Don, I Left as You Wished novel · Chapter 13 of 32

Chapter 13: Down the Hall

"Then ask him," I said.

"You don't ask Tullio things." Santo watched the ring on the drain. "He tells you what he wants you to think, and he watches what you do with it."

"So what do we do?"

"We let him think I still don't know anything."

He stood and held a hand down to me.

I didn't take it. I got up on my own.

He didn't seem to mind.

I drove home over the bridge at three in the morning with the big driver's headlights in my mirror the whole way.

On Wednesday I found out why.

I was loading kickboards into the back of my car outside my building at seven.

The big driver got out of his black car, walked across the street and lay down on the sidewalk.

He reached up under my back bumper.

He came out holding a gray plastic box the size of a deck of cards, with a magnet on one side.

"Coach," he said. It was the first word he'd ever said to me. "You got a passenger."

He set it on the hood.

Santo was there in twenty minutes.

He looked at the tracker for a long time without touching it.

Then he picked it up, walked to the corner and dropped it into the open bed of a garbage truck heading for New Jersey.

"Let them follow that," he said.

"It's Dino," I said.

"It's Tullio's money and Dino's patience."

"Either way, it's my car."

"Either way, you're moving into the house."

I laughed. Then I saw he wasn't joking.

"I am not living under your roof."

"It's your mother's roof."

"It's your father's roof."

"Then it's nobody's." He folded his arms. "Your building has no doorman, a fire escape anybody can climb, and a lock I could open with a credit card."

"You'd know."

"I would."

My phone rang.

It was my mother.

"Your room's made up," she said. "I put the good sheets on. Don't argue with me on a Wednesday."

I looked at Santo.

He looked at the sky.

I moved in that night with one duffel bag, my laptop and a box of swim caps.

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