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My ears picked up a faint, yet clear, male voice. Whizzing and gasps made me look back. Those three emerged from the smoke, staggering. Stepping on broken glass and wood, they moved away. The little light coming through the hole in the wall, didn’t help me make out much. I pressed my forearm to my nose to shield myself from the smoke, noticing a figure on all fours crawl through that hole. Bits of his ripped, grayish jacket hanging over either side of his back, I identified him. Rocco DeLuca… Letting out a cry of pain, he disappeared in the dark. With his comrades following suit, I headed towards Leonardo. By then, he had rolled on his back, his mouth wide open to release all the agony that had been plaguing him.
23
CESARE
God damn it…
Searing pain in my legs and my gut.
A spinning head, a badly bruised face and enough lacerations to make me think I’d been in a fight with a mountain lion.
Matteo wasn’t much better off. He had a bloody nose, some serious cuts along his arms, a bruised collarbone and some nasty burn marks over both knees.
Leonardo was in even worse shape. He could hardly walk. He limped his way out of that mangled bar, all the while complaining about the pain in his thighs.
The worst came when I started the motor of my Torino. And it wasn’t my blurry vision or the insane dizziness.
It was treatment for all those wounds.
We just couldn’t get any.
Back when we had first tried to rob that armored truck, there had been no witnesses. Nobody had seen what had gone down on that empty street. It was easy for us to hide the incident from the cops.
That night was nothing like that.
There had been at least three or four dozen people in Amanda’s. All of them saw those gunmen. They were right there before all hell broke loose. Heading to a nearby hospital would automatically place us at the scene. The cops would roll in, flashing badges and demanding to know more. Even if one of those witnesses didn’t identify us, our wounds and those burn marks would speak for themselves. We wouldn’t be arrested, but getting the NYPD off our backs would be tough.
More than that, the Metropolitan was out of the question. At fifteen miles away from Brooklyn, it was too far for me to consider it as an option. We’d have Piper’s help down there, but, this time, I doubted I could do much to talk the staff out of notifying the cops. In other words, we’d have the exact same problem as we would if we went to a hospital in Brooklyn.
There was just one thing left for us to do.
Get to Matteo’s apartment building and patch ourselves up. We didn’t know if we had sustained anything worse than cuts and bruises, but this was a risk we just had to take.
It took a lot of effort on my part to bring some sheets from Matteo’s bedroom and spread them over his double couch. He and I took that up, while Leonardo had to make do with a sleeping bug. Laying it down on the floor, he sat in it and brought his knees to his chest, pulling out Kleenexes from a box. With Matteo wiping dirt and blood off his knees, I popped a painkiller. I applied a band-aid on a long cut over my elbow, the wailing of sirens making all of us look at Matteo’s balcony door.
“What the fuck happened back there, man?” Leonardo’s voice shattered the silence. “Who were those guys?”
“DeLuca and his crew,” Matteo was quick to respond. “I recognized him immediately.”
“DeLuca?!” I said, surprise pitching my voice higher. “Why would he…?”
“Oh, come on, Cesare. Don’t act so surprised,” Matteo interrupted. “This was payback for robbing their truck. They knew it was us; we’d tried to do that once already. How long do you think it would take them to put two and two together?”
“He’s right,” Leonardo agreed, tossing a bloody Kleenex in a blue bowl by his feet. “But answer me this, will you? Just who thefuckblew the shit out of that bar?”
Leonardo’s question pushed away the fog of confusion, reminding me of a detail I had forgotten in this incredible mess.
The blast.
During DeLuca’s crew’s assault, someone attempted to blow Amanda’s bar to kingdom come.
“I’ll tell you who it isn’t,” Matteo said, his cringe indicative of his agony. “The mob. They don’t do anything that sensational. It’s not their style. They prefer doing things quietly. They hate the attention.”
“I know, but they hate losing their money more,” I argued, putting some force in my voice. “It’s got to be them.”
“And risk taking out their own crew?” Matteo asked, sitting bolt upright. “DeLuca works for them, Cesare. Why would they try to kill him, especially with a bomb? No. It just can’t be them.”
At that moment, my phone buzzed with an incoming call. The caller ID was “Unknown.”
