“I don’t know! I swear I don’t know,” Abbott says, finally realizing we’re serious.
Clayton grabs him by the front of his filthy flannel shirt and launches him onto the bed. “All signs point to you, asshole. Where are they?”
Abbott falls back on the mattress. “I don’t know! It wasn’t me! That wasn’t the plan.”
This time, I grab him, punching him in his already-thrashed face with my fist. He sputters and spits blood, the smell of stale alcohol rolling off him as I get closer.
“What the fuck you two wailing on me for?” he says, dabbing at his split lip. “I said I don’t know!”
I glower at him. “It’s the least we owe you for the years of abuse and neglect you put your daughters through.”
Clayton joins me, looming over Abbott with his gun displayed menacingly. “Charlie asked me to kill you, you know. And I do like to please my wife. So if you don’t tell me where she is, I’m going to make her very, very happy.”
“And I’m going to make sure it happens real slow,” I add.
“Oh yeah,” Clayton says. “Very slow.”
Abbott swipes a rumpled sleeve over his mouth. “I don’t know. Jesus Christ. How many times I gotta say it? You’re asking the wrong person. I swear I don’t know. It’s the truth.”
“I think you’re a fuckin’ liar,” I say. “But I got a brother who’s a genius with a pair of pliers, and I bet he can fix that.”
Clayton pulls back, ready to strike again, but Marco’s voice stops him.
“Wait! Someone else worked him over first,” he says. “Who got rough with you, Abbott? Maybe that’s who we should be looking for.”
We step back and Abbott slides onto the edge of the bed, hunching over. Suddenly he looks a million years old, but I can’t muster up any pity for the son of a bitch.
“Some of my creditors found me,” he admits. “They roughed me up. Beat me until I agreed to an insurance scam.”
“How? The winery isn’t yours anymore,” I say. “Didn’t you tell them that?”
“The house is still mine,” he says, looking up at me with defeat in his gaze. “It’s insured for a lot of money. They’re supposed to burn it down tonight. Then when I collect on the policy, they get it all.”
Marco turns to Farman. “Didn’t you say one of the UTVs wasn’t turned back in to the vehicle pool yet?”
“Oh my God,” I hear myself say. I look over at Clayton. “They never left the property. They went home.”
And now Frankie and Charlie are tied up in a house that’s about to be burned down. When all of our manpower is split, either here at the motel dealing with this bullshit, or following my orders to search for the women in town and at every airport and train depot within a fifty-mile radius of Napa, including Oakland and SFO. Motherfucking…fuck.
“We’re not done here,” I hiss into Abbott’s face. “Not by a long shot.”
I point to Farman. “They’re at the Abbott house. Get over there. Take as many men as you can. And you.” I turn back to Abbott. “We’re not done here. Not by a long shot. We’ll be having a reckoning, and that’s a promise.”
Abbott shakes his head. “Ah, come on, Bellanti. We all got what we wanted in the end, didn’t we? Don’t be such a woman.”
“My woman is twice the man you are, you sad sack of shit.”
With one more punch—to his good eye—I take off, racing to my vehicle alongside Clayton and Armani, all the while praying that we aren’t too late.
25
Frankie
“Still no response. This is bullshit!”
The men have gotten increasingly belligerent. The texts were sent to Dante and Clayton over an hour ago, but the thugs haven’t gotten a reply yet. The tallest one—the one I’ve been calling Gasoline in my head—is the one who came up with this plan to begin with, and he keeps insisting that the ransom money is in the bag.
The thing is…I don’t know about Clayton, but Dante’s phone is practically glued to his hand. He should have responded by now. The fact that he hasn’t is making me panic. I can’t help thinking that something terrible has happened to him and Clayton, too.
