.

On the back of it, under the dried blood, were two letters I had carved with the smallest blade I own.

Nobody had turned it over yet.

We went back to the house, and I stood in my own kitchen and watched Giovanni sleep in a chair.

At six the next morning his phone rang again.

It wasn't the love song.

It was a number he didn't have saved.

Giovanni answered with his eyes still shut, and a man's voice came through so loud I heard every word.

"Where is my daughter?"

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