The days after killing Bob, the accountant, were a blur. I’d lost count of the number of men I’d hurt, cutting a bloody swath through the De Sanctis ranks, trying to get to Renato or Antonio. In the end, it was Ronan Black, the devil’s own attorney, who came through. I had in my shiny new cell phone the banking information for a one-off payment, made from a shell corp belonging to Renato De Sanctis, to a renowned forger, for a new set of identity documents.
Standing now, three days later, with a shovel in my hand, under a starless New Jersey sky, I stood on the cusp of finding out. I had to know, one way or another. I couldn’t wait one more second to know.
“Crap. This isn’t the kind of thing I had in mind for when we were out,” Bran muttered. He was standing in the hole we’d been digging in the moonlight. He leaned on a shovel and sighed. “I still say we use the digger.”
“No, it’s too noisy, and besides, we don’t know how deep to go. We might go too far.”
Bran sighed and wiped a hand over his sweating brow. “This is really fucked up, you know that. I mean, even for you, digging up your ex-girlfriend’s grave is macabre.”
“She wasn’t my girlfriend.” There wasn’t a word for what we were.
“That makes it even worse. And now the memory of her is a death wish. You want to bring the De Sanctis family down on your head?”
“They can’t do shit. Antonio won’t risk pissing off Kirill unless it’s serious.”
“I’d say fucking up half their men is serious.”
“I’ve barely scratched the surface of the damage I’m going to inflict on them. I’m only just warming up. This is a diversion from the main event.” I dug down again. The soil was deeper packed the lower we got, and it was working a serious ache up in my arms. I welcomed the pain. It kept me awake. The persistent feeling of being in a dream had dogged me since I’d killed the accountant.
“This is just a diversion?” Bran snorted, disbelief in his voice.
He knew me too well. This was just a diversion, unless she was really alive. Then, everything changed.
“I love throwing my back out for a diversion,” he muttered.
“Less complaining, more digging.”
We worked on in silence. The noise in my head was a muted roar. My bloodlust had been well and truly sated in the last few days, but even then, since this thread of intrigue had unspooled, nothing seemed to quench my need to break bones and inflict pain. I was restless, full of dark, twisted energy that had nowhere to go. Like a tiger pacing in his cage, tail lashing, temper simmering, I couldn’t fucking wait to resolve this mystery.
A hard thud broke through my thoughts.
Pay dirt.
We uncovered the rest of the coffin quickly.
“Man, I don’t know about this. If she wasn’t really dead, why bury an empty coffin? It doesn’t make sense.”
“I’m looking inside this coffin, and nothing you say will stop me. Here, help me pry it open.”
Grabbing the twin crowbars I’d brought with me, I tossed one to Bran and posed myself at one end of the long wooden box. Bran grimaced but caught the heavy metal bar and moved to the other end of the coffin.
“On three. One, two, three,” I grunted as I leaned down on the crowbar.
After a moment of both of us pushing, the edge cracked open on one side. Bran stepped back, clamping an arm over his mouth and nose.
“Does it smell? I don’t want to smell it.”
I approached the gap and used my foot to push it wider. My heart was beating so hard, I couldn’t quite catch my breath. The strange unreality of the last few days popped like an overripe bubble as I peered inside.
It was empty.
Bob, the accountant, had been right.
Sofia De Sanctis wasn’t here, and she never had been.
She was alive. Just like that, I was painfully awake.
I couldn’t sleep for days after the graveyard. I stayed awake, finding out what I could.
Seven years ago, Renato De Sanctis, through a shell corp, bought a new set of ID documents. The new identity was for a Sophie Rossi. Rossi was Sofia and Renato’s mother’s maiden name. I only had to pull out three of the forger’s teeth to find that out. A light day’s work. Once I had the name, it wasn’t too difficult to find out more. There were a lot of Sophie Rossis in the country, and I needed to narrow it down. Luckily, one of the IDs that had been forged had been a Maine state driver’s license.
Did you really think I wouldn’t find you there, prom queen? Did you think a few states between us would save you?
Having the state really narrowed down the number of Sophie Rossis to look into. I was able to narrow further when I cross-searched by a couple of other names. It was only a hunch that the three of them would have stayed together, but I always trusted my gut. There were no hits for Angelo or Chiara in Maine, but I found a newspaper article about an Italian American who had started a boxing gym in some small town. It was a wide net to cast, and yet there was a photo of the front of the gym. Angelo wasn’t dumb enough to pose in a photo, but his young wife wasn’t nearly so careful. In the photo of the front of the gym, a car had just pulled up in one of the staff parking slots.
Chiara was getting out of the car, oblivious to the photo being taken. I scanned for more information. Andy and Cicci Salva were the registered owners of the gym.
It merited checking out, even if the very idea was still far-fetched. The truth was that Antonio De Sanctis had buried an empty coffin and told the world that his daughter was dead. It was a thread I’d never stop pulling until I had uncovered the truth.
The gym that Chiara and Angelo owned was in a small town. Hade Harbor, Maine, famous for its university and ice hockey team. A speck on the map, near the sea. I left the next morning, and Bran tagged along for “the story.”
We stopped for dinner in some small diner. It smelled like grease and burnt coffee.
“Fuck, it’s nippy up here.” Bran hunched forward in his jacket, sticking his hands into his pockets.
“Aren’t you from Ireland?”
“Fair enough. So, have you seen your brother yet? Is he back from Russia?”
I shook my head, taking a mouthful of the bitter black tar that the joint had the nerve to call coffee.
Bran pulled a face at the taste of it. “Does he know about this resurrection business? Ronan will probably tell him.”
“I asked him not to. I don’t want anyone to know, not yet anyway. I don’t want him involved and I don’t want anyone in her family to realize what I suspect.” I don’t want anyone trying to save her from me.
“Right, that’s why we had to fill the damn grave back in.” Bran stretched his neck this way and that. “It still feels like shit, by the way.”
“How about you? Seen your brothers yet?” I wondered how the O’Connor family worked. With a stepbrother like Ronan Black, it was a surprise that both Bran, and his older brother, Killian, had been inside so long. The only sibling who hadn’t done time was Quinn, the youngest.
Bran grinned and shook his head. “Ronan sent me a message to stay out of trouble, but that’s about it. I saw Quinn, though. She’s all grown up and getting into trouble already.”
“Must be an O’Connor trait. I’m sure she’ll be a guest of the state before her twenty-first birthday.”
“Fuck you. Ronan won’t let that happen.”
“Having a stepbrother who’s a criminal defense attorney didn’t help you, though, did it?”
Bran laughed. “I guess you’re right there.” He broke off as some burly trucker bumped into his chair from behind.
Bran twisted around to look up at the guy.
He was one of those local yokels, overconfident in his little pissing patch. He jerked his chin at my friend. “You got a problem, pretty boy?”
Bran shook his head slowly. “No, man. No problem.”
“Good,” Mr. Soon-to-Be-in-ICU grinned. He thought he looked tough, in his trucker cap, with his straggly beard. His plaid shirt was straining around his belly. He slapped the waitress’s ass as he passed by her. A king in his shitty little kingdom.
I wiped my mouth on a napkin and set my fork down.
Bran was looking at me with amusement in his eyes. “What about not getting into trouble too quickly?”
The whirling chaos inside me chomped at the bit to get out. The beast I’d always tried to deny was frothing at the mouth for blood. It had become addicted. It demanded daily feeding.
“The man is clearly looking for a fight. Who am I to deny him?”
I pocketed the knife from my place setting and headed outside, already grinning in anticipation.
