Chapter 16: The Cooler

Cesare was dressed and out of the door in two minutes.

He kissed me once, hard, on the doorstep, and I let him.

"Two of my men are across the street," he said. "Lock this behind me."

"Go."

I locked the door and leaned on it.

The carnations lay all over the floor, and I started picking them up because my hands needed something to do.

Tillie's radio had gone quiet upstairs.

I thought nothing of that until I heard the glass.

It was the front window, and it broke inward with a flat, heavy crash.

I dropped the flowers.

Footsteps crossed the shop floor, two pairs, fast.

Tillie's voice yelled from the stairs, "Who's down there?"

"Tillie, don't!" I shouted.

She came down anyway, in her nightshirt, with a baseball bat from behind her bed.

The first man hit her across the face with the butt of a pistol.

She went down against the counter.

The bat rolled across the floor.

"Where is she?" the man said.

Tillie said something I could not hear.

He kicked her in the ribs.

I was already moving.

I did not think about it.

My whole body had one thought in it, and the thought was the baby.

I looked around the back room for a weapon.

The shears were on the worktable where Cesare had left them, long and sharp.

Beside them stood the big brass watering can Tillie used for the hanging baskets, full to the lip.

I picked up the can.

The second man came through the swinging door into the back room with a gun in his fist.

I saw his face for half a second.

He saw me.

I threw the water into his eyes.

He swore and fired blind, and the shot went into a shelf of vases.

I swung the can by its handle and caught him across the mouth.

His head snapped sideways, and he went down on his knees on the wet floor and slid on the spilled carnations.

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