The Famous Mafioso Hired Me to Hear Him, and the Man in the Cell Is Not Who They Convicted novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The House on Hertel

The house on Hertel Avenue had a bathroom the guards could not see.

I found it by walking the upstairs hall with a clipboard, the way an interpreter walks a room before a medical evaluation, and counting what the cameras covered.

They covered the stairs, the front door and the door of the bedroom where he slept.

They did not cover the bathroom at the end of the hall.

The window over the tub was painted shut, and the door locked from inside.

The nurse had gone home at nine.

The two state guards had been put in the kitchen with a pot of coffee and a plate of cannoli that Gianna had sent over, and I could hear their television through the floor.

The ankle monitor on his left leg pinged a box in the front room every four minutes, and the box did not know what floor he stood on.

I stood in the bathroom with my back against the door and my heart going hard.

He was in the bedroom across the hall.

The chain was gone.

For the first time since I had known him, his hands were free.

All evening I had sat beside him at the medical evaluation, signing the doctor's questions into his left hand.

I had watched him do something he had never done in the glass room.

He had touched two fingers to his own wrist to feel his pulse.

Then he had turned his hands over and looked at them as if he had forgotten what they were for.

I opened the bathroom door a hand's width and signed through the gap into the dark hall.

COME HERE.

He had been waiting.

He came out of the bedroom in a plain gray shirt and slacks, barefoot, with the small black box strapped above his ankle.

He did not hurry.

He stopped in front of me, and the hall light caught the gray at his temples, the scar and the width of his shoulders.

He was taller than I had thought, with the chain gone.

He lifted his hands.

TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT, he signed.

YOU, I signed.

HERE. NOW. YOU.

I had never signed anything so plainly in my life.

He looked at my hands, and then at my face.

Then he came through the door, and I shut it behind him and turned the lock.

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