Chapter 21: The Man in Cicero

Massimo's POV

I left a note on her pillow because I couldn't make myself wake her.

She would have wanted to come.

She would have been right to.

I would have let her, and the man in Cicero would have looked at her face and said nothing to anybody.

So I took two men and a gray coat and drove south in the dark.

The bar sat under an elevated train line, with a neon beer sign missing its last letter.

The man I wanted sat at the far end, alone, with a shot glass he wasn't drinking.

He was about fifty, with thick forearms and a hearing aid.

He looked up the moment I walked in, because men who do what he did learn to watch doors.

My two men stayed by the entrance.

I took the stool next to his.

"You know who I am," I said.

"Montanari." His voice was slow. "I figured you'd come in a year or so."

"I've known where you drink for two years."

"Then why now?"

"Because the woman who paid you has run."

He turned the shot glass a quarter turn on the bar.

"I never met a woman," he said.

"A lawyer's firm paid you forty thousand dollars through a retainer.

"That was nine days before the restaurant. You sat across the street in a gray van."

His thumb stopped on the glass.

"I kept a copy of the payment," I said.

"I didn't keep it for the Family. I kept it because a dying woman asked me to."

"Who?"

"The one you shot."

He closed his eyes.

For a long time, there was only the train overhead and the ice machine groaning behind the bar.

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