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“You going to live?” I ask.
“Hoping you can get out of paying me?”
“Hoping you live long enough for me to buy you a beer.”
“Now you’re talking my language.”
The door opens and it gets busy. There are doctors, nurses, cops. It all becomes a blur. I’m taken out and loaded into a different bed. The doc’s taken away, various people working on him. I don’t know what happens to Don Colombo’s body. I don’t really give a shit. All I care about is getting hold of a phone and calling Kelly. It’s over at last. We can be together and she won’t be in danger.
I got what I wanted. Don Colombo is dead. I should be happy about that. I don’t give it much thought. All I care about is telling Kelly that I’m alive.
I ask a nurse for a phone but I’ve got the cops wanting to talk to me first. I tell them I killed the Don. No point the doc getting in trouble. He saved my life. This makes us even.
They don’t arrest me.
They might yet but I doubt it. They’ll know same as the city will know by tonight. I have no rivals left. I’m in charge around here.
Someone gets me a phone at last and I call Kelly’s number. I hold my breath as I wait for her to answer. There’s a click and then I can hear her voice down the line. Better than any morphine at dulling the pain. “Hello?”
“Kelly,” I say back to her. “It’s me.”
EIGHTEEN
KELLY
* * *
“It’s me,” he says down the line like we last spoke a couple of days ago. “You missed me?”
“It’s been two months,” I tell him. “I haven’t heard a thing from you in two months and now you call?” My hand goes to my bump. His baby is inside there. I’m trying my best to get by without him and now he gets in touch?
I go through every emotion under the sun from anger to grief to joy to lust and everything in between. “You’ve not called me once. You never answered your phone. Two months, Ricardo. What makes you think I want to hear from you now?”
“It’s over,” he replies.
“Damn right it’s over. It was over when you fucked off back to the States and ghosted me. Didn’t even have the courage to tell me yourself, got your loyal enforcer to do it for you. Paid me off and thought that made everything all right, didn’t you?”
“You done?”
“No, I’m not done. You can’t just ring me up out of nowhere. Do you have any idea how hard it’s been for me to get over you? I loved you, Ricardo and you just ditched me like a piece of trash. How could you do that to me?”
“Let me speak for a moment and you’ll find out. You going to let me speak, Kelly?”
“All right, fine. Go ahead. Say what you’ve got to say.”
“I’ve been in a coma since the day I left you in Rome.”
“You’ve what?”
“You wanted to know why I didn’t answer my phone, right? I’ve been in a coma.”
“I’ve heard some lame excuses in my time but that takes the biscuit, that does. You expect me to believe that?”
“Believe what you want but it’s true.”
“And how did you end up in a coma? Bang your head like we’re in a Mexican soap opera?”
“I got shot.”
