He smoothed a hand over his bushy beard. “No, sweetheart. I’m alone because I want to be.”
“Truly?”
“Truly. I like my life the way it is. I love sharing it with you, but you’ve never encroached on what in my life is mine, and I don’t want to share those parts with anyone. I live mostly in my head, and I’m happy there.”
“Would you be lonely if I moved to the coast?”
“If you moved to the Pacific coast, yes. I would miss you terribly. But if you move to Quiet Cove, and I feel lonely, I’ll call you up and invite myself to Quiet Cove. It’s not far, Lara. Lots of people make the drive round trip every day. Trey does.”
Their sandwiches and cabinets arrived, and they were quiet while they ate. Lara’s stomach grumbled unhappily at her first whiff of the grilled cheese, but it settled again, and she took a bite. Then she really was hungry, and she took three more.
Her father worked on his BLT with the same enthusiasm. Around a bite, he said, “Talk to me, Lara. Tell me what you’re thinking about.”
“I’m worried that I won’t figure out how to live in Quiet Cove, and I’ll stress and be weird, and ruin things with Trey.”
“But he’s seen you at your worst. You’ve experienced deep trauma, and he was there for it. He knows. Trey’s a sharp young man. He takes after Nick, I think. I see why the don takes the risks he takes for him.”
“I don’t want him to help me. That’s not a relationship. That’s a caregiver situation. I want to have a relationship with him. But I don’t know how.”
“Here’s what I think. Nobody knows how to be in love until they’ve done it. Everybody figures it out as they go. You’re trying to set a framework around something that’s different every time.”
“You’ve been in love?”
“Yes, when I was a young man. She died.”
“I never knew that.”
“I never talk about her. And I’m not now. What we’re talking about is you, and I’m giving you some advice. What’s the worst thing that can happen if you move to Quiet Cove?”
Lara shrugged. She’d been trying to understand that very thing.
“Here it is: things don’t work out with Trey, and you move back home. Your heart will hurt, and it will take time to heal, but it will heal. If you’ve sold your apartment, you won’t have that anymore, but I will be where I always am, and your room will be there, and you’ll come home and start over. That’s what people do. You want to be normal, Lara? You are. The thing you’re trying to do is what’s not normal. You can’t be with another person and set in stone everything that means. You have to go with the flow. That’s the thing you need to learn to do: you need to take a leap of faith.”
Lara laughed and breathed in some vanilla cabinet from the straw she’d been sucking on. Her father watched, bemused, as she spluttered.
He handed her some paper napkins from the dispenser. “What did I say that caught you funny?”
“Nothing, it’s not that. It’s that Trey talks about faith in that way, too. His religious faith, his faith in Nick, in his family. Even in the Red Sox. He says faith is knowing without evidence—but that’s a paradox. You can’t know without proof.”
“And you know full well that’s not at all true. The theory of relativity wasn’t confirmed for more than a hundred years after Einstein posited it. But the entire scientific community accepted it, and built their own theories on it. Whole disciplines, whole industries, arose on the back of Einstein’s unconfirmed theory. You, my darling girl, are hiding behind a flimsy shield. Faith is the foundation of science. Not religion, but faith. The belief that there is more to know, more to see. The certainty that there is more beyond the boundaries of our human perspective, beyond even our human comprehension. Without faith, we would still be living in caves and beating each other with rocks.”
He pushed his plate aside and reached across the table to lay his hand over her wrist. “Trust in Trey, Lara. Trust in yourself. Have what you want. Take the leap. And trust in me to catch you if you fall.”
~ 19 ~
Trey pulled into the PBS lot and took his phone out to send Lara another text. He’d texted her when he’d gotten into his car, after a client meeting, but she hadn’t hit him back yet. Her appointment with Dr. Rosen had ended at two, more than three hours ago, and she usually called to tell him how it had gone. He wanted to check in with her; he was a little worried about how he’d left her that morning, so pale and groggy.
Generally, she responded within a few minutes when he texted—often within a few seconds—and almost always answered when he called. Her agenda most days was light, nothing that would keep her from her phone or from answering it. He could count on a single hand the number of times a text had sat fifteen minutes, and all those times, he’d forgotten that she was with her doctor.
Since they’d been a couple, he didn’t need even a single finger to count the number of times he’d gone this long without being in contact with her. It had never happened. His worry that she was really sick kicked up a notch.
Deciding to call instead, he opened his contacts—and then his phone rang. Nick was calling. He answered that instead.
“Hi, Uncle. I’m in the lot, on my way in.”
“Have you spoken with Lara today?”
The mere coincidence of Nick asking about Lara at the precise moment he was growing worried about her shifted that worry into the first bubble of panic. “Not since I left her this morning. I was just about to call her. Is something wrong?”
“Her father missed a meeting here with me half an hour ago. He hasn’t called, and I can’t reach him.”
Trey’s panic instantly hit full boil. He’d been worried that she was sick. If Frederick had missed a meeting with the don and not even called, then there was trouble—no other possible answer. Something bad had happened.
“I’m here, I’m coming in.”
“My office.”
“Yes.” Trey ended the call and hoofed it into Nick’s office.
~oOo~
Angie and Donnie were there already. All three men stood around Nick’s desk. Trey closed the door and joined them.
“Tell me what you know,” Nick said.
“She was in bed when I left. I talked to her for a couple of minutes, and she went back to sleep. She had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon, at one. Her father was going to take her to it.”
“Doctor?”
“Therapist.”
“Ah. Go on.”
“There’s nothing more to tell. I left, she went back to sleep, and I haven’t talked to her since. I’ve texted a couple of times, but she hasn’t gotten back, and that’s weird. I was starting to get worried that she was sick, but if her father is out of touch, too …”
“Why do you think she’s sick?”
“She’s been a little off the past couple of days—pale and lethargic. She says she gets sick a lot in the fall and winter.”
Nick nodded. “She does.” He turned to Angie. “Put Calvin on a general search—hospitals, accidents, the like.” Calvin Trioli was the head of the IT department for PBS, and Nick’s computer guy for everything else as well. Many of the PBS employees—the male ones, anyway—wore two hats.
Angie stepped back at once to make the call. Nick went to the wall of shelves near the window and pulled back a door made of book spines. Behind it was a small safe. They all stood quietly, their eyes averted—though they couldn’t have seen anyway—as Nick entered the code and opened the safe. He pulled out the Moleskine notebook they’d taken to calling the Bondaruk Book—the coded text that Lara had translated awhile back—and then the notes that were Lara’s decrypted text.
He turned back to the room with the book in his hand. His eyes landed on Trey. “If it’s not an accident, then it’s got to be the Bondaruks.”
Trey was already there; the thought sat in his belly like a hunk of dry ice. But hearing the words out loud was almost too much. “Fucking hell. Not again.”
> Over the course of the past few weeks, Nick and Donnie had been working hard on the Pagano Brothers’ brand of diplomacy, reorienting the focus of the people whose cooperation and complicity kept the organization running. The Bondaruks had been inserting themselves in years-long relationships, trying to break the Paganos off at the knees. Nick and Donnie had turned all that around.
Trey had been in a few of the lower levels of those meetings, and they had been master classes in the assertion of power. Nick spun fabrics of enticements and threats so intricate that the people he spoke to somehow managed to be both intimidated and honored by his attention, and to be far more aware of the latter than the former. They feared him, but believed themselves his friend. Even as he laid out the consequences of defying him, they trusted him to protect them.
And he would—from any outside threat. Because he was the bigger threat.
To Trey’s knowledge, Nick and Donnie had been entirely successful in repelling the Ukrainian interference in Pagano business relationships. If the Bondaruks had taken Frederick and Lara, that was why.
“Do you think they’re after Frederick again, or do they know about Lara?” Donnie asked.
“It’s bad either way. The only other people who know what Lara does are standing in this room right now.” His eyes circled the room, locking with each of them in turn—Trey, then Angie, who was done with his call, and then Donnie. “Right?”
They all said, “Yes, don,” as if it were a rehearsed refrain.
“Then they went for Frederick. But you said Lara was with him this afternoon.”
Trey nodded. “Yeah. She wasn’t going out except to her doctor, and her dad was taking her.”
“Call the doctor, find out if she made that appointment.” He held up the notebook. “We need to go through the back notes in this thing and see if it indicates where they would do wetwork.”
Wetwork: torture.
Murder.
“What if they took her all the way to New Jersey?”
Nick shook his head. “That much distance is too risky for wetwork. They’ve been crawling all over our turf the past few months, like roaches. They’ll have a place here, or in Connecticut. No farther.” He handed the book to Donnie. “I’ll call Vio, get his help on his turf.”
A lump the size of his stomach blocked Trey’s throat. Swallowing hard so he could breathe, he got on his phone and looked up the number for Seymour Rosen. God, he hoped she’d made that appointment. If she had, then she’d been out of reach for only a few hours.
If she hadn’t, then the Bondaruks might have had her all day.
Again.
~oOo~
“You know we’re going to have to get the head of this beast.” Vio Marconi locked a full mag into an M4.
“We’ll get the head tonight.” Nick slid his arms back into his suit jacket. The Kevlar vest beneath it compromised the look somewhat. Nick, Vio, Ed Alberici, Donnie, Angie, and Trey stood behind Nick’s Navigator, illuminated by the lights of Vio’s Land Rover. The Navigator’s hatch was open, and enough firepower for a small war was arrayed in the back.
“No, Nick. Oleksander isn’t the head.” Vio wasn’t wearing a custom suit as his battle armor. He wore black jeans and a black sweater, accessorized with a Kevlar vest.
Nick froze in the act of reaching for an M4 of his own. “What do you mean?”
“The father is running things from their mother country, and they’re much more powerful there. We can get this head, but the Bondaruks are a hydra. He’ll just send someone else to run this operation. He has something like ten sons, and more nephews than that.”
Nick spun and faced Donnie. “Why didn’t I know this?”
“I’m sorry, Nick. It’s not intel our guys have found.”
Trey watched Nick’s eyes flash anger while the rest of his face remained calm. He stared at his underboss, who returned the look without a flinch. Then Nick turned back to Don Marconi. “Thank you, Vio, for sharing.”
Vio slapped Nick’s arm. “We’re together in this, yes? Fratelli?
“Sì, fratelli.”
“Then we’ll take these bastards down now, cripple the monster, and we’ll be ready when another head pops up. Italians have always held New England, and we always will.”
While the dons talked about brotherhood and made their speeches, Trey was about to go out of his mind. They’d found the Bondaruks’ fucking wetwork shop, and they were standing here, half a mile away, not moving nearly fast enough.
Angie came up to Trey and took the M4 out of his hands. He checked the load. Trey snatched the rifle back. “I know how to handle a gun, Ange. Fuck off.”
“Easy, kid. You’ve never gone into something like this, so keep your dick in your pants here.” Angie checked the fit of his vest, too. Trey felt like a kid being sent off to his first day of school.
“I’m not going to fuck up. They have Lara.” They were sure of that now— they knew that Lara had been to her doctor’s appointment, and that was the last anyone had heard of her or her father. Calvin hadn’t found anything to suggest an accident or illness, but he had caught a traffic camera image of Bohdan Bondaruk driving a battered white parcel van out of Providence. Then he’d taken the few clues they’d discovered in the book and located the property they meant to ambush now.
Five hours had passed since Nick had called Trey to ask if he’d heard from Lara. Eight hours since anyone had heard from her or her father. More than sixteen since he’d seen her. Trey’s body felt full of rats, scrabbling and chewing through his muscles and veins.
“That’s exactly why you will fuck up. They’ve got your girl. Trust me, that’s when you make the worst mistakes, when somebody you love is getting hurt. So listen up: whatever you see in here, whatever is going on, you take a good full breath before you do anything. Follow our lead, no matter what. We’ve all been through this before. Trust Nick. Trust us. Don’t fuck up.”
“He’s right, Trey,” Nick said. “You must stay calm, and it will be the last thing you feel capable of. Eyes on me. We’ll get her out.”
“Then let’s get her the fuck out.”
~oOo~
She wasn’t there. Trey didn’t know what to feel—was she safe? Or had they killed her?
The ten men of the Marconi and Pagano families on this mission had crept to the boarded-up auto-body shop in northeastern Connecticut. Angie and Tony had gone out front and killed the two guards on the building. Then they’d all gone straight through the front door.
Inside, Bohdan Bondaruk and three associates stood in an unstructured arc around Frederick Dumas, who was chained over an apparatus that looked like the roller of a steamroller. Trey had some experience with heavy equipment, after several summers working with his uncles at the construction company, and he thought it might in fact have been the roller of a steamroller, converted into a torture device. Frederick was stretched on his back over it, his arms and legs chained. He wore only his pants. His paunchy, hairy torso glistened with running sweat and blood. Blood, sweat, and urine soaked his khakis. His face was a swollen, bloody, mangled mess. He was out cold.
Oleksander Bondaruk was half-sitting on a low workbench, with his arms crossed cavalierly over his chest.
But Lara was not in this room. Where the fuck was she?
Trey saw all of that in a frozen second before the Bondaruks understood they’d been infiltrated. Then, the world became a riot of sound and motion. Shouting and gunfire, running and diving. Trey tried to lift his own gun, but he couldn’t move. His eyes still sought Lara and didn’t seem to care about the rest of it. All he could think of was Lara. Everything else was nothing but static.
“TREY!” Angie tackled him and drove him to the broken concrete floor, behind a row of rusty drums. “Stay down, stronzo!” He leapt up and continued shooting.
The chaos lasted a minute or two, or an hour; it all felt the same. Then it was quiet. It wasn’t until he sat up that Trey fully realized how badly he’d choked. Bullet casings littered
the floor. Blood pooled around the bodies of all five Bondaruks. Tony Cioccolanti was down, a leg of his jeans sopping blood. Two Marconi men were down as well, but they were moving.
Frederick Dumas was still on the roller, but now his chest ran with fresh blood. He’d taken a hit.
And Trey hadn’t even aimed his fucking gun.
Nick crouched before him, his face smeared with sweat and blood. He grabbed Trey by the collar and stared hard at him. His forehead was creased with angry concern. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah”—the word got caught at the back of his throat and only a croak made it out, so he tried again. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
Nick slapped him across the face. He put his back into it, and Trey’s bell was good and rung. He half thought his whole head would come off his shoulders.
But he knew that he couldn’t show pain, especially not now, when he’d fucked up so bad. Everybody knew that Nick Pagano, at the tender age of fifteen, had beaten his own father nearly to death, on the orders of Uncle Ben. The beating had been, for Nick’s father, a punishment for beating his wife and Nick. For Nick, it had been his initiation. He had earned his reputation for a cool head, an iron heart, and brutal hands before he’d been old enough to drive.
And Trey, at the age of twenty-six, after three years at Nick’s side, had just shat the bed. Nick’s ‘Golden Boy,’ they called him. The one Nick meant to start a civil war for the right to make.
Leaving his cheek to throb, Trey turned his head back and faced his don.
The fury in those infamous eyes was hot enough to singe. “You could have gotten your ass killed and left me to carry your body home to your father and mother. You put every one of us at risk, standing there like a fucking statue while bullets were flying. If you don’t have the balls to face action like this, what the fuck are you doing here? This is not a game, nephew. This is not a fucking movie.”
Simple Faith (The Pagano Brothers Book 1) Page 26