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He glared at me, panting hard as he pressed his hand to his wound and blood leaked out between his fingers. Eventually, he lowered himself down onto the dirty floor.
I turned my attention to the men still standing. “It seems your friend here might have a hard time answering questions at the moment. You,” I said, nodding to the gray-haired man. “Do you have a different answer for me?”
He glared at me, but this one wasn’t as stupid as his bleeding friend. “His name’s Bianchi,” he said, confirming my suspicions.
“How long have you been working for him?” I asked.
“A couple months,” he spat.
“Doing what?” Of course, we already knew about the treasure-hunting, but I wondered if there were any more pieces to the puzzle.
The gray-haired man didn’t answer. He glared at me with narrowed eyes while the pockmarks along his chin rippled with the twitching of his jaw.
“Silence is the same as a lie,amico.And as you can see,” I said, nodding to scruffy, “I don’t like lies. They tend to make me cranky.”
Vito scoffed. “Almost as cranky as when he gets hungry,” he added, ever so helpfully.
He wasn’t wrong, though. “So, perhaps you have something to say?” I persisted.
“He’s had us trailing after some doctor, following her like a dog after a bitch in heat. Had us searching a bunch of places too.”
“What places?”
He pressed his thin lips together, and his eyes narrowed even further, like he could shoot me down with laser beams. The man wasn’t a quick learner.
I adjusted my aim and shot him in the foot, making him scream just like Scruffy as he hit the floor hard.
Vito chuckled. “He warned you he gets cranky,coglione.”
“How about you?” I said, shifting my attention to the next in line, a dark-haired man in his mid-twenties who I probably would have said was attractive if I swung that way. “Do you want to tell me what places your new owner had you searching?”
“There were a bunch,” he said reluctantly, likely not in a hurry to join the men bleeding on the floor. “A bunch of apartment buildings, an old convenience store. One house—one that looked like it hadn’t been lived in for years.”
Heidi’s childhood home, maybe. My gut told me all of these properties were somehow linked to Heidi or her parents.
“And where is Bianchi now?” I asked.
The guy cringed. He opened his mouth, then closed it. “I don’t know. I swear I don’t.” He cringed some more while his eyes fixed on the barrel of my gun and his feet took a small step back. “He only contacts his men when he needs something.”
He really didn’t know; I could see it in his eyes.
Vito shifted beside me. “Do you want them dead yet, boss?” he asked.
That was usually how this kind of “meeting” ended, but it wasn’t sitting right. Not one of these assholes had the eyes of a killer. They were the kind of men who had done Belemonte’s grunt work and were now doing the same menial shit for Bianchi.
I shook my head almost imperceptibly, but Vito got the message, easing his finger up on the trigger.
“From what I knew of Belemonte,” I said, “most of the men he had working for him were coerced and fucking desperate.” I looked from one man to the next. “Every one of you looks desperate. But Bianchi’s a dead end; the man’s living on borrowed time. So, I suggest you give him a message for me and then get your asses as far away from here as you can. If I see any one of you again, you’re dead men.Capisce?”
Most of the men stared back at me, silent, but the dark-haired one who’d been cringing nodded his head.
“What message should we give him?” he asked.
“Simple. Tell him I’m coming for him. And you,” I said, turning my attention to the teenager who was shaking like a leaf. “Stop spending time with your dumbass father who’s only going to get you killed, and get your ass in school.”
There, I’d even done a good deed for the day, motivating youth and all that shit. I was practically a saint.
Saint Amadeo of New York. It did have a certain ring to it, didn’t it?
