Blood and Fire

by McKenna, Shannon

  She held out a plump, imperious hand. “Lemme see.”

  Petrie shook the pictures into his hand and handed them to her.

  The first photo was of the stiff they’d found on Wygant Street, right after Ranieri’s fight. Rosa Ranieri stared down. Frozen.

  Petrie leaned forward and tapped it with his finger. “This is the guy that I mistook for Bruno. I’d seen Bruno’s photo, the one that’s displayed in the diner, that Portland Monthly magazine cover. I’m sincerely sorry about that mistake, but now that you see it, do you blame me?”

  She made no reply. She looked at the second photo, Aaro’s self-destructing barfly, and he heard her gulp. The pictures shook in her hand.

  Then the third guy, the youngest one. The one whose neck Ranieri had admitted to snapping in the course of the brawl outside the diner. The resemblance to Bruno was less, but it was still there.

  The other cadavers made no impression on her. She leafed through them without stopping and went back to the first three. The ones who shared genetic material with Bruno. Her silence told him what he needed to know. She was gray. Sweat had popped out on her brow. She breathed in shallow pants, patting her voluminous bosom.

  “Ms. Ranieri?” He knelt down next to her. “You OK?”

  “Madonna santissima,” she whispered. “These people . . . it’s not possible. These pictures are recent?”

  “Taken a few days ago. They’re awaiting identification in the Medical Examiner’s office. They died within hours of each other. You’ve never seen them?”

  She began to rock. He was getting nervous. The toddler squirmed in her arms and started to whimper. “I gotta go,” she muttered.

  “Go where?” he asked. “Back to Newark? Isn’t that where your niece Magda lived when Bruno was a kid? Is that where he went?”

  Her face sharpened, lips tightening. “No! You tricky son of a bitch, I ain’t tellin’ you nothin!”

  No problem, since she already had. “So you don’t know them?”

  Her eyes welled full of tears. “No,” she said, her voice froggy. “I don’t know these poor young people. Never seen ’em before in my life.”

  He studied her face as she said it. He’d listened to a lot of people lie. He was willing to bet that Rosa Ranieri wasn’t lying about this. She would be a loud, blustering liar. Not a crying type of liar. That was a different type of woman. He raised his voice to be heard over the baby’s fussing. “But you’ve seen people who looked like them?”

  Her eyes flashed, defiant. “So what if I have? It happens, right? It’s a coincidence. They say everyone has a double, right?”

  “My next question,” he said. “After having seen these, do you think there might be things you didn’t know about Bruno’s mother?”

  She recoiled. “No! Magda was a good girl! And these people are too young! She would never have . . . it’s not possible!”

  “You mean, not possible that these are her children, too?”

  Rosa Ranieri flapped her hand in denial, and the toddler started wailing in earnest. “She is dead! The only baby she ever had was Bruno, and she was a good mother! She died to save her son! She died a hero!”

  “I don’t doubt it, ma’am. But the DNA has been tested. The probability of these people and Bruno being full siblings is overwhelming. That’s not random.”

  She began to blink. “Take the baby,” she gasped, pushing the toddler toward him. “Call Sveti.” The photos scattered at her feet.

  “But I—but . . .” He held the yelling toddler out at arm’s length, dismayed, as Rosa Ranieri toppled sideways on the park bench. “Oh, fuck,” he muttered, looking around in desperation. The newborn in the baby carriage woke up and began its earpiercing squall.

  He spotted the bombshell, who was playing soccer with the two older kids, and bellowed at her. “Hey! Sveti! Help!”

  The girl named Sveti spun around and sprinted toward him, shrieking at the kids to follow her. He tried to soothe the kid he held, jiggle the baby carriage, and keep Rosa from rolling off the park bench and onto the muddy ground by trapping her on it with his thigh.

  “What did you do to her?” Sveti gasped, pounding toward him.

  He registered her faint, attractive accent while he fished for a coherent reply. “Ah, nothing. I’m Detective Petrie, of the Portland Police Bureau, and I—”

  “Give me that baby!” She snatched the screaming child out of his arms to his intense relief.

  “I was just asking her a few questions about—”

  “Eeeuuwww!” commented the boy, as he gathered up scattered photos that Rosa had let drop. “Are these people dead? They look dead!”

  The little girl craned to look at the photos fanned out like baseball cards in the kid’s grubby hand, and let out an ear-splitting shriek.

  Sveti gasped and jerked the photos out of the boy’s hand. “You show these to her?” She flapped them in his face, her voice quivering. “These horrible photo? You bastard! You are sick! You are sadist!”

  “Ah . . . but I . . . but I had to . . . she said she could—”

  “How could you? How dare you?” Her eyes blazed with fury. She an avenging goddess, the kind that would tear off a guy’s thnd use them for earrings. “Get away from her! Go!”

  “But, uh, don’t you need help with her? I could call a—”

  “You have done enough! Go!” She lunged, batting at him with the photos crumpled in her fist. “And take obscene pictures with you!”

  He grabbed the photos but resisted her shoving hand. “I can’t move,” he explained. “She’ll roll off the bench if I move my leg.”

  Sveti dropped to her knees, gently put the toddler on the ground, and tried to push Rosa back up to a sitting position. With no luck at all, that being a whole lot of woman to lift. He hastened to help her.

  The older woman’s eyes fluttered open with a pitiful moan. They fastened on him, squinting in dislike. “You? Still?” she said. “Get lost.”

  “Yes, do get lost,” Sveti urged. “Hurry. Go!”

  He dug for a card. “Let me leave you this. In case you want to—”

  Whack, Sveti batted his card away. “You take card and stick it right up into place you know very well!”

  “You mean, up his ass?” the little boy piped up, helpfully.

  “Zitto! No bad words!” Rosa Ranieri regained consciousness to hiss the reproof at the little boy, and promptly went slack again.

  Petrie felt a bizarre urge to laugh. He backed away, resisting the urge to get one last hungry gawk in at the exotic foreign Fury. He had what he needed. Time to split.

  Rosa Ranieri was the type who’d go nuts if she wasn’t in on the action. It took one to know one. And when she acted, he’d know.

  27

  Lily fought consciousness as long as she could, but light pressed her eyelids, and pain throbbed redly in her skull with each heartbeat.

  She took stock with h

  er other senses before opening her eyes. Still air. Chill. Artificial light. The bitter smell of antibacterial cleansing foams. A churning stomach. A desperate need to pee. She cracked her eyes open a slit. Her head pounded like hammer blows. She rolled to her side, tried to sit up. Had to stop halfway through, squeeze her eyes shut, clench her belly against the churning flop of nausea.

  She was in a small, windowless room, with metallic furnishings. A naked fluorescent bulb blazed down from the ceiling. She sat on a metal cot covered with a thin black plastic mattress pad. She wore a white cotton hospital gown, open in the back, bare butt hanging out. She shivered. Her jaw locked, twinging painfully with each shudder.

  There was a different color of paint over a spot on the wall that had been walled over, where the window had once been. Her clothes lay on a shelf. She poked them. They’d been cleaned. Bloodstains on the sleeve. Brownish shadows on the nubbly wool. No shoes, though.

  She herself seemed to have been cleaned, too. Her hair smelled like disinfectant. Ick. She shuddered to think of unfriendly hands touching he
r body while she was out cold.

  There was a tray on the shelf. A plastic-wrapped ham sandwich, a banana, a bottle of water, a packaged square of brownie. A napkin, a wet wipe, and a paper packet of Excedrin. So they planned to treat her drug hangover before they tore her limb from limb. How thoughtful.

  There was a camera mounted high in a corner of the room. No trouble taken to conceal it. t stared stonily down at her. She looked back, tempted to say something defiant to it, but she decided not to give them the satisfaction. She wasn’t a circus animal to entertain them.

  Bastards. Washing her clothes, giving her a brownie and headache medication? Twisted, sick bullshit. A proper dank, ratinfested, skeleton-strewn dungeon would be less offensive.

  There was a small bathroom attached to the room. She stepped inside, took note of the camera there. So they wanted to watch her pee.

  She took care of her business and dressed. Her arm was bandaged but still painful. The slash felt hot, and there were drops of old blood seeping through, and a halo of yellowish staining. Ugh. She peeked beneath. Huh. What do you know. Someone had stitched it.

  Two possibilities. One, they’d decided to keep her alive just to torture her with fear and uncertainty. Two, she’d died and gone to hell. This was what she got for all that bad attitude, all that mouthing off.

  There wasn’t a lot of difference between the two scenarios, when all was said and done.

  She stared at the tray of food. Hard to interpret whether her stomach was desperate for food or repelled by it. It hardly mattered. Calories might help. And whether it was torture or hellfire that awaited her, it was unlikely that they’d go to all this trouble just to poison her.

  She perched cross-legged on the cot and devoured everything on the tray, including the Excedrin. She put the wrapping and the tray back on the shelf and sat down on the cot again, cross-legged.

  She tried to keep her mind blank. There was nothing constructive she could think about. Thinking about Bruno hurt too much. He belonged to that other world, that fantasy universe that might have been able to exist, if she’d rolled the right dice. But she hadn’t.

  Tough shit. Here she was, here she’d stay. She stared at the wall, keeping her eyes open, flooded with light, as if it could overexpose her brain like camera film, wash it pale and blank. No thoughts, no feelings.

  Time passed. The throb in her head eased down. Her inflamed arm felt hot. Her belly grumbled for more food. She couldn’t stop her teeth from chattering.

  Dignity. Calm. Equanimity. This was probably it. She’d try not to snivel or whine. She’d had a good run. She’d bet money that she’d given them more trouble than they’d ever expected. It was the thing in her life so far that she was most proud of.

  She thought of the drawing of her mother, and then of that sunset-tinged view of forever with Bruno, and her heart caught, twisted—

  Not good. Chilly and detached. Blank was better.

  She didn’t have that long to wait. It was a half an hour or so before the door lock clicked and the door opened.

  It was the fake nurse in jeans and a Columbia sweatshirt, dark hair pulled back into a high, bouncing ponytail. Fresh-faced, wholesome. A girl from the varsity volleyball team. The furthest thing from a scheming kidnapper/killer that Lily could imagine.

  She forced old air out of her lungs. Oxygen, for the brain cells. She repeated her mantra. Dignity. Calm. Equanimity. She waited for the other woman to speak first, leaning on the impulse to babble, to beg.

  The bitch looked delighted with herself. Her dark eyes sparkled. She held up a steaming paper cup. “We thought you’d like some coffee,” she said. “Just how you like it. Dark roast, no sugar, real cream.”

  Saliva practicallyuntained from her salivary glands. “How do you know how I take my coffee?” Her voice was a fuzzy croak.

  “We know everything. Here, take it. It’ll make you feel better.”

  Lily stared at the rising steam, trying to gauge how many notches of dignity, calm, and equanimity she might lose by accepting. She concluded that any loss of points would be offset by the advantage of caffeine. She had to choke back the urge to thank that scheming fiend, just for a lousy cup of coffee. She drank it without looking at the woman, who was probably primed for a barrage of questions.

  But Lily had already decided that there was no point in asking. They would tell her what this was about, or not. The less noise she made, the better. When the cup was empty, she placed it on the tray with the wrappings and laced her fingers together.

  The girl got impatient with the silence. “Come with me.”

  Lily ran that hypothetical action through the dignity-calmequanimity algorithm, but the woman let out an irritated sound before the results could crunch. “Come with me, or I will physically compel you,” she said. “I have black belts in eight martial arts disciplines.”

  “Tell me where I’m going,” Lily said.

  The woman’s ponytail bounced as she tossed her head. “King wants to talk to you,” she said. “What King wants, he gets.” Her blue eyes dilated almost to black when she spoke the name.

  “So King is the name of the guy doing this to me?”

  “Come with me and find out,” the woman said. “If you don’t come willingly, you’ll still find out, but it’ll be more painful. As in dislocated joints, torn cartilage, snapped bones, missing teeth, broken nose, internal bleeding. Have I made myself clear?”

  Data churned through the algorithm. Up she went, on her feet. The lure of information plus the avoidance of pain was a winning combination. The wooden floor was cold and smooth against her bare feet. Funny, how small and docile being barefoot made one feel. She supposed she should be glad they’d left her any clothes at all.

  Pad, pad, pad. She tried to pretend her knees weren’t knocking and her bowels churning. The food she’d eaten was threatening to make a surprise reappearance. Not good. Stress urping was not dignified.

  She willed her spasming stomach to calm down, focusing on the squeaking athletic shoes of the ponytailed ninja bitch. The corridor was long and hardly lit at all. Light filtered in from each end. It looked like the corridor in an old apartment building or hotel.

  They stopped and she was shoved into a doorway, into a large room, also white and windowless. A table against the far wall. A single chair, sitting under a horribly bright light. An interrogation room.

  Two men. One was on his feet, the young one who had helped kidnap her from Rosaline Creek.

  The other was an older man, one she’d never seen before. Even when he was seated, she could tell he was tall and well built. He was handsome, his perfectly styled hair discreetly graying at the temples. He had the patrician good looks of a powerful politician—or rather, an aging A-list actor who played powerful politicians. Real politicians didn’t have time for this much grooming. This guy had gotten himself ironed a couple of times. His tan was too smooth, his jaw too taut. He smiled, activating deep, charming dimples. His teeth were unnaturally white.

  “Ah, Lily. Finally you’ve joined us.” His smile was jovial. “Please, sit down.” He gestured toward the chair in the middle of the bleak room with the air of a kindly host seating her on a cozy sofa. “Hobart, are you ready with the videos? You look pale, my dear. Melanie, get Lily another coffee.” He turned to her, brow creased in concern. “This time two sugars, I think. I know you don’t take sugar, but indulge me—you look like your blood sugar is a little low. After all, you’ve been unconscious for close to three days. Sleeping beauty!”

  Melanie shoved her down into the chair. “Indulge you?” Lily repeated. “Don’t play bullshit games with me, you psychopath—ow!”

  Her voice choked into a squeak as the woman he’d called Melanie twisted her arm up with a jerk that pulled her onto her feet, every nerve in the twisted arm screaming with agony—

  “Melanie, that will do,” the guy said in a tone of mild reproof.

  Lily’s butt reconnected hard with the chair. She wheezed with pain, feeling her
shoulder. Surprised it was still attached at all.

  “Melanie? The coffee?” the man reminded her.

  The ferocious glow in Melanie’s blank eyes damped down, like someone had thrown the off switch of a machine. She trotted to the corner, where a large coffee carafe sat. Crazed assassin, morphing instantly into perky waitress. It was chilling to watch.

  “You have to excuse Melanie,” the man said. “She’s passionately loyal to me. All of my people are. They can’t help themselves.”

  “Melanie?” she croaked. “And Hobart. So those are their names.”

  The man waved his hand dismissively. “In a manner of speaking. Their names are not registered on any official document. Their names are whatever is convenient to me. Their defining identity is that they . . . are . . . mine.” His toothy smile spread wide, beaming.

  Lily stared at the man. New depths of dismay yawned inside her.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “This is worse than I thought. You are totally batshit, aren’t you? All of you guys are.”

  Hobart lunged for her this time. She fell off the chair in her effort to scramble out of range.

  “Back.” King’s command stopped the younger man as if he were a voice-activated robot. “Really,” he chided his minions. “Don’t take what Lily says so personally. She’s been under terrible stress. And she is soon to be under a great deal more. A little empathy, people.”

  That speech went down Lily’s craw like strychnine-laced Kool-Aid. She struggled up to her feet, sat carefully in the chair. Melanie handed her another cup. Lily sipped. Nauseatingly sweet. It made her cough.

  It burst out, uncontrollable. “What did you mean by that? About that stress that I’m going to be under?” She hated herself for the weakness that prompted her to ask. More so when King chuckled.

  “Hobart, are you filming this with the handheld as well as the fixed vidcam?” he asked, silkily. “I don’t want to miss an instant.”

  The guy leaped to obey, and Lily took note of the two video cameras mounted on tripods, which watched her from diagonal corners of the room. Hobart himself held a third in his hand.