Blood and Fire

by McKenna, Shannon

  He began to circle her, constantly moving. It made her dizzy, the camera’s eye constantly swirling around her, Hobart’s blank gaze above.

  “As to that,” King said. “Well, you see, I’ve gambled a great deal of money and manpower on the hope that Bruno Ranieri actually does give a damn about you.” His smiled widened, dimples deepening. So, Lily. Think long and hard before you answer. Does he care?”

  Weird, how such a boring, neutral suburban house with a welltrimmed yard and manicured hedges could somehow still be so ugly.

  Bruno stared at the front of the house of Giuseppina Ranieri, his maternal grandmother. It was risky, and rude, to come at her with no advance phone warning, but he’d decided that it was riskier to call first. Give her time to organize herself and stonewall him just for spite. Grandma Pina was one of the most dislikeable people he’d ever met. Outside of the maniacs trying to kill him. One thing about psycho killers—they put the gardenvariety assholes starkly into perspective.

  “So? Shall we come along? Hold your hand? Is she that scary?”

  It was Sean, jibing at him, but the jibes had lost their edge. The guy was just trying to rile him up, rev his engine so he could move.

  It wasn’t working, sadly. He was dog tired. Shit scared.

  Get going. He’d faced bullets, knives, clubs, bombs, and fists. He could face down Grandma Pina.

  “Be quick,” Kev said. “We can’t be late to the airport. Or we could pick up Zia Rosa and bring her back, and you can do the family reunion adventure with her. Would you rather have reinforcements?”

  He recoiled at the thought. “No. You cannot imagine how much those two women hate each other. What was Zia thinking to fly out to Newark right now?”

  “‘Thinking’ isn’t the appropriate word for what happens in Zia Rosa’s head,” Kev said. “Wish someone had stopped her, though.”

  “She called a cab and sneaked out,” Sean reminded them. “Not their fault. Nobody knew they were supposed to duct tape her to a chair. Sveti said she was freaked after Petrie showed her the photos of your, ah . . .” He paused, delicately. “Alleged siblings. I can see how that would be nerve-wracking. Since they, uh . . . look like you and all.”

  Bruno shuddered. “I’ll talk to Grandma Pina now, and get it over with. Then we pick up Zia. You two stay here. You’d scare her.”

  “And you won’t?” Kev pointed out wryly.

  Bruno glanced into the rearview mirror and looked away quickly. It was true. He looked like eight different kinds of shit. Vampire pale, eyes bloodshot, six-day stubble. Palpable desperation oozing out of his pores. And a dangerously long interval had passed since his last shower.

  He marched up the walkway. Lily was in trouble. Personal hygiene could wait. But it was unfortunate to walk up to Grandma Pina’s door looking like a desperado. She was not the type to see through to a guy’s inner beauty.

  He rang the bell, a hollow ding-dong. Several seconds passed and the door jerked open a couple of inches, blocked by the security chain.

  Grandma Pina glared at him from the narrow slit. There was no recognition in her gaze. “What do you want?”

  He knew better than to smile. “Hi, Grandma Pina. It’s me, Bruno.”

  Her face froze, eyes widened for a moment before they squinched tight again. Her chin thrust forward. “I don’t believe you!”

  He shrugged. “It’s me,” he said again. “Why would anyone lie about being me?” Or voluntarily claim you as a relative?

  Seeing her face gave him a queasy feeling. Pina Ranieri had been a beauty in her youth, when se’d been courted by and married to Rosa and Tony’s oldest brother, Domenico. Her daughter had resembled her, but what he saw now was a chilling glimpse of how his mother would have aged if she’d taken a wrong turn in life early on and focused on nothing but how the world had let her down.

  Not that Mamma had any chance to take a wrong turn. The world really had let her down, in the worst possible way. She’d reached the end of the line at the age of thirty-two. Which, coincidentally, was the milestone he would hit on his own next birthday. Huh. That fun fact hadn’t occurred to him until now.

  All thanks to Grandma Pina. He looked at the disappointment and anger etched on her face, furrowing her brow, pinching her nostrils, puckering her mouth. So like his mother’s, and yet so horribly unlike her.

  “You’ve grown,” she said, still suspiciously.

  “It happens,” he said. “I was twelve last time you saw me. At Mamma’s funeral.” Not that you saw me often. Never if I saw you first.

  “Don’t you give me any of that back talk,” she warned, as if she’d heard his smart-ass thoughts.

  He squelched a snotty reply. “May I come in?”

  “What do you want?” she demanded, again.

  He bit his lip and tried again. “May I tell you about it inside?”

  She slammed the door. The chain rattled. The door opened.

  He walked past her into a house he barely remembered. Grandma Pina hadn’t invited him and Mamma to come there often. Bruno’s very existence was an irritation to her. A living reminder of her great disappointment in her daughter. Plus, he had tended to break things.

  The living room was crowded with puffy furniture covered with shiny, impermeable plastic wrap. A glass coffee table was covered with little crystal doodads and ceramic flower sculptures. Pictures of kittens, flowers, sunsets, and seascapes hung on the walls. Spic-and-span. Dead and embalmed.

  She gestured toward the couch with a martyred air.

  “No, I’ll stand,” he said. “This won’t take long. I just wanted to ask if you knew what happened to my mother’s stuff after she died.”

  She looked affronted. “Well, after all these years, I never had any idea that you’d ever want any of that garbage! I don’t know what you’re insinuating, but I certainly never—”

  “I wasn’t insinuating anything,” he hastened to say. “I just wondered if you had it, or knew who had disposed of it.”

  “Well, I went through it afterward. Packed up a few things that were mine to begin with, mind you, things that I wanted back! Most of it was trash. She didn’t have a pot to piss in. Pathetic.”

  He unclenched his fists and kept his voice even. “I’m looking for one thing in particular. Did you remember an antique jewelry box? It came from Grandpa’s side of the family. It was his mother’s, from the old country. Mamma had it, when I was a kid. About so big”—he indicated with his hands—“and covered with mother of pearl.”

  Grandma Pina’s shoulders jerked in an angry shrug. “I don’t remember it, but I suppose you can look through those boxes if you like. It’s not much to look through.”

  His heart sank. The box was memorable. If Grandma Pina hadn’t seen it, it probably wasn’t there. But he had to be sure.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’d appreciate that.”

  He sighed. “I’ll go down alone, if you like,” he offered. “Just tell me which boxes they are. Point them out from the top of the stairs.”

  Her lips tightened into a prissy arc. “No, I’ll show you.”

  He followed her down. The room was lit by a single hanging bulb, and stuffed with boxes. She led him through a corridor between chest- and shoulder-high stacks of God knew what and into a dark corner.

  There, on a raised wooden flat, was a pile of battered, dusty cardboard boxes. They were set apart from the others, a few feet of security distance around them, as if they were somehow contaminated.

  She jerked her chin toward them. “Be my guest.”

  “Thanks,” he murmured. His stomach fluttered nastily as he touched the packing tape on the topmost box. Grandma Pina just stood there, looking like a lemon was stuck in her esophagus.

  “You could just leave me here to go through these, if you have things to do,” he offered. “You don’t have to stay.”

  She sniffed. “Hardly.”

  Oh, whatever. He tore off the tape.

  Kitchen stuff. An espresso pot, cups,
pots and pans. Ceramic salt and pepper shakers that he had played with as a kid. A shepherd and a shepherdess. The shepherd’s crook and the flowers on the shepherdess’s bonnet had been broken off. His fault. A pasta strainer. Plates. He rummaged to the bottom, making sure there was no place the box could be hiding.

  Everything he touched made memories swirl up through his body. He tried to freeze them, hold them back, but the plastic plates, the juice glasses with Woody Woodpecker and Wile E. Coyote, the coffee cup Mamma had favored, all made his throat ache. The breakfasts with her. Cinnamon toast and cereal. Scrambled eggs. Teasing, laughter.

  Next came her clothes. Just as bad. That sweater, that blouse, that nightgown. Light, pouring into a room in his mind that had lain undisturbed for eighteen years. He remembered every piece. He didn’t know his own current wardrobe as well as he remembered hers.

  He held her purple nightgown to his face and breathed in for the scent of her perfume, but it was long gone. Just mildew now.

  “It was those trashy men she took up with.” Grandma Pina blurted out the words as if they were under pressure, like she’d been waiting eighteen years for someone to bitch to. “They were the ruin of her. Starting with your father and downhill from there.”

  That sparked his curiosity. “Did you know him? Who was he?”

  She harrumphed. “He was out of her life before you even started to show. So many things she gave up for you. All her prospects.”

  Bruno grabbed another box. Photo albums. He opened one. His baby pictures. Mamma holding a miniature Bruno, looking gorgeous and happy. He fogged right up. Closed the album, fast. Not now.

  He felt around with his leaky eyes closed to make sure nothing of jewelry box dimensions could be hidden there. Nothing.

  “I told her.” Grandma Pina’s voice quavered with anger. “I can’t remember how many times I told her that Rudy was dangerous trash, but she wouldn’t listen. Stupid girl. She deserved what she got.”

  Something in his voice made her step back. “Don’t threaten me.”

  “Don’t bad-mouth my mamma. If you want to stay while I look through these boxes, fine. Just keep your mouth shut.”

  He looked away. Let her glare and twitch if she wanted.

  He powered through the boxes, hope fading with each one. By the time he got to the last one, hope was gone. It was a catchall. Books, magazines, miscellany. Items he couldn’t imagine why his grandmother had packed. Even a few of his old action figures. Rudy’s little brass pipe, of all things, the one he’d used for smoking hash and crack. Envelopes, magazine subscriptions, utility bills, past-due notices. Stuff from collection agencies, threatening messages stamped in red. He felt the cardboard bottom. No jewelry box.

  He couldn’t start sobbing in front of Grandma Pina, but oh, God, he’d been hoping so hard for a break. “This is it?” The question was redundant, but it burst out of him anyway.

  “Everything. Maybe your box got thrown away with the trash.”

  He tried not to flinch. “You would have packed it if you’d seen it,” he said. “It was clear that it wasn’t garbage.”

  “Then it was stolen by your no-good neighbors. Or Rudy. He probably pawned it for drugs.”

  “Maybe.” He sat for a moment in a state of absolute despair. He wanted to sink down, become one with the chilly concrete. Just a dark grease spot. But desperation jerked him into action again. He leaned over that last box, rifling through it. There had to be something. Some clue, some opening. He yanked out the mail. Bills, credit card offers. Letters from the school guidance counselor about his bad attitude.

  Then his eye snagged on a thick envelope, which was not addressed to Magdalena Ranieri but to Anthony Ranieri. He peered at it in the dim light. It was from the county coroner’s office. “What’s this?”

  Grandma Pina squinted over her glasses. “Oh, that. The coroner’s report of your mother’s autopsy. Tony called them and requested one.”

  “He did?” His voice cracked a little. “Why?”

  Pina flapped her hand. “Some silly notion of wanting a record of every mark they left on her. So he’d know what to do to the people who killed her. You know how he carried on. So violent. But then he and that mentally deficient sister of his ended up running off back to Portland with you before the report even came back. They had some absurd idea that you were in danger. Ridiculous, both of them.”

  Yeah.” Bruno thought of Rudy and his switchblade. “Ridiculous.”

  “So, in the end, I had to deal with that.” She pointed at the envelope with a martyred air. “When I was trying so hard to forget.”

  “I don’t know,” Bruno said, staring at the envelope. “Looks like you did OK. With the forgetting part, I mean.”

  She drew herself up. “I was devastated! My only child!”

  “Yeah, yeah. So broken up, you never even opened it.”

  “How could I?” Tears trembled in her eyes. “How could I bear it?”

  He could see where Mamma had gotten her flair for dramatics, but that was all she’d gotten, thank God. The flair, but not the content.

  He ripped the envelope open, pulled out the sheaf of paper. He wasn’t sure why. But it seemed disrespectfult t Ranieri that this official catalog of her death wounds should go ignored for eighteen years. No one had cared enough to open the envelope.

  She had died from it. He could at least read it.

  It was hard going. Seeing it all laid out in that dispassionate, scientific way did not distance him at all. He couldn’t help but imagine the scene as it happened. See the blood. Hear the blows, the screams.

  He couldn’t help but imagine it happening right now, to Lily.

  He was about to shove the thing back into its envelope just to save what was left of his sanity, when something caught his eyes.

  . . . well-healed surgical incision over a resected left ovary . . .

  Resected left ovary? Weird. He read it again. Yeah. One of her ovaries was gone. And “well-healed surgical incision” indicated that it had been gone before her death by torture and beating.

  “Do you know anything about Mamma having an ovary removed?”

  She looked affronted by the question. “Excuse me?”

  He held up the report. “This says her left ovary was removed. Surgically. Why would they do that? Cysts, maybe, or a tumor?”

  “I never knew a thing,” she huffed. “Maybe she got a sex disease from one of her men. That kind of thing happens to women of her sort.”

  He should have known better than to ask her a reasonable question. She was like a backed-up sewer pipe. Spewing filth every time she opened her mouth.

  The phone rang upstairs. Grandma Pina turned her head, clearly torn between the desire to answer and the danger of leaving an unsupervised lowlife thug loose in her basement.

  “Go get your phone,” he urged. “I’m almost done. I’ll be good.”

  She sniffed again and scurried up the stairs. He was glad to see her go. His stress levels were high enough without her help.

  He lifted the autopsy report and read on.

  28

  Does he care?

  The question echoed in Lily’s head. Lily took a gulp of coffee. Lie.

  “No, he does

  n’t care about me,” she said. “It’s just sex.”

  Her contrary nature made the words pop out. They were immediately followed by knee-melting fear that she’d just signed her own death warrant. The slow, bloody, screaming kind.

  King just smiled. “Ah, Lily. That’s not true.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve known him for, what, a week? I was only physically with him for half that time. For all I know, he was already screwing other women. He’s a ladies’ man. He’d boff anything female with a pulse. And he’s attractive. Who could blame me?”

  “Oh, no one, my dear. Was he good?” King asked brightly.

  Lily paused, feeling for the trap. She wanted to spit on the floor and tell him to insert it straight up his nether orifice. But th
at did not jive with the not-caring persona. She gave them a bright, toothy smile.

  “Very good,” she said throatily. “Lots of stamina.”

  “Oh, really? A man can really give his all when he’s in love, eh?”

  She let out a cynical bark of laughter. “We had quite the mad affair. The guy talks a lot, but he never said ‘I love you.’ Not his style. He keeps things light. So don’t try to control him with me.”

  King threw his head back as he laughed, showing off his excellent dentition. “That’s good. I’m so glad you’ve been entertaining yourself.”

  “Oh, yeah, I was so entertained,” Lily said. “The gunshots and knives and explosions and all that, it really livened things up.”

  That set him off again. He chuckled until he wiped tears from his eyes. “Oh, that’s funny,” he murmured. “You are unique, Lily.”

  “I’m gratified that you’re so amused. I live to please. I don’t suppose you’d just tell me why you’re doing this. I have no beef with you, other than that you’ve been trying to kill me. So what is your problem?”

  King tilted back on two legs of his chair. “I’m afraid the simple answer will not satisfy you, my dear. Because it’s really not fair to you.”

  He paused with that annoying half smile. She clenched her teeth against the urge to beg him to go on.

  He finally gave in, probably to the hunger to hear his own voice. “It isn’t anything that you did, Lily, or anything you know. It’s more about who you are. Which is to say, Howard Parr’s daughter.”

  She’d known that already. She’d known it from the beginning, but even so, she felt the pieces fall into place with an iron clang of finality.

  “Why?” she whispered.

  “It was about what Howard knew, my dear. Which was far too much for my comfort.”

  “About Magda, you mean? How you murdered her?”

  He stared at her blankly and began to chuckle. “Well, now. You know even less than I thought. Howard never had a chance to confess, did he? Zoe stopped him just in time, bless her murderous heart.”