Escape, Dead End

by David Antocci

  “Is Rosso OK?” one of them said.

  “Yeah,” Donny answered quickly. “I got here before she got to him...” he thought a moment. “Good thing I got there when I did. He’s sleeping now. You know, the cancer, his heart... the old guy doesn’t have long. Doesn’t take much to wear him out.”

  They all nodded somberly at the mention of Rosso’s decline.

  Donny wanted to get them out of the house as quickly as possible before they had a chance to poke holes in his hastily thrown together story. Grabbing Abby by the arm he quickly lead them out the front door and to the car the other men had just arrived in. Donny pushed Abby into the back seat, and one of the other men took a seat next to her. He looked at the other three, “I don’t think we’ll all fit.”

  “No problem,” one of the guys said. “Me and Billy will stay here. You go help Donny take care of this.”

  “What the hell?” Billy said. “I called it. I wanted to fuck her.”

  “Fine,” the first one said. “You go. Jerry, get back here. We’ve got to clean up this mess.”

  Too bad for Billy, Abby thought. He and the driver were just going to get hurt.

  The two men watched as the car drove away, and then walked into the grand home, past the bodies in the library and out to the patio where they were taken aback by the men laid out on the ground, blood smeared near a couple of them closest to the kitchen door.

  “Son of a bitch,” was all he could say.

  “What the fuck do we do with all them?” Jerry said aloud.

  “This is too many to bury out back.”

  “We can’t just bury ‘em. These guys got families. They need fuckin’ funerals.”

  “I think we gotta talk to the old man.”

  “Donny said he’s sleepin’.”

  Jerry rolled his eyes. “Well, let’s just wake him the fuck up for a minute to find out what he wants to do with the dead bodies bleedin’ all over his friggin’ house.”

  As they walked upstairs, the other was thinking. Finally, he said, “Hey, I didn’t see Monte. You think he’s OK somewhere?”

  “You know,” Jerry said, “I didn’t see Franco or Mikey neither.”

  They stood at Rosso’s door, knocking, but got no answer.

  “You open it.”

  “No, you.”

  “Fine, we’ll open it together.”

  On the count of three, they opened the door and took in the macabre scene before them. Monte was laid out, surrounded by a giant pool of blood. Franco lay in a crumpled heap, a good portion of his skull missing. Mikey’s legs were arranged in two entirely opposite directions. Worst of all, Rosso lay still on the bed, slack-jawed, his silent heart monitor showing a distinct green flat line.

  Suddenly, the room lit up with blue and red strobes, and the two men ran to the window to see no less than a half-dozen police cars pouring through the front gate.

  The two spoke in unison as they reached for their phones. “Oh, shit.”

  ***

  Donny, Abby, and their two mobster companions were about ten minutes from the house on a long, deserted, wooded road heading toward a landfill owned by one of Rosso’s shell corporations, which happened to have the sanitation contract with the city.

  Donny rode shotgun, Billy sat in the backseat behind Donny and next to Abby, who was behind the driver.

  It was a precarious situation at best. Billy kept reaching over to stroke Abby’s thigh, which she objected to, and Donny piped up and told him to keep his hands to himself. Then Billy’s phone ring.

  “Yeah?” Billy said, answering it.

  He was silent for a few moments, listening, which made Donny nervous.

  “What? Cops?” Billy nervously glanced forward at Donny for a split second.

  Both Donny and Abby had the same thought at the same time.

  “Alright, I’ll talk to you later. Keep your fuckin’ mouth shut, got it?” Billy hung up the phone and casually reached into his pocket, produced his gun, and pointed it at Donny. “What the fuck is goin’ on?”

  “What the hell, Billy!” Donny feigned surprise.

  “Mike says Monte’s dead, so’s the old...”

  That’s as far as he got before Abby smashed the crown of her head into his left temple. The sudden impact struck Billy’s brain against the side of his skull, knocking him out.

  It happened so quickly that the driver was taken by complete surprise and fumbled for his gun.

  In a move that Abby had mastered over the years, she looped her bound hands under her backside and feet, to be in front of her, and reached forward strangling the driver with the rope that bound her hands.

  He forgot about the gun and the wheel and reached up, clawing at her arms trying to get himself free. Abby pushed her feet against the back of the seat, lifting herself up and applying all of her one-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame against his throat.

  “Stop the car!” she screamed. “Stop the car!”

  It was about thirty seconds of complete shock before Donny fully appreciated what was happening and jumped in to lend a literal hand. He grabbed onto the steering wheel and tried to keep the car from careening off into the trees. It didn’t help that the driver was practically standing, his foot fully depressing the accelerator, as he tried to free himself from Abby’s grasp.

  “Stop the car!” Abby continued to scream.

  “I can’t. I’ve just got the wheel!” Donny shot back.

  “Not you, the driver! Stop the fucking car!”

  Billy came to in the backseat and took in the scene. It took a moment before he realized what was going on, but he couldn’t find his gun. He reached forward, grabbing Donny around the neck. Abby didn’t let this go on more than a second before she shifted herself and kicked him in the ribs with the hard heel of her right boot, breaking one rib instantly. Billy screamed and let go of Donny to grab his side.

  Donny reached for the wheel again, but it was too late as the car finally jumped off the side of the road and crashed into a hundred-year-old maple. The driver had buckled in, but the airbag had exploded in his face, leaving him unconscious. Either that or it was the lack of oxygen from Abby’s rope around his neck. Either way he appeared to still be breathing and would probably be fine.

  Billy wasn’t so lucky. He wasn’t buckled and smashed into the front seat headfirst.

  Donny shook his head to clear the cobwebs. “Abby, you OK?”

  Her answer came in the form of a grunt.

  “Hold on,” he said as he stumbled from the car. Having whacked his knee on the glove box, he was limping a bit. He made his way to the rear of the car, where he helped Abby get out. He looked her up and down. “You alright?”

  She nodded her head. “Yeah, I’m OK.” She walked a few steps forward and looked in through the broken window on the driver’s door. He wasn’t moving. She placed her fingers on his artery to make sure there was a pulse. Satisfied that he would live, she looked into the backseat. “What about Billy-boy back there?”

  Donny didn’t even need to go back to look—he could hear him moaning. “He’s hurt, that’s for sure.”

  “Come on,” Abby said. “We’ve got to get away from here.”

  Donny blinked, trying to clear his mind, and looked into her eyes. He was hard-pressed to catch up with what was going on. Abby had been dead for nearly a year, but now here she was in the flesh ordering him around. She was right about one thing: he helped her get away from Rosso’s, and the men back at the house had obviously figured that out. “Alright, follow me.”

  They took off running down the road, staying close to the tree line so they could duck for cover if another car came along.

  11

  A HALF-MILE DOWN THE ROAD, Donny and Abby ducked into the trees, where he led them through a path and into a large, open, unlit area. The moon wasn’t very bright, but he seemed to know the way. Abby followed him to a metal building, where he entered a code into the keypad. They entered, and Donny hit the lights, the flickering fluorescent
bulbs lighting up a shabby office with faded green walls.

  “Where are we?”

  “The landfill.” He looked around and found a large first aid kit tucked away under a bunch of junk and a half-dead potted plant on top of an aging, gray metal file cabinet. “Sit down,” he said, indicating an old office chair.

  Abby did sit, happily. She had been running on pure adrenaline for the past twenty-four hours, ever since she got the call Ava had been taken. It was starting to wear off, and she was hitting the wall.

  She had various cuts and scrapes and a particularly nasty graze above her right eyebrow, probably from the car accident. It all happened pretty fast, but she seemed to remember hitting her face on the seat in front of her.

  They sat silent while Donny cleaned her up with rubbing alcohol and gauze. There was so much to say, and so many questions, that neither knew where to start.

  Donny finally broke the silence. “We shouldn’t stay here long. This is where we were heading in the first place. The men back at the house know that. There could be some guys on their way here right now. The sooner we get out, the better.”

  Abby nodded her head. “I thought you were getting out of all this. After you helped me get away from Bryce, you said you were going to get out yourself.”

  “I thought you were dead,” he said, looking at her. “It’s kinda like seeing a ghost.”

  Looking into his eyes, she smiled—truly smiled—for the first time in months.

  He finished up, her cuts and scrapes cleaned, and packed the first aid kit away. “So... what the hell is going on Abby? What happened back at the house?”

  “I’m after Bryce. I figured Rosso would know where he is. So, I knocked on the door... loudly.”

  Donny shook his head, almost chuckling at her casualness. “I knew you changed on Trial Island. I could tell just watching you. I remember saying, ‘I’m looking at Abby, but that’s not Abby.’ The way you carry yourself now... and you carry a gun? Where was this badass two years ago when I had to all but tie you up and throw you in a trunk to get you to leave Bryce?”

  “I guess I found myself.”

  “You’re damned right you found yourself. You just single-handedly took down the biggest crime family in the Midwest.”

  “He took Ava,” she said. “That was all the motivation I needed.”

  “Bryce took her?”

  “Yes. I’m sure of it. I’ve been trying to track him down for the last ten months, but haven’t had any luck. The investigator is one of the best, but even he couldn’t get anything. The family is locked up tight. But I knew Rosso would know, so I went straight to the source.”

  “I heard a rumor that he was still alive, but never saw him or anything. Just rumors. So what did Rosso say?”

  “Not much,” Abby said. “He was experiencing severe cardiac arrest at the time. The only thing I got was that Bryce is laundering money somewhere upstate.”

  “He just told you this?”

  “He took some convincing,” Abby conceded.

  “You really are on a rampage, beating information out of a sick, old man. I guess I would be, too, if he put a hit on me.”

  “I didn’t beat him. I had some information he wanted, so it was an exchange, so to speak. And he didn’t put a hit on me. That was a cover story. It was Bryce who attacked us on my sister’s lawn last year and,” she made air quotes, “killed me.”

  Donny was still getting over his shock. “It was a pretty convincing story. You were about the only thing in the news for weeks. When it came out that you were a mob wife, the media spent most of the summer running ‘Where’s Abby’ pieces. When you turned up dead on your sister’s lawn at the hands of a mob hitman, everything just blew up.”

  “I know,” Abby said. “I’m alive, remember? I watched it myself. Kind of surreal, actually.” Abby shifted gears, uncomfortably glancing out the window, unable to see anything in the darkness beyond. “We should get out of here.”

  Donny looked at the clock. They had been there about fifteen minutes, and he figured they were essentially living on borrowed time at this point. “You’re right, let’s go.”

  Abby picked out a set of keys hanging by the door labeled for one of the pickup trucks parked on the side of the building, Donny shook his head. “No, that road we came down is the one way in and out of here, and this landfill is the only thing down here. If anyone comes looking for us, they’ll be coming down that road.”

  “I guess we’re on foot then,” Abby said as she hit the lights.

  As soon as she did, the unmistakable glow of headlights bouncing in the distance dimly illuminated the office through the front windows.

  “Come on, through the back door.” Donny grabbed her arm, and they raced out the back, careful to keep the building between themselves and the car coming into the complex as they made short work of the distance to the tree line.

  Once they were in the trees, Abby pulled her night-vision monocular from her belt to look back toward the office building a few hundred yards away. All the lights were off, but she was able to see a couple of men walking around the building. One of them found the back door ajar and called another one over. Abby smiled for a moment as they bravely flung the door open and shot blindly into the space, hitting nothing but old office furniture.

  “What’s going on?” Donny asked even though the sound of gunfire made it clear.

  “They’re looking for us in the building,” Abby said.

  “They must have seen the lights on inside before we shut them off. It won’t be long before they figure out we’re not in there and come looking for us. We should go.”

  “You’re right,” Abby said, taking a last look at the men.

  Just before she took the monocular from her eye, they must have figured out that the building was empty because someone inside hit the switch for the outdoor floodlights, lighting up the area around the building like Times Square.

  “Son of a bitch,” Abby cursed, ripping the monocular from her eye and rubbing it. The sudden burst of light had blinded her momentarily in the right eye.

  “You OK?” Donny said, catching her as she stumbled a bit.

  “Yeah, just glad these aren’t binoculars, or I wouldn’t be able to see through either eye right now.” She blinked her eye purposefully. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Good,” he said, looking past her, “because they’re searching the yard for us, so let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Donny held onto Abby’s hand to help guide her as they ran through the trees. It only took a couple of minutes for her to see straight again, but she was enjoying the closeness with Donny she hadn’t felt with another person in a very long time. She held tightly onto his hand as they dashed toward safety.

  ***

  As they came out the other side of the woods surrounding the landfill, Donny got his bearings and said they should go right. He knew of an auto repair business not far down the road. It was an old-school garage that patched tires, did oil changes, and got fifteen-year-old clunkers running again on the cheap. Nothing fancy.

  As Donny suspected, it only took them three tries to find an older, beat-up, American-made pile of garbage with the key left under the mat. With that, the pair set off to get out of suburbia and back to the city where they could blend in and figure out their next move.

  “How long is the ride?” Abby asked.

  “During rush hour­—close to an hour and a half. Right now, with no traffic and going the speed limit so we don’t get pulled over in a hot car, probably forty minutes or so.” He looked over at her. “You look beat. Why don’t you close your eyes?”

  “Thanks, I might,” Abby said, watching him watch the road.

  Donny stayed quiet for a little over five minutes, hoping she might sleep, but when it was clear she was still awake, he asked, “So what’s next?”

  “I’ve got to get my hands on a phone,” Abby said. “Rosso’s information doesn’t do me much good, but I’m hoping it makes sense to the in
vestigator looking for Bryce.”

  “Well, here.” Donny fished the phone from his pocket.

  “No, I can’t risk the call getting traced back to you. I’ll get a burner in the city.”

  Donny said nothing, but the puzzled look on his face told Abby he didn’t understand.

  “A disposable phone,” Abby said. “J... um, my investigator, calls them that. The cheap, pre-paid ones you use and then burn them, usually by snapping the SIM card and throwing it in the garbage so that it can’t be traced back to anyone. I’ll buy a couple at some random convenience store once we’re in the city.”

  Donny shook his head, amazed at the transformed woman sitting next to him.

  They rode in silence for a couple more minutes until Abby broke it. “Why didn’t you get out?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “That’s a lie,” Abby said. “We were in L.A. You had all your fake ID’s, cash, and everything you needed to walk away. You were the last person I expected to run into at Rosso’s place.”

  He sighed. “Alright. Well, I know I never said it, but you had to know how I felt about you.”

  He looked at her, and their eyes met.

  “Of course I knew, but I also knew you’d be dead if either of us acted on it.”

  “I still cared about you. I still...”

  “No,” she said sharply. “We cannot. If you need to, pull the car over and let me out now, but I’ve got shit to get done Donny.”

  He almost chuckled. “You can’t tell me you didn’t feel the same way. You kissed me back after we signed the Trial Island papers.”

  She allowed herself a small smile. “It was just for appearances. You were pretending to be my husband. How would it have looked if I didn’t give you a proper kiss goodbye?”

  He smiled back. “Alright, that’s bullshit.” He thought a minute. “Anyway, forget about it. I’m not sayin’ I love you, or we need to pick up where we left off. You wanna know the truth? I’m kinda pissed off.”

  “Good,” Abby said, trying to be cold.

  “I mean, the hoops I went through to get you and Ava out, and now you’re right back here? What the fuck!”