Seven Days to Disappear from My Mafia Stepbrother novel · Chapter 17 of 32

Chapter 17: Fourth of July

"Four days," Bunny said. "The owners told the newspaper. They're bringing a photographer."

"Then we light one ring," I said. "Not six. One."

"With half-voltage boxes?"

I picked up a transformer out of the crate and turned it over.

"A forty-foot run won't fire on these. A ten-foot run will."

Lucio was already reading the label.

"So you cut every ring into four short runs."

"And give each run its own box. That's four times the boxes, four times the wire and four times the splices."

"How many splices?"

I did it on the back of my hand in marker.

"Two hundred and twelve. For one ring."

Bunny lit a cigarette.

"Well," she said. "Nobody's sleeping."

Nobody did.

We hauled the first ring back down to the Boneyard by crane on Tuesday morning.

It lay in the dirt.

I cut the old runs apart with the torch.

Lucio sat on his bucket in the shade with a soldering iron and a spool of wire across his knees.

He'd never soldered in his life.

By noon he'd burned three fingers and stopped swearing about it.

By three he was faster than me.

"Where'd you learn to do that?" Bunny asked him.

"Two hours ago."

"Your father couldn't change a light bulb."

"How would you know?"

"He told me in a letter. Nineteen ninety-one. Only one he ever sent." Bunny tapped her ash. "Said he'd tried to fix a lamp and set the drapes on fire."

Lucio stared at her.

"What else did it say?"

"None of your business, sweetheart."

Every afternoon at four Leni called on video.

I propped my phone on a bucket so she could see the ring.

She lay on the couch in the front room on the Hill with a heating pad and a clipboard she'd stolen from her own nurse.

She'd decided she was the foreman.

"Run six is loose," she said on Wednesday. "I can see it from Rhode Island."

"Run six is fine."

"Lucio, tighten run six."

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