Chapter 17: Out on Bail

Damiano's POV

I came out of the courthouse at ten past four, and the street was full of trucks.

They stood nose to tail down Queens Boulevard, flatbeds and box trucks and a tanker, with their hazards blinking.

Forty drivers stood on the sidewalk in work boots.

At the head of them was the gray-haired man who had stepped between Moira and Eamon on the dock.

He looked me up and down.

"You hit Tommy's girl with a car," he said.

"I did."

"You said so on the news."

"Yes."

"Then I guess you're the first man in this whole business who ever did."

He put out a hand the size of a shovel.

"We're keeping the contract, Mr. Corvino. We'd like to keep it with you."

I shook it.

I had signed that contract that morning without seeing the faces it belonged to.

Now they were all looking at Moira, who stood next to me with her chin up and her bag over her shoulder.

She had called every one of them from Woodside the night before.

She had not told me.

She had stood in a stranger's kitchen and built something that would still stand if I went to prison for three years.

She hadn't asked me for anything.

"Get in the car," Luca said, "before somebody posts bail on you twice."

We got in.

Nobody spoke on the Belt Parkway.

She held my hand across the seat with her thumb on the burn scar.

I looked at the water and could not say a word.

In the hall at Bay Ridge, Luca said, "I'll get the car for eight."

He took the stairs two at a time and left us alone.

"You smell like a holding cell," Moira said.

"I know."

"Go and wash."

I went up.

I stood under the water in my own bathroom with both hands flat on the tile.

It ran hot over my back.

I had been in a concrete room for seven hours with nothing in my head but her.

The door opened.

I didn't turn around.

"Terms," I said. "I don't come into your room unasked."

"This is your bathroom."

"Then you're not asking."

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