In the Wind: Out of the Box, Book 2 (19 page)

“What is this?” The voice is high pitched and furious, outraged all out of proportion to the situation. Anselmo turns to see Elena—lovely Elena, his mistress—stalking toward him. She has never shown this particular stripe of anger before, and he raises an eyebrow. “Who is she?” Elena asks, whiplash voice echoing over the patio as she arrives just as the servant girl flees.

Anselmo turns his eyes to the new woman. “What is your name, my dear?”

“Isabella,” the woman says. “Isabella Perugini.”

“What a lovely name,” Anselmo coos. He turns to look at Elena. “Isabella Perugini. Have you heard a more lovely name?”

“You lech!” Elena says, almost hissing. This causes Anselmo’s blood to pause, to run cold. “You dirty old man. You bring a new woman here,
in front of me
, without so much as caring—”

Anselmo stares down the steep hill ahead, down to Firenze in all its glory below. This is his home, this is his domain, his place. He listens for a moment more, takes all that he can take, and then he feels a strange snap in his head, like a switch being clicked. He backhands Elena, casually, but with some strength, a little rage bleeding through. It catches her on the cheek and snaps her head back. Her eyes go wide then her face slackens, and she falls onto the bubble covering of the pool and sinks in.

Anselmo puckers his lips together, twisting them. He is parched, thirsty. He knows her neck is broken, that she is done. “Where is our brandy?” he asks, smiling at his new woman—Isabella—as the old one lazily sinks to the bottom of the pool, never to rise on her own again.

I awaken to the cab driver shouting at me in Italian. I blink my eyes open to fading daylight and a tall hill, with a driveway that stretches up past a gate in the distance. The driver has done me a favor, because there are guys with guns just barely visible up the way, shuffling around a gatehouse. They’re not looking at me, and for this I’m thankful.

I quickly pay him via credit card. I manage, despite my bad Italian, to make one last request and exit the cab to dart into the cover of trees that leads up to the wall of a palatial estate. It’s not exactly a hollowed out volcano or an undersea lair, but as far as villainous strongholds go, it’s not bad.

I slip along the wall and out of sight of the gatehouse, unobserved. I wonder about security cameras, but I realize I can’t really afford to second guess myself, at least not at the moment. I’ve got a fraction of an idea how to do this based on what J.J. told me about Anselmo’s estate, and if I don’t move quickly, it’s guaranteed to fail.

I’m over the wall in three shakes, slipping through thick underbrush that probably takes a gardener hours per day to maintain and make pretty. And it is pretty; professional landscaping of the sort you’d expect from a hilltop mansion.

I can see the house in the distance, and the guard detail looks blessedly light. Presumably a good portion of his guys are still out combing the railroad tracks for my corpse, which is all the better for me, because I’d sure hate to be completely outnumbered and outgunned.

Oh, wait. I still am.

Guys with guns are a major motif around the place. Another guy with a rifle on his back saunters past me.

I seize him by the back of the neck and choke him out. Not dead, just out.

I slip the rifle off his back and futz with it a little. I’m not fond of guns like Sienna is, but I can fumble my way through using one when needed. I figure out where the safety is, make sure a round is in the chamber, and then start moving around the side of the house.

It’s a big, sprawling place, a
casa
of the sort that the provincial governors probably used to have. I jump onto the red tile roof of the house and scamper up behind the roofline as I hear voices out back. I peek out and see exactly what I expected: an amazing, tremendous view of a sweeping hillside that leads down into Florence proper, and …

And a pool deck with Anselmo, Lorenzo and Isabella sitting out and looking across the splendor of the valley below.

It takes me a second to realize there’s a body in the pool. It’s not moving, and everyone seems to be ignoring it except Isabella, whose furtive eyes keep darting back to it every few seconds. I can’t see much in the shape, just a faint outline wrapped up in that bubbly stuff they use to cover a pool.

I put the curious questions about who it is and why they ended up in the drink out of my mind and start planning my move.

“You see, my dear,” Anselmo says, “my father, he was killed by a member of the Sacra Corona Unita.” Anselmo feels his lips smack together as he tells the story, and stops to slake his thirst with a sip of brandy. “This man, he was a fool, for he let me live. Mercy, he said.” Anselmo smiles at the memory. “Even before I manifested, as a boy of fourteen, I became a man that very night. I beat him to death after darkness fell.” He raises a hand to show her. “His wife, she screamed in the night as the blood flecked across her face. She could have become an enemy, so I killed her, too.” He swings the hand again, his grin wide. “Enemies, it does not pay to leave them alive. Ever.” He shrugs. “This is the cost of mercy, you see? Always it comes back to haunt you, so a man—a real man, he shows no mercy in this. Dispenses with his enemies—man, woman, their boys, and even girls nowadays. Is necessary to ensure your power, your survival.” He tastes the brandy again, swirls it around. “A real man dispatches his enemies fearlessly, never allowing the possibility that they will come back to him later—”

Gunshots ring out in the night, and Anselmo leaps to his feet, dropping the glass of brandy. He is dimly aware of it shattering against the concrete patio, splattering against his socks and trouser leg. He spins toward the house, toward the direction of the shots, and sees Lorenzo fall. Bloody stains appear upon his chest, and the boy sags, falling to the ground.

“What the—” Anselmo barely gets out before he catches sight of Treston upon the rooftop, a rifle in his hands. The boy tosses it aside and jumps, at him, gliding across the pool toward Anselmo. But Anselmo is ready, the smile already upon his face at the thought of what is to come. He will kill Treston, oh yes, show Isabella that he is a real man, and then he will have her—

He feels the strong hands push him from behind – the force of a shove coming from that damned woman – but he is improperly balanced to do anything about it. He falls forward, into the pool, the splash followed by the deafening rush of his heartbeat. Anselmo flails as he tangles in the covering of the pool. It wraps around him, trapping his limbs, trapping his torso. It fills his vision, everywhere, and he fights it, twists—

And finds himself face to face with Elena’s dead eyes.

Anselmo screams in fury, bubbles rushing before his eyes, and feels his feet touch the bottom of the pool at last. He puts everything into his legs and jumps, ripping the cover out of the pool as he breaks out of the surface, limbs still wrapped in the covering, and lands, hard, on the concrete decking.

He lies there, gasping, fearful, dripping water out of his mouth and his nose as the sound of heavy footfalls fills the air around him. He hears the cries of
“Capo! Capo!”
but it takes him a moment to gather his wits and respond.

“Sorry,” I say as I glide down the hill, Isabella Perugini’s arms wrapped around me. “I would have waited a couple more minutes, but I felt compelled to strike while the irony of his bullshit about wiping out his enemies was still heavy in the air.” I push my power to the straining point and beyond, and I don’t even care. My arms are past complaining at this point, my bare feet bearing the brunt of the channeling force. Either I’ve broken through to a new level of using my powers or I’m going to be dead tomorrow.

Isabella rests her head against my chest as we slip down the hill behind Anselmo Serafini’s estate like a high-speed ski run, and I realize that if I die tomorrow, it was totally worth it for this moment.

I steer us around the trees, avoiding the obstacles most likely to cause a skull fracture, and finally catch sight of a road ahead.

“What now?” Isabella asks. “He’ll have the train stations watched.” She sounds worried.

“Probably the airports, too,” I say. “At least within minutes.”

She lifts her head off my chest to look at me, and the wind rushes by around us as I take us down the last hundred feet or so and feel the bare soles of my feet touch the sidewalk next to the road. “What do we do?”

There’s a squeal of tires and my cabby comes to a stop a few feet away from the curb. “We take a cab,” I say, feeling a sense of relief that this one little thing has gone right for me.

She clutches my hand tight as I open the door for her and let her in first. I slide into the car next to her and feel her lean her head against me, warmly, as the cab driver floors it. Back to Rome, away from here. The sirens fill the night air as we make our escape from Florence.

Anselmo sits in his chair, clothes dripping as he stares out across the once-magnificent view. It was magnificent only moments earlier. Sitting here, with Lorenzo and Isabella, it had seemed the grandest thing he could imagine. He puckers his wet lips, feels beads of water roll down his skin.

He feels his face contract with hatred. To be so unmanned in his own home—

He swallows the anger, and it is a bitter taste. “Treston,” he says, and it is the vilest curse he can imagine. He lets his eyes drift to Lorenzo, who bleeds quietly upon the concrete.

“Capo.”
This quiet breath comes from Niccolo, one of his lieutenants. Anselmo feels his furious gaze slide over the man, watches him flinch before it. “The Carabinieri, they will be here—”

“Tell them to fuck off,” Anselmo says, letting his eyes drift back to the horizon, to where Treston made his escape, taking Isabella—that traitorous bitch—with him. “I pay them to stay away, so tell them to stay away.”

“Si, Capo,”
Niccolo says and disappears back toward the house.

“And Niccolo?” Anselmo says, feeling the water drip off his body. His shoes are sodden, wet. He looks down and sees that he is still wearing the shirt he took from Treston’s suitcase back in Rome. To the victor the spoils.

“Si?”

“Find that servant girl, and have her bring me a drink,” Anselmo says. There is a low moan, and his eyes shift to Lorenzo once more. “Drag Lorenzo inside and have a doctor take the bullets out.” He waves a hand. “Put men at the airport and train station. Find them.”

“Which should I do first,
Capo
?” Niccolo asks, the fool.

“The drink, idiot,” Anselmo says, without a moment’s pause. “The girl. Then deal with the airports and train station, and finally … this.” He waves his hand again at Lorenzo’s body as the boy moves his leg in pain.

Anselmo shakes his head, dark plots rolling through his mind, and he continues to stare out at the impressive vista. Night begins to fall around him, and he has needs, emotions, disappointments to make up for. He barely hears the girl as she brings him wine.

No one fails to hear her, though, possibly not even down in Florence.

“Picciotti,”
Perugini says as we step out of the cab in Rome. I have no idea what it means, and I don’t know whether she’s referring to the cab driver or not, though I suspect by the way she rubs her own shoulders, arms crossed over her body, that she’s not. The cab driver looks at her out the window, pure outrage on his face. “Not you,” she says, answering my question for me, and he speeds off like he didn’t hear her apology.

“What?” I ask, trying to maintain a sensitive distance. She looks disgusted, and I don’t want to step into that.

“He told me,” she says, shaking her head, “that he was up to something.”

“Did he tell you what?” I take a step closer, my desire to know what Anselmo is planning overruling my desire to give her space.

“Not exactly,” she says and starts down the avenue. We’re on the Via Nazionale, though I’m not sure where to go, so I just follow her for now. She’s blowing off steam, getting her aggravation out of her system at being kidnapped by Anselmo, and I’m quite content to let her. “But he gave me a powerful hint.”

“What was it?” I ask.

“He said that he’s going to make Giovanni Falcone look like the work of little boys,” she says, not turning to face me, taking each step as though the mere act of walking is enough to drain the poison from her system.

“I … I have no idea who that is,” I say, utterly mystified.

“He was a prosecutor,” she says, turning back to give me a look. If I thought she was inscrutable before, all that is gone now. Her eyebrows are down at a forty-five degree angle, her lips are pressed tight together when she’s not talking, a line of stress that doesn’t give a hint she’s ever been happy in her life. “The Sicilian Mafia killed him with a bomb. They blew up his car.”

“So he’s gonna kill someone,” I say. “With a bomb?”

She shakes her head. “He did not get specific. He is mad with power, thinks he is a god or something.”

I tilt my head as I think it over. “He kinda is. He’s got invulnerable skin, can’t be cut, can’t be hurt with bullets or swords or fists.” I clench my jaw. “And he’s sitting at the head of a crime family of some sort.”

She gets a flash of wariness at this. “He has a meeting planned. Something big. Tomorrow.”

“Big?” I ask. “Like what? And who’s he meeting with?”

“Other
picciotti
, probably,” she says and spits on the sidewalk. “He is up to something. A nasty little schemer.”

“Okay, so maybe he’s meeting with other mobsters,” I say, my mind racing, trying to figure things out. “Or maybe somebody else? Someone related to this kill he’s planning?”

“I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “He is a pig, a lech, a violent man who has no recognition of others or his own limits.” She shudders slightly, and it stops her in the middle of the sidewalk. “He thought I was interested in him, the fool!”