Chapter 9 - The Anatomy of a Cold Engine
The flight from Teterboro had been arranged through a freight forwarder that did not exist in the state database. The aircraft was a twin-engine turboprop, an old Beechcraft King Air with the de-icing boots on the wings patched with black vulcanized rubber and the cabin stripped of its executive seats to make room for four aluminum cargo boxes strapped to the floor with ratchet webbing.
Elena sat in a nylon jump seat near the tail, her right shoulder wrapped in an elastic support that allowed her to use her arm without tearing the new granulation tissue Dr. Aris had certified as "functional, if abused."
Across the narrow aisle, Caleb was already asleep, his mouth open, his head resting against the cold aluminum skin of the fuselage. In his lap was a cashier’s check for seventy-five thousand dollars—the operating capital for the shop in Fallon—and an envelope containing two brand-new Nevada driver’s licenses issued under names that had belonged to two distant cousins who had died of scarlet fever in 1954.
The cabin door opened from the cockpit. Lorenzo came back, ducking his head to clear the low ceiling joists. He had changed into a dark suede jacket and jeans that looked stiff and new, his hands clean of city soot, his dark hair ruffled by the slipstream from the baggage hatch.
He sat on the cargo box opposite her, his boots wedged against the aluminum runners.
"We have two hours to Omaha," he said. "The pilot has to refuel on the county strip. He doesn't like to carry more than four hundred gallons when the crosswinds are coming off the plains."
Elena looked out the small, round window. Below them, Pennsylvania was a vast, dark quilt of leafless hardwood forests cut by the frozen grey ribbon of the Susquehanna.
"Why didn't you stay for the sit-down?" she asked.
"Because the sit-down was over before Lulzim cleared the steam room," Lorenzo said. "The marshals took four of his drivers before they reached the tunnel. By tomorrow morning, Marco’s company will be in receivership, and the cranes will belong to a leasing bank in Delaware that employs two hundred people who have never heard the name Moretti."
"And your family?"
"My family is currently composed of three second cousins who run funeral parlors in the Bronx and an aunt who lives in an assisted-living facility in Boca Raton," he said without a trace of self-pity. "The rest of them are either in federal custody or at the bottom of the channel off Sandy Hook. The Moretti family is out of the freight business, Elena."
She turned her head to look at him. His eyes were tired, the blue looking pale in the thin, high-altitude light coming through the King Air’s windows, but the lines around his mouth were less severe than they had been in the library in Bedford.
"You knew the warrants were coming before I took the bullet," she said.
Lorenzo did not look away. "I knew the Eastern District had been working the car service for eighteen months. I didn't know they had the tap on Marco’s personal line. When you pushed me into the booth, you didn't just save me from a four-point-five-gram slug, Elena. You saved me from being arrested at a table with three kilograms of unrefined heroin sitting in the trunk of the car outside."
"I didn't know about the car," she said.
"I know," he said. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the brass key with the red plastic tag she had given Dante outside the athletic club. "The locker at the Port Authority was empty, Elena."
Elena’s expression did not change. "I know."
"Dante went there while I was in the steam room," Lorenzo continued smoothly, tossing the key from his right hand to his left. "There were no manifests. There were no notebooks. There was only a copy of the *New York Post* from three weeks ago and a receipt for two hundred rounds of nine-millimeter target ammunition from a gun shop in Secaucus."
He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his face inches from hers.
"You never had the papers, did you?"
Elena met his gaze without blinking. "Caleb had them. He burned them in a fifty-five-gallon drum behind the garage in Fallon the day after our father died. He knew that if he kept them, someone like Marco would eventually come looking for the ash."
"Then what did you have?"
"I had a six-month shift at Ljardan," she said, her voice dropping into a register that made the King Air’s engine noise seem to recede into the background. "And I had an older brother who was stupid enough to think he could come to New York to buy back our father’s name."
Lorenzo stared at her for ten long seconds. Then, slowly, the corners of his mouth turned upward into the first real smile she had ever seen on his face—a cold, sharp, brilliant flash of iron that had nothing to do with cruelty.
"You set the table," he said.
"I watched you eat alone for twenty-four Tuesdays, Enzo," she said. "I knew which way you turned your head when the streetcar passed the corner. I knew you didn't touch the bread because you thought the kitchen was using lard instead of olive oil. And I knew that when the hit came, you would look at the waitress before you looked at the street."
"You could have been killed," he said.
"I grew up in Fallon, Enzo," she replied, her voice steady as a surveyor’s chain. "In Fallon, you either take the hit when you see the swing coming, or you spend the rest of your life cleaning up the glass."
Lorenzo reached out and took her right hand—the one that had been numb for three days, the one that was now warm again, the pulse beating strong and regular under his long fingers. He did not let go.
"The house in Bedford has eight bedrooms," he said. "And the library has three thousand books that nobody has read since my grandfather died in 1974."
Elena looked down at his hand, then back up at the grey clouds sweeping past the window.
"I have two more years of nursing school, Enzo," she said.
"NYU has a campus in Westchester," he replied, his thumb moving slowly across the ridge of her knuckles. "And the dean of the medical school is a man who owes me forty thousand dollars from an old poker game in Saratoga."
May you like
Elena looked at him, the corner of her own mouth twitching with the faintest shadow of an iron smile. "Then you'd better make sure he doesn't forget the interest."
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