by Jeff Carson
Wolf continued onward, cautiously looked around the corner, and then lowered his gun and walked out.
There were no employees, only customers now clumped at the door, pushing hard against one another to get out. A woman looked at Wolf and screamed. The sudden appearance of a man with a gun, drenched in blood, with a gun-toting woman behind him, sent the crowd into a heightened frenzy, desperately groping for escape.
Wolf went to the stereo on the wall and turned down the music.
The pub door slammed shut, and they were now in relative silence. Wolf watched the commotion retreat outside, then took a look at himself in the mirror behind the bar. His face and chest below were bathed in bright red.
He put his gun down, grabbed a wet bleach towel from the back bar sink and wiped his face, digging into the crevices of his eyes, blowing his nose. He threw the towel in the sink and got another one, repeating the process.
“Lascia! Lascia!” a voice boomed from a few feet away.
Wolf turned just as a pistol clanked on the floor next to his foot.
Lia stood frozen, staring at a Beretta pointed at her from the other side of the bar. She had her hands up in a simultaneous defenseless and what-the-hell gesture.
“What are you two doing here?” Rossi said, shifting the Beretta to Wolf. “You’re wanted for murder, Mr. Wolf. Tenente Parente, what are you doing? Are you helping him right now? What is going on?”
Wolf shook his head. “You going to play that angle, Rossi?”
“Get your hands in the air and come out here!” Rossi waved the gun at Wolf. “Now!”
“I know the truth about your father,” Lia said quietly.
Rossi gave a quick dismissive look to Lia. “Come out, Sergeant Wolf. Now.”
Wolf looked over at Lia. Her eyes were wet and her lower lip was quivering.
Rossi thrust his gun at her and shouted in Italian.
She shook her head. “He never left you an inheritance,” she continued in English for Wolf’s benefit. “Paulo just told me your dad was killed twenty-five years ago in Sicily. He checked thoroughly. You’ve been lying this whole time?”
Rossi shouted in Italian again; this time, spittle flew out his mouth.
“Rossi, you don’t want to do this,” Wolf said quietly. “It’s over. We know about you and your brother smuggling drugs in from Africa. We know your brother didn’t get a big inheritance either. You and your brother are in business together. You two have been leveraging his position in the Guardia di Finanza—in Genoa. Lia told me your brother works there, and how the Guardia di Finanza ultimately oversees port activity.”
Rossi shifted his aim toward Wolf. His whole body twitched while he stared through Wolf. He was thinking—calculating. He seemed to come to a conclusion, and looked at Lia.
Wolf watched Rossi’s gun, trained loosely in Wolf’s direction, waver for the first time.
“Killing us both won’t change anything,” Wolf said quickly. “Paulo knows everything. I told him everything I know on the phone earlier. He checked out your father, and now it’s just a simple task of looking into you and your brother’s finances to prove what you’ve been up to.” Wolf shook his head. “It’s all over. It’s all out in the open. There’s nothing you can do to cover it up now. Killing us both won’t help.”
Rossi looked at Wolf with hatred, and then tracked his gun to Lia. His face shook, and sweat dripped from his hairline. He was pale as milk. With a suddenness that made Lia gasp, he stepped back, dropped his arm to his side, and looked down at the floor.
Wolf and Lia glanced at each other briefly, and then Wolf took the brief opportunity to search the back counter of the bar.
The CZ-99 lay too far away to grab, hopelessly beyond his arm’s reach. Wolf stepped forward, narrowing the distance some, and then stopped as Rossi’s head jerked up.
“Is that what you were doing with these guys here in the pub, Valerio?” Lia asked, seeing what Wolf was trying to do. “Did you kill John Wolf? Did you kill David’s brother?”
Rossi sniffed hard and went perfectly still as he looked at Lia. A quick smile quivered across his face, then disappeared.
“Did you?” She was pleading.
“Yes, he did,” Wolf said. “He was there that night at the observatory. With Vlad. He killed Matthew Rosenwald and John.”
Rossi turned his unblinking eyes to Wolf. He stood motionless, arms still hanging at his side, finger still tense on the pistol’s trigger.
“They saw something they shouldn’t have. And you killed them. You killed them both. Isn’t that right?”
Rossi’s lip curled into a snarl.
“Then you couldn’t trust Vlad anymore,” Wolf said. “After I saw you in the pub here, I realized some things about the past few days. Like, you weren’t roughing up Vlad the other day for my benefit. You were warning him, goading him into saying what you wanted him to in front of Lia and me. You were telling him to cover up the shipment. But you must not have liked the way he was acting.” Wolf turned his head to Lia, keeping his eyes trained on Rossi. “So he killed Vlad, earlier tonight in a way that would implicate me. But even that wasn’t enough. I was getting too close. After he and Cezar found me, they knew I knew too much and must be killed.”
Rossi looked at Lia with dead eyes.
Wolf stole a glance back to the CZ-99. With a full stretch, it was now in reach of his left arm. But it lay on its left side, pointing forward. It would be an awkward move, picking it up, repositioning it, pointing it, and firing. Even if he’d been left-handed. Which he wasn’t.
Rossi’s face twisted in agony, his mouth moving silently and rapidly as if saying a well-practiced prayer. Then he slowly, steadily lifted his gun.
Wolf reached out to Lia with his right hand, gripped her sweatshirt, and flung her behind him to the floor. At the same time, he reached for the CZ-99 with his other hand.
Rossi’s eyes were shut tight. “Non avevo scelta! Prenditi cura di loro per me!”
Wolf transferred the gun to his right hand, slapped it into his palm, and threaded his finger through the trigger guard. He aimed true with as much speed as he could muster.
One deafening pop reverberated as two muzzle flashes lit the barroom, Rossi’s and Wolf’s rounds discharging simultaneously. Rossi’s head exploded into a red twist of expanding skull and hair. For a moment, what was left flopped sideways, dangling from his still standing body, and then he teetered and crumpled to the hard barroom floor.
Wolf set the smoking CZ-99 down and looked to a wide-eyed Lia sprawled on her back. He raised his eyebrows, and she nodded. Satisfied she was okay, he walked through the open bar gap to Rossi’s lifeless body. He stepped directly into the expanding crimson, bent close, and spat.
Chapter 48
The Saturday lunch crowd in the piazza was the largest he’d seen yet. Day-trippers from Milan, Lia had told him, flocked to the lake when it was good weather. And it was great weather. The air was warm, and the gentle breeze carrying the scent of pizza and espresso kept the humidity at bay.
Wolf took a bite of one of said pizzas and shook his head in disbelief. “How the heck were you there last night at the pub?”
“The whole thing was lucky,” Lia said, taking a bite of her own. “I saw Cezar in the piazza just a few minutes before we talked on the phone, and thought it odd to spot him there, so I was watching him the whole time. He kept stopping and looking around, like he was searching for someone. Then he got a phone call and left the piazza in a flash, and I watched him go out of sight down an alley.”
“And you followed him?”
“No. After he left I got the call from you, then I got a call from Paulo no more than a minute later. He told me Valerio’s dad wasn’t buried in Lecco, so I couldn’t send flowers. And that I had the time of his death completely wrong. I was puzzled, to say the least. I didn’t even know what he was talking about. Then he said that Valerio’s dad had been killed twenty-five years ago in Sicily, something to do with the mafiosi.
>
“I asked him what the hell he was talking about, and he said that you called saying that I was the one requesting the information. I hung up, and remembered what you’d said on the phone, and figured you were trying to tell me something about Valerio.
“From that second on, all I could think about was Cezar in the piazza. And I realized he had been looking up at your apartment also. I wondered if maybe he was looking for you. Since he ran off, and I realized you must have been near the piazza, I decided to follow his trail.”
“They caught me shortly after our phone call,” Wolf said with creased brow. “I was pretty far away from the piazza. How did you find us?”
She shrugged. “I went down and down, and wound my way toward the lake. Then I saw Valerio and Cezar loading you in the back of Valerio’s Gazella. You were out cold, which was shocking to see. Then, of course, there was no call on the radio from Valerio that he’d caught you, so I was suspicious. So I ran to my car and went to the only place I could think they’d be taking you, the Albastru Pub.” She gave another shrug and dove back into her pizza.
He stared at her.
She smiled and took a sip of Coke.
“Thanks. Have I thanked you yet for saving my life?”
“Yes,” she said laughing. “You have. Last night.” She took another sip. “So my question for you. How did you get the idea to have Paulo look into Valerio’s father’s death?”
“Everything came to a head when I saw Vlad’s dead body. I knew someone was trying to set me up, and doing a damn good job of it. And there were only a few people who could have been doing it—you, Rossi, or Cezar.” He shrugged. “That’s basically everyone I know in this country. Well, there’s Cristina, the girl who was dating my brother, but I was with her just before Vlad had been killed. And Colonnello Marino or Tito?” Wolf shook his head. “No. Those guys have issues, but they aren’t murderers.
“Then I saw a few things, and then I saw Rossi inside the pub,” he continued, “and, well, I realized it had to have been Rossi. I saw some shipping documents last night, and couldn’t read anything but the ports. The destination port was Genoa, Liguria, Italy, and the source port Tenes, Algeria. The only other thing I could gather from them was the shipping company name, which was Fratello Importing, or something like that.
“What caught my eye was Liguria. I remembered that as the place Valerio said his brother lives, and you said his brother worked for the Guardia di Finanza. Just like your brother. Remember he said that his brother bought a nice house in Liguria with the inheritance money their father had left?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “That’s where he lives. Liguria is the region. Genoa is the capital, where the port is. In fact, his brother lives minutes from Genoa.” She shook her head. “And it was called Fratelli Importers?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
She looked at him expectantly.
“What?”
“Fratelli means brothers in Italian.”
“Huh. That would have been nice to know at the time.” He stared for a beat at the ground, then snapped out of it. “But it was seeing Rossi talking to Cezar in the pub that clicked everything into place.
“And, I thought, that could be a great cover story for a pair of brothers who were involved in smuggling drugs and actually wanted to enjoy spending the money they earned. ‘Our father died. It was an inheritance.’ Who’s going to call them out on such a sensitive subject? Nobody.
“Then I remembered Rossi saying that his father was never around, but suddenly gave him and his brother an inheritance. So I started wondering what their father’s true history was. I suspected Rossi and his brother had to have been exploiting that, and I was hoping they’d made up the whole dying three years ago thing.” Wolf shrugged. “And I was right.”
Lia stared through her pizza. “Our family always assumed that the parents were divorced that their father just lived in Sicily, and that’s why he was never around. It never came up that he was dead. They never talked about their father. It was like a taboo subject.”
“It probably was. Maybe he died in a disgraceful way back then, and, growing up, no one liked to talk about it.” Wolf took a few more bites and stopped. “Rossi’s wife,” he said.
“What?”
“You’ll have to check on her. See if she was in on all this, or if she was duped into thinking Rossi’s father had left the inheritance.”
Lia took a deep breath and shook her head. “I think they don’t know. He was ashamed at being exposed so much that he shot himself. I don’t think his wife would have known. She’s not the criminal type.” She looked at Wolf. “I hope for the kids’ sake she wasn’t in on it.”
They ate silently for a while, meditating on that sober thought.
After a few minutes she looked at him with a wry smile. “How did you get Paulo to do that for you?”
“Simple. He didn’t do it for me. I just pretended like I was calling in the favor for you, like you were too busy to talk at the moment, and we didn’t want to bring it up to Valerio. You know, because it was a touchy subject. He seemed pretty reluctant, or suspicious, but I sealed the deal when I told him to just call you directly with where to send the flowers.”
She blushed and forked her pizza.
Wolf gave a shrug. “Any excuse to talk to you works for Paulo. The guy is smitten.” Wolf turned serious. “I wish I could say I’m sorry Rossi’s dead. I know he was a lifelong friend. A friend of the family …” He let his sentence trail off.
“No. It’s okay. I know now he was just a shell of a person. A phony. It’s strange to say, but the person I was a friend with probably died a few years ago and maybe a long time before that. He was just using me for reasons I can’t even imagine.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he said.
As they finished eating, Wolf thought of Rossi’s death again. The images replayed in his mind like a GIF file. He would never know which bullet had arrived first, Wolf’s or Rossi’s. Which had penetrated that part of Rossi’s brain that ultimately ended his life. In the end, all that mattered was that John’s honor was restored, and those responsible for his death were dead. All of them.
Chapter 49
Wolf and Lia spent the rest of their Saturday in Marino’s office, recounting the week’s events leading up to the harrowing demise of Detective Rossi.
Relief flooded Wolf that evening in a crashing wave, allowing him a much-needed release of grievous emotion. He called his mother, told her the real story of her son’s death, and joined in her emotional outpouring as well.
To his surprise, his later date with Lia was the most enjoyable night with a woman he’d had in years.
They both slept at John’s, and Wolf found out that Lia Parente was a liar. She was vicious. And he told her so facetiously as they lay in bed next to each other, completely spent.
The next morning, she took him to the airport, and they hugged, and gave each other a soft kiss, knowing it was a long shot that they would ever see each other again.
“Goodbye Sergeant Wolf.”
“Goodbye.”
“Will you think of me?” she asked.
He smiled, and then he nodded. “Eating pizza will never be the same.”
With a back of the hand wave, she rolled up her window, the wheels of her Alfa Romeo chirping as she drove away at Italian speed.
…
Wolf’s back pressed deep into his coach window seat as the 777 Lufthansa flight lifted from the Tarmac of the runway. He stared at the receding clay-tile buildings below, looking forward to seeing the mountains of Colorado once again.
The plane climbed to cruising altitude, and Wolf requested a coffee from the flight attendant pushing the drink cart. As he sat back sipping the watery confection, the thought of home raised his pulse. The past six days had colluded to mercilessly change his life, bringing him to a wholly foreign land, and now back home with a dead brother.
He had the sense that he’d missed so much at home, a
nd at such a critical time. Connell and his lies, slandering Wolf while he was a half-world away, undoubtedly hurting his chances for an appointment.
Then there was Sarah and her new sober life, with a new man to share it with. A suspicious death in Rocky Points on Wolf’s watch, one that he wasn’t around for to help the other deputies investigate.
Though he was going home, he felt control slipping away with the ground underneath him.
“Sir.” A flight attendant with a bored expression and a thick accent snapped him out of his thoughts. She held out a steaming tray of food. “Would you like some breakfast?”
Wolf nodded. “Yes, thank you.”
“And for you, sir?”
“No!” The man next to Wolf blurted, lifting up his glass of liquid. “I have my ginger ale. That will be enough.”
The man leaned back into his seat and closed his eyes tight as the flight attendant moved away. Then he dug into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pill without looking at it, put it in his mouth, and swallowed it down with a sip of ginger ale.
Wolf peeled the cellophane off his steaming food tray.
“Dramamine,” the man said with a deep breath.
Wolf turned to see that the man was looking at him through the corner of his eyes.
“Ah,” Wolf said.
“Yeah. I get terrible airsickness. Same with boats, cars, you name it. Any sort of motion. I’ll be fine, though. Just as long as I don’t try eating one of those ham-and-cheese omelets, that is. Otherwise, we’ll be sopping up ham-and-egg chunks in less than an hour.”
Wolf closed the lid on his meal and pushed it forward. He could eat when he reached Denver. He sat back and closed his eyes, trying to keep his mind off the gag reflex of the man next to him.
A few moments later, he snapped his eyes open and stared at the food in front of him. Then he looked at the man next to him. And then he smiled.
The man apparently sensed someone staring at him, because he cracked an eye and turned to Wolf. “What?”