Seven Days to Disappear from My Mafia Stepbrother novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: Ten Pounds

I made the sign myself, on the back of a transformer box, in black marker.

On Monday the twenty-ninth of June I stood at the end of the curb at the Las Vegas airport and held it up with both hands.

THE FERRYMAN SAYS YOU CAN LIFT TEN POUNDS.

He came through the sliding doors in jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled.

I'd never seen him in jeans.

He had one small bag over his shoulder and a pair of leather work gloves sticking out of his back pocket.

He saw the sign and stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk.

A family with a luggage cart had to go around him.

Then he laughed.

It was the same laugh from the car in the rain, surprised out of him.

"Ten pounds is generous," he said. "My surgeon said eight."

"Then you're carrying the bag of bulbs. That's seven."

"You weighed them?"

"I weighed everything."

He looked at me for a second.

He didn't.

He took his gloves out of his pocket and held them up.

"You said bring gloves."

"Get in the truck, Ventresca."

Bunny was at the wheel with her rhinestone sunglasses on top of her head.

She didn't say hello.

She watched him climb into the back seat of the cab, slow, one hand braced on the door frame.

She watched his hand.

The gold signet ring on his little finger caught the sun.

Bunny put the truck in gear and didn't move it.

"You've got your father's hands," she said. "Ventresca."

Lucio went still.

I turned around in my seat.

"Bunny."

"Nineteen eighty-six," she said, to the windshield. "A Greyhound station in Providence. Five in the morning. A man in a hood hands me an envelope and walks away."

"I never saw his face. I saw that ring."

She pulled out into traffic.

"Ten years later there's a picture in the paper. Some Don on Federal Hill at a christening. Same ring. Same hands. I nearly fell off my stool."

Lucio leaned forward between the seats.

"He did the bus himself, the first few years," he said quietly. "Before he trusted anyone."

"Well." Bunny blinked hard behind her sunglasses. "Tell him he was late. The bus was already boarding."

"He's dead."

"Then I'll tell him myself someday."

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