Page 4 of Out of Sight

But somehow Mario and I both forgot about Antonio’s gun. It went off before Mario could get the front door shut, and Mario collapsed back onto the ground, clutching his left leg with his—well I wouldn’t call it his good hand since it was missing two fingers, but at least it still existed—remaining hand.

“Motherfucker!”Antonio screamed, grabbing Mario by the collar of his shirt and shoving him even farther from the cardoor. “Trying to take my friend Willie-Boy’s car after stealing two grand from the Morellis? What kind of stupid are you?”

He slammed the car door shut and just started kicking the shit out of the man who wouldn’t live another three minutes. I couldn’t do anything without blowing my cover.

I was a coward.

I lost track of how many kicks and stomps and punches Antonio whaled on him. I didn’t want to count. I wanted to be anywhere else. I turned my body away from the scene, cringing at the sickening sound of flesh hitting flesh over and over until Mario didn’t even scream for help anymore.

I didn’t flinch when the gun went off again. I was back in my numb place, trying to get past this horror show of an evening.

“Done!” Antonio smiled brightly as he walked back into my line of sight. He was covered in dark blood. “Oh crap, I think I locked the keys in the car. What do we do now?”

two

Claire

Iwasn’t even supposed to be their secretary.

I worked with computers, not people, but people weren’t hiring nerds to work on their computers after I was laid off. A friend of a friend of a friend suggested a temp agency they worked for, and I managed to score a pretty okay paying job.

The job was at a small law office in downtown San Francisco, an hour away from the Air Force base I grew up on.

I thought Carlo Morelli, the man who ran the office, was adorable: maybe mid-to-late-fifties and just so freaking Italian that I didn’t even feel bad stereotyping him. Thick Long Island accent (even on the wrong coast), the reverence for Mama’s cooking, ostentatious gold jewelry, and most especially a penchant for old mobstery clothes like track suits half the time and sleek pinstriped suits the other half.

His younger half-brother was a twenty-something year younger carbon copy and junior partner in the law office: theoffspring of the late Mr. Morelli and his much-younger second wife.

I felt like a twenty-eight-year-old Nonna, shaking my head in amusement as Angelo Morelli let out loud threats or Carlo Morelli whispered soft words of violence against whoever was on the other line of the phone. I didn’t believe a word of it. Carlo was just such cute old man!

Who would ever believe this guy was the real deal when I also transferred calls to him from his spoiled sister, or confirmed the flower delivery to his daughter every Wednesday and his mother every Sunday?

I made the Morellis think they didn’t need to be careful around me, smiling at their savage insults and brutal threats. They thought… I didn’t know what they thought of me. Whatever they thought, it meant that I was trustworthy enough for them to start leaving office doors open more often, letting me hear so much more than I ever should have.

I’d been working there about a month and a half before it clicked what the Morellis were really into. I was at home, slurping up some midnight lo mein in my usual oh-so-dignified way and browsing the news app on my phone.

Body Found Partially Dismembered in Local Park.

What the hell?

Being the morbid modern woman that I was, I read the article in detail. One ear cut off. Several fingers off one hand, and the whole hand gone at the wrist on the other side. Bluntforce trauma all over the body, two busted kneecaps, a gunshot wound to the left thigh, and another one execution style between the eyes. He’d been dead less than a couple hours, the body found by a man going on a late night walk his dog. There were no leads.

An uneasy tingle went up my spine as I remembered what Angelo Morelli said on the phone earlier.

I’ll take his fingers one by one until he begs me to take his fucking hands…

Something told me that the body in the park was Mario Costa, wayward client of the Morelli brothers. Mario ran a laundromat just outside the financial district and used Morelli & Morelli as his business attorneys for the last six years before business started going south and he was unable to pay his retainer. I’d seen his account in arrears the last couple weeks as I updated our bookkeeping software.

I wanted to quit. Immediately. I wanted to hide and never go back to work ever again.

So I called the Colonel’s office to leave a message, then did the idiotic thing and decided to go back into the office the next day.

I spent the entirety of the night racking my brain, forcing it to remember every piece of information and every detail I’d overheard in the last six weeks. I took a notebook full of notes on phone calls, names, dates of meetings, weird invoices, and violent threats—anything and everything that might be of use. Then I spent the early morning hours before work quietly browsing the news sites to confirm whether or not these other verbally abused men were actually harmed in some way.

Every one of them were either reported missing or showed up as a body dumped somewhere unsavory.

At the office in the morning I kept my cool, doing my normal daily tasks until I finally had a moment to myself. Then I hacked into the Morelli private files—because not everything you learn in college comes from the professors—while they were out to lunch and got more than enough information to confirm I was working for criminals. The mob? Mafia? Whatever they called themselves these days, I gathered plenty of evidence to put the law firm under suspicion for the recent dead body found in the park, several other missing persons, and anyone they associated themselves with, especially anything in the files on William “Willie-Boy” Bracco since he seemed to be their personal mercenary, murdering men like Mario Costa when told to.

But that wasn’t good enough for me; years of parental disappointment taught me the harsh lesson that just doing good wasn’t good enough. I had to risk everything and work harder than ninety-nine percent of other people if I wanted to feel a sense of achievement.

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