Super Godfather: My Ex Begs Me on Her Knees novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Envelope

Remo carries a sealed envelope of cash to a widow, fights off two men at a gas station and keeps it, and finds the underboss already sitting in her kitchen.

Rosalia drove a grey Buick.

She picked me up at noon on the corner of Atwells and Dean Street, and I climbed in wearing the only clean flannel I owned.

"That's better than the jacket," she said, pulling out.

"It's the same flannel I wear to fix boats."

"It has fewer holes."

She handed me a plain white envelope across the console.

It was thick and heavy, sealed with tape on the flap, and it had no name on it.

"Test one," she said. "There's a house on Garfield Avenue in Cranston. Put this in the hand of the woman who lives there. Not on the table, not in the mailbox. In her hand."

"What's in it?"

"Don't open it."

"How much is in it?"

"Don't open it," Rosalia said again. "You don't need to know, and if you tear the tape, you fail."

"What if somebody takes it?"

"Then you tell my father why."

I turned the envelope over.

I weighed it in my palm.

I had eleven dollars on a card that might not work.

I had a notice on my door giving me thirty days.

And I had a pile of paper that felt like a great deal more money than I'd ever held at once.

Rosalia watched the road, not me.

"Everyone thinks about it," she said, to the windshield. "The ones who say they don't are lying."

"Did anyone ever take it?"

"Nobody gets as far as telling me."

She pulled into a gas station on Reservoir Avenue, a few minutes from the address.

"I'm filling up. Get yourself some water. Use the cash in your pocket."

"I don't have cash in my pocket."

She looked at me then, for the first time all day.

Her eyes were so dark I couldn't find the pupils.

"Then you can be thirsty," she said, and got out.

I walked to the side of the building where the drink machine hummed.

I was fishing in my jeans for coins when two men stepped around the corner.

One was square and bald, with a neck as wide as his head.

The other wore a track jacket and chewed gum with his mouth open.

"Remo Fiorentino," the bald one said. "That envelope's wanted somewhere else."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Sure you do."

The gum chewer came up on my left.

He kept his hands out of sight inside his jacket.

I thought of Shelby on the gravel.

I thought of nine men carrying toolboxes past her.

I tightened my grip on the envelope and said, "No."

The bald one swung first.

I'd spent four years in the Marines and eleven under boat hulls, and I knew how to take a punch in the shoulder instead of the face.

I took it, turned and drove my forehead into his nose.

Something crunched.

He staggered back with both hands on his face.

The gum chewer pulled a knife from the track jacket.

It was a cheap folding thing, but it was four inches of steel.

"Give it up," he said. "We don't need to cut you."

"Then don't."

He lunged.

I caught his wrist with my left hand, still holding the envelope in my right, and bent it back until the knife hit the concrete.

He screamed.

I hit him once under the ribs and he folded.

The bald one was coming back with blood in his teeth.

I stepped over the knife, grabbed his collar with my free hand and slammed him against the drink machine.

The whole machine rang like a bell.

"Who sent you?" I said.

He spat red on the concrete.

"You'll find out."

"Tell him I said no."

I let go and he slid down the machine.

Behind the gas pumps, Rosalia leaned against the Buick with a coffee in her hand.

She hadn't moved.

She hadn't made a sound the whole time.

She watched me walk back, and she watched the two men limp to a car and drive away.

"Tape's still on," she said.

"I noticed."

"Your lip's bleeding."

"I noticed that too."

She took a clean napkin from the cup holder and held it out without a word.

I took it, pressed it against my mouth and got in the car.

For one second, as she shifted into drive, I saw her smile.

It was small and quick and gone by the next blink.

The house on Garfield Avenue was a yellow ranch with a plastic Madonna in the front garden.

A little boy's bicycle lay on its side in the grass.

I walked up the path alone because Rosalia had said so.

I knocked.

The door opened to a woman in her sixties, thin, in a black cardigan, with a child hiding behind each leg.

"Yes?" she said.

"Ma'am, I was told to put this in your hand."

I held out the envelope.

She looked at it as if I'd offered her a snake.

Then she reached out, took it, and her fingers shook so hard the tape rattled.

"Come inside," she said. "Please. Come in."

I hadn't planned on going in.

But I followed her down the hall to the kitchen, where the table was set with a plate of cookies and a pot of coffee.

A heavy man in a camel overcoat sat at the table with a gold ring on his smallest finger.

He had a grey crew cut and the puffy, unhurried face of a man who had never been told no in his own house.

He lifted a cup of the widow's coffee and smiled at me.

"There he is," said Corrado Falco. "That's my money you're carrying."

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