by Gina LaManna
I stuck out a finger. “And you’re the one who over-tipped that desk clerk. He’d talked about some banker guy, but I thought you were printing out wedding stuff.”
“Nope,” Donald said. “Too easy to pin it on Joey, who was busy printing off some nudes, and then under-tipped.”
“But the misspelling...” I said. “Dammit, that was your list, not Joey’s. I expected Joey to misspell wedding, not you.”
“That was an unlucky catch,” he winced. “Of course a banker wouldn’t misspell a common English word like that. But this meathead...”
The way he said English niggled something loose in my brain. It reminded me of Andrey, the man I’d thought was my target when I’d been after the Good Stuff. However, I’d been wrong and ended up going on a date with him, which is an entirely different story. Anyway, the main idea here was that Andrey had been Russian.
“Are you from the Russian Mafia?” I asked. “You are! I can hear it in your accent. Carlos was right the whole time.”
“The whole time?” Donald asked. “How did he know?”
“Faking Leo’s death...” I paused. “No, that makes no sense. Leo, why did you do that?”
The priest shrugged. “Money.”
“I paid him,” Joey said. “I was just trying to win my love back by postponing her wedding to this madman.”
Joey spat in the direction of Donald.
“Why did you want to marry her anyways?” Joey asked. “We’re soul mates.”
“That you are,” Donald said sardonically. “You’re made for each other. Have her. It would’ve been a convenient way to be a spy, though. Maybe pocket some cash. Except that Vivian is poor as hell. All she’s got is that stupid pink Jeep.”
“You told me you liked it,” Vivian said. “Ugh, I can’t believe you and your lies.”
“Oh, Vivian, you were blind,” Donald said. “You were just using me to get back at this orange beach ball over here. Though, at this point, I’m afraid the only way you two will end up together is in a matching pair of coffins. If you’re lucky.”
“You had a small dick, anyways,” Vivian said. “I faked every orgasm.”
Donald looked at the ceiling. Then he licked his lips. “Since our relationship fortunately didn’t work out, I can’t go through with my original plan to infiltrate the Luzzi Family. So, I’m going to just collect some money for my time and effort and get out of here. In fact, the whole process is much less painful this way. It’s really thanks to you, Viv. You forced me to change tactics. On the bright side of things, that means I only have to be with you guys for...oh, twenty-four hours, tops. I’ll collect my ransom money, and then...”
He mimicked shooting a gun. Except the motion was quite terrifying since the gun in his hand was real.
“Now, let’s get the show on the road. Your dress is really hurting my eyes.” Donald looked somewhere over my shoulder, and I felt a bit like the sun, in the sense that nobody wanted to look directly at me. “Drop any weapons and phones here. If you hesitate, or I find something, or I think you might be hiding something, I’ll shoot this bi—”
“Hey, I have a better idea,” Clay interrupted.
I looked at Clay, sure my eyes were wide as two slices of pepperoni. Donald was cool and calm, a really scary dude with a gun. As he turned towards Clay, Donald didn’t flinch or look away, and I had no doubt that the banker would shoot with the smallest bit of provocation.
“Yes?” Donald asked, the corner of his mouth sliding upwards.
“Well, how would you ever know if we got rid of everything in our pockets? What if I have two guns on me?” Clay paused and raised his finger like a patient math teacher. “What if we just stripped down to our underwear and put our clothes in a pile so you don’t have to worry?”
Donald narrowed his eyes. “Is this some perverted trick?”
Clay removed a pocketknife from his pants and dropped it on the floor. “Never mind, forget it. It’s fine, man. I was just trying to make things easier for you. Now that I think about it, I don’t really want to get anywhere close to naked around you.”
I nodded. “Yeah, me too.”
I didn’t know what Clay intended, but if he had a plan with any probability of working, I’d go along with it.
“I’ll get naked,” Meg offered.
“No!” three or four people shouted at once.
“That’s all right,” I called out, glaring around. “Nobody’s getting naked here. This is a church.”
“Actually, yeah.” Donald nodded. “I think Clay’s onto something. Everyone down to your boxers. Now. Except you, Kiki. I know you’re clean. You made it on an airplane.” He waved the gun around. “Now!”
Internally swearing at Clay up and down the Mississippi, I slowly removed the light sweater from my shoulders and dropped it on the floor.
“Hurry up, Lacey,” Clay said.
“Why?” I hissed. “This is so weird. Why are you helping him?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do.” Clay gave me a strained look.
I didn’t believe for a second that he was helping Donald, but I couldn’t think for the life of me how removing our clothes would help.
“You’d better take off those sparkles,” Clay said to me. “Throw them across the room so they don’t hurt his eyes anymore.”
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Donald said. He walked around touching the gun to each one of us in turn, skipping over Clay and Anthony. Probably because they were both bigger than him and could possibly take control of the gun.
“Let’s move it. Don’t think about it, buddy.” Donald fired a shot really close to my ear that whizzed behind me and lodged just below Jesus’ feet on the crucifix. “I saw that, big guy. Toss the gun across the room.”
I opened my eyes—at some point they’d squeezed shut at the gunfire, and watched as Anthony slowly slid his gun across the floor to the other side of the room, his mouth a thin line.
Bummer, I thought. As long as Anthony had a gun we had a chance, but now I didn’t know how we’d get away without any casualties. Even if Anthony managed to make it to Donald and take him down, which he most certainly could, Kiki or I would be dead first. Which I considered a fail.
“Sparkles, let’s go. Real slowly.” Donald nodded towards me.
Meg was already in her underwear. Her bra looked sturdy enough to hold two basketballs, and her thong disappeared halfway up her ass.
I very slowly shimmied out of my tight dress, thankful I had on a semi-sexy pair of underwear and matching bra. I didn’t want Anthony to think I was a total dweeb, especially if this was my last hour on earth. I gave the stupid dress a little kick and it slid a few feet in front of me.
“Bad job, Lace,” said Clay. Ever so slowly he approached the dress, hands in the air, and gave it a huge wallop. The sequined concoction skidded across the floor. And then we were all in our underwear.
Clay, clad in a pair of Ho! Ho! Ho! Christmas boxers as red as an apple from the Garden of Eden, pulled a phone from a back pocket of his boxers.
“Since when do boxers come with pockets?” I asked.
Clay ignored me and handed the phone over to Donald.
Donald picked up the phone and glanced at it disinterestedly.
“All right, now—”
But Donald was interrupted as soon as he began.
“Sir,” Clay said quickly. “You probably want to shut my phone off. It has GPS tracking, so if the cops are looking for us, as they might be soon, you’ll want it turned off so they can’t find you.”
Donald looked down at the phone, then back at Clay, as if he were judging whether Clay was scheming against him or simply stupid.
Which was funny, since I was wondering exactly the same thing.
“Right,” Donald finally said. He pressed the top button of the phone and waited for a second as it powered off, not taking his eyes off Clay or the gun off Kiki.
Clay closed his eyes and flinched, but nothing happened.
; Donald smiled. “Now, where was I?”
This time, he was interrupted for one giant reason. A flash of light and what sounded like a huge thunderclap erupted behind him. We all flinched, but then the next phase of the explosion took off, and smoke burst from the pile of clothes on the floor and enveloped the room in a black fog.
The eruption behind Donald deafened me completely. Strobe lights flashed incessantly, the light so bright, stars erupted behind my eyelids even as I fell to my knees. I couldn’t hear screaming, though Kiki’s mouth opened in terror and Meg thunked to the floor before me.
The chapel was a mess of running legs, screaming people, smoke and light and noise. By the time I’d collected myself enough to open my eyes and get a grip on my location, Anthony stood over Donald, who was now wearing a pair of handcuffs. Clay was holding the gun, while Meg worked at untying Joey, Alfonso, Leo, and Kiki.
Vivian stood still, probably in shock, her mouth opening and closing, but without producing any type of sound. For once, she wasn’t snapping her gum, and it was rather a pleasant change, even though my ears still rang from the explosion.
I shook my head as sound once again started filtering through my eardrums. I approached Clay slowly.
“What the hell was that?” I asked Clay.
He smiled like a proud new father.
“My baby worked,” he said. “I figured out how to detonate an explosion remotely using my phone. Just like I was practicing in the hotel room. The ‘off’ button is the trigger. Brilliant, or what?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But what was the bomb?”
Clay shifted a bit uncomfortably, and cast a shifty gaze at Anthony.
“What?” I looked back and forth between them.
Clay coughed. “Your dress.”
“My dress?” I said. “You made my dress into a bomb?”
“Well, it wasn’t really your dress,” Clay pointed out. “It was Meg’s, and she never planned to wear it since it’d offend Vivian. She just brought it along in case. So, I used it.”
“But what if you accidentally turned your phone off while I had the dress on?” I spluttered. “Or what if it lost power or the battery drained, or you dropped it?”
Clay looked thoughtful. “Huh. I hadn’t thought of that part. Nice catch. I’ll have to work on that for the next phase. But I wanted to try it out on something mobile, like a piece of clothing. It’s meant to be worn undercover. I was gonna try it on a scarecrow when we got back.”
I took a step forward, right up to his face, but as I opened my mouth to say some not-very-nice things, Anthony’s hand rested on my wrist.
“I think you owe Clay a thank you,” Anthony said. “He kept all of the right people safe, at least for today.”
I gritted my teeth, but I took a step back. Clay looked at Anthony as if he had just awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Thank you,” I said. “You’re very smart. Next time, just tell me when I have a bomb on my body.”
“All right.” Clay had the good grace to look sheepish.
Anthony put a hand on Clay’s shoulder. “But she’s right. If I ever hear you rigging a bomb in her dress again...”
He didn’t need to finish his sentence. Anthony gripped Clay’s shoulder until his message was received, and Clay’s face was white. “Yes...absolutely. I understand.”
I looked around at the chaos inside the chapel. The fake roses were singed black and a light dusting of gray powder covered most of the pews. Jesus’ cross had a bullet hole through the bottom, and a small flame was burning where the remnants of the golden sequins lay in a heap, smoldering happily. The altar was littered with a golden dust that looked like a shooting star had crash landed and imploded.
To put it mildly, we hadn’t left this place in better shape than we’d found it.
“Now what?” I asked.
We all looked around, shrugging at one another.
“It’s a good thing you didn’t marry this guy,” Meg said, giving Donald a light kick to the kidney.
Donald keeled over and mumbled something, but the white neck strip from Leo’s priest outfit had been taped across his mouth and it came out too garbled to understand.
“Yeah, definitely,” Vivian said. “It’s a good thing, ’cause I would’ve had to get a divorce since me and Joey are soul mates.”
Then she gave Joey a very slobbery kiss, very much of the French variety, and we all looked away.
“It’s our lucky day,” Clay said. “Shall we hit the tables?”
“I have a better idea,” I said. I found my phone on the floor and quickly called my friend, the Printer Nazi, at the Lutsen Resort from where we’d come.
He wasn’t exactly happy to hear from me, but we chatted for a moment and then he grabbed Nora and Carlos, with whom I exchanged a few words.
I turned back to the crew, all of whom had taken a seat in the front pew, except for Anthony, who stood watch over Donald with the gun.
“Here’s the plan,” I said. “We are going to find me some fresh clothes, stat, and then we’re getting right back on a plane straight to Lutsen. Carlos is going to call his people at a private airport nearby, and we’ll touch down at the landing strip closest to the resort.”
I smiled at them. “And then we’re going to have a wild party and dance all night long and drink—a lot—in order to celebrate the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Joey Marcucci.”
A smattering of applause broke out.
“Oh,” I said. “And we’re bringing Donald with us. Carlos wants a word.”
Another stream of babble erupted from Donald’s taped mouth, but we all ignored him, gathered our belongings, and made the sign of the cross with the Holy Water from the canister at the door.
“Sorry, Jesus, about those bullet holes.” I whispered. “But thanks for your help, buddy.”
Chapter 13
A FEW HOURS LATER, Vivian was all dolled up, glowing, and looking like a very happy Barbie with a very tanned Ken, whirling around the dance floor. Donald was locked away with a few men upstairs, to be dealt with later. Today was a day of holy matrimony.
I stood next to Carlos as other couples joined Vivian and Joey after the first dance.
Carlos held out his hand. “Dance with me?”
I smiled. “Of course, Boss.”
Carlos almost smiled, and then spun me expertly around the dance floor. For an old man, he still had style. Dressed in a sharp suit with dance moves so pristine I wondered if they’d been learned in an academy, he could have been royalty.
At first, I was stiff and nervous, hesitant to make a mistake in fear of a tongue lashing from my grandfather. However, as the song wound down, I found myself enjoying the dance and wishing we had a few seconds longer. It wasn’t every day Carlos showed any sign of humanity or kindness, and a dance was high praise, in my opinion.
The last notes of the song drifted into the abyss of sound, he kissed both of my cheeks, and thanked me for the dance.
“Thank you, Carlos,” I said. “For everything.”
“You’ve done good work, tesora,” he said, a gruff edge to his voice.
Just as quickly as he arrived, he disappeared from my side. I smiled at his choice of words. Treasure, in Italian. Looking around, I caught a glimpse of him whisking Nora into his arms and whirling her around the floor, her smile brighter than a flashlight, her hair as red as a fire truck.
I felt a presence behind me, and hurriedly wiped a miniscule tear from my cheek.
“Dance?” Alfonso asked.
“Absolutely,” I said. He was up to my shoulder, so we had to adjust our typical dance positions for the occasion, but we made it work.
“Remember what I said?” I asked. “All that stuff about going to college and shit?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I told my mom I’m going to apply to some colleges when we get home.”
“Good for you,” I patted his head. “Don’t worry, there’ll always be a job in the Fam when you need one.”
Al
fonso smiled. “If I need one. Not all of us are failures in the real world.”
I ruffled his hair and gave him a faux stern look.
“Can I cut in?” Anthony’s familiar voice caused a pleasant tingle in my stomach.
Like a starstruck fan, Alfonso nodded and backed away.
Anthony gathered me in his arms, and I felt wonderfully cozy and safe. Though I’d never admit it to him, I didn’t want the song to end. Ever.
“I love your shirt,” he said. “Where can I get one?”
I pinched him. The only clothes we’d found that fit me at the nearest gift shop was an incredibly tight, absolutely see-through “WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS, STAYS IN VEGAS” T-shirt, a teensy black skirt, and knee high black stripper boots with studded gems down the side.
“Shut up,” I said. “It wouldn’t fit over your arms.”
“Speaking of which, we need to get you back on a regular workout schedule once we’re back in the cities.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Way to ruin the party.”
“I told you, I’m open to alternative workout styles,” he said. Then Anthony leaned back and held me at an arm’s distance. “Just say the word.”
My eyes locked on his, and it was as if the rest of my loud, obnoxious, crazy family wasn’t bumping into us and swirling around our private little universe. I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I was distracted by his chocolate brown eyes, as if they were part of a heavenly cookie fresh from the oven. He pulled me back to his chest and his arms slid around to my lower back, one of them dangerously low on my behind.
“You’d better watch out,” I said. “Carlos is probably watching.”
Anthony kissed me on the forehead, and we danced for a few moments in silence, though he didn’t move his hands from my backside. If anything, he pulled me closer and rested his cheek on my head.
“No,” he said.
I rested my head against his chest and let all thoughts disappear from my mind. “No, what?”
“You’d better watch out,” he said. “Because I’ve got Carlos’s permission.”
I gulped. And I didn’t ask “permission for what?” Because I had an idea, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know. I sucked in a deep breath, and Anthony tilted my chin upwards. “But no pressure.”