Chapter 4: The Diner

At six the next morning, Santino told me to stay put and keep the bolt on.

I watched him walk out to the truck in his black coat with his face shut.

I gave him two minutes.

Then I pulled on a spare canvas jacket from a hook, went out the back, and climbed into the truck bed.

There was a tarp folded behind the cab.

I lay under it, smelling oil and fish, and when he started the engine, I held on.

He found me forty minutes later, when he stopped at a red light and pulled the tarp back to check his mirror.

We looked at each other.

"I told you to stay," he said.

"You told me a lot of things."

He shut his eyes, and I think he said a prayer.

Then he drove on and let me ride in the cab.

He did not turn back.

I understood that turning back would cost him a half hour he didn't have.

We came into the city by the river, past the shuttered piers, and he parked the truck on Oregon Avenue across from a diner with a green awning.

He killed the engine.

"Carlo wants me at nine," he said. "I came here first because every Monday at seven, Lucio eats breakfast here. I followed him once in January."

"Alone?"

"No."

He nodded at the window.

The diner glowed yellow in the dull morning.

In a booth at the back, with a coffee in front of him and his cream suit jacket folded beside him, sat Lucio.

I knew the shape of his shoulders better than my own.

I knew how he held his cup with two fingers because he thought it looked elegant.

Across from him sat a woman in a navy windbreaker, with her brown hair in a ponytail and a badge clipped to her belt.

She slid a manila folder across the table.

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