Chapter 7: Shots on Oakley

I ran downstairs barefoot in Damiano's T-shirt.

The front door stood open.

Two of his men were in the street with guns out, and a third was chasing a gray sedan toward the corner.

Damiano knelt on the wet pavement beside his driver.

He had a pistol in one hand and the other pressed hard against the man's upper arm.

He looked up and saw me on the steps.

"Inside," he said.

I came down the steps instead and knelt on the other side.

The driver was in his fifties, gray stubble, a gold cross at his throat, and his face had gone the color of putty.

"Through and through," Damiano said, to me or to himself. "It missed the bone."

"Then he needs pressure, not a gun."

I pulled the dish towel off my shoulder, the one I'd grabbed from the kitchen without thinking, and folded it into a pad.

Damiano moved his hand.

I pressed the towel down where it had been.

The driver hissed through his teeth.

"Sorry," I said.

"Don't be sorry, Mrs. B.," he gasped. "Press harder."

Damiano stood up and turned to the street, and he became someone I hadn't met yet.

He didn't shout.

He spoke in short flat sentences, and men moved the moment the words left his mouth.

Call the doctor.

Get the car off the street.

Find me the sedan.

At the corner, there was a crunch of metal.

The gray sedan had tried to take the turn onto Twenty-Fourth too fast and had gone nose-first into a light pole.

Two of his men dragged a young man out of it and walked him back down the block between them.

He couldn't have been more than twenty.

He had a split lip and he was crying.

Damiano looked at him for a long moment.

"Garage," he said.

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