Chapter 14: Homecoming

I stood in the dark corner with the cold coming up through my boots.

It wasn't the table.

It was a linoleum floor in a pawnshop on Atwells.

It felt exactly the same.

The red dot on the burner kept burning.

The doctor sat with his back to me and his hat on his knee and waited to be forgiven by a phone.

I could have taken one step.

I could have put my hand on his shoulder and let him turn around and see whose ride he'd asked for.

I typed instead.

Your fare is paid. A car will be outside at four. Bring the suitcase. Do not come back.

He read it and sagged in the chair.

"Thank you," he said to the wall. "Thank you."

The Ferryman doesn't say you're welcome.

The old man took him out the front.

I stood in the back room until the bell stopped ringing.

Then I took the burner off the shelf and stopped the recording.

Twenty-two minutes.

I didn't play it back.

I'd heard it once.

Lucio's man drove the doctor somewhere at four in the morning, and Lucio never told me where, and I never asked.

The Ferryman keeps his word.

Even when it's me.

On Monday I sat on the end of Leni's hospital bed in Boston with the burner in my lap.

She'd been moved to a regular room with a window.

She was pink.

I'd forgotten she could be pink.

"Tell me," she said. "All of it. I'm not breakable anymore, I've got a new part."

So I told her.

The envelope in the front hall.

The pantry door.

The garden, and the fig tree.

Then I gave her one earbud and played her the last minute of the doctor.

She listened with her eyes on the ceiling.

When he got to the line about the donor not waking up, she pulled the earbud out.

"She ate dinner with me," Leni said. "Every Sunday. She brought me soup at dialysis."

"I know."

"She sat in that chair right there on Thursday and held my hand while they wheeled him in."

She threw the earbud at the wall.

Then she held out her hand for it back, because she wanted to hear it again.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Seven Days to Disappear from My Mafia Stepbrother from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.