Don, I Left as You Wished novel · Chapter 20 of 32

Chapter 20: No War

"Santo," I said.

He turned around with the phone still at his ear.

He looked at me for a second.

Then he hung up.

"Get in the car," he said. "He'll take you to the house."

"Call them back."

"Roz, get in the car."

"Call them back and tell them no."

He opened the back door for me. His hand on it was perfectly steady.

"I have to be at the pier," he said. "We'll talk tonight."

"Tonight he's dead."

He didn't answer.

A second black car pulled into the lot. Two of his men got out. Santo got into it and it left.

I stood there in the heat with the nursing home flag snapping over my head.

The big driver was still holding my door.

"Take me to the pier," I said.

"Coach." He looked pained. "He said the house."

"If you take me to the house, I'll tell Joanie you did."

He thought about Joanie for a long moment.

Then he shut my door and got behind the wheel.

"He's going to kill me," he said, pulling out.

"She'll kill you worse."

"Yeah," he said, almost fondly. "She would."

The piers were orange in the late sun when we got there.

Santo was standing at the end of the main pier with eight or nine of his men around him, under the cranes.

The bookish capo was there with his ledger. So were the four men from the office steps.

Nobody was smiling.

I got out before the car stopped all the way.

I walked down the pier between the stacked containers, and the men turned to look at me one by one.

The stray. The one in the photo they hadn't seen yet.

"You don't come down here," Santo said, when I got close.

"Then you shouldn't make phone calls in parking lots."

Somebody behind him shifted his feet.

I stopped right in front of Santo, close enough to touch, and didn't.

"Call it off."

"He drowned my mother."

He said it loud enough for every man on the pier to hear.

None of them looked surprised. He'd told them already.

"I know he did," I said. "I was there when the gardener said it. I heard it the same as you."

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