Page 74 of Possession

He’s watching me warily, though he hasn’t yet said anything to me. In fact, this is the first time I’ve seen him since the night I killed Crowley in the boxing gym locker room. No word has been uttered between us in four years.

He says, “So. You’re alive.”

My hand tightens on my glass.

Vitali says, saving me, “This is what we need to talk about.” He slides a tablet across the bar, situating it between me and Anton.

The screen shows a man, neither young nor old, sitting on a café patio. He’s carefully nondescript and subtly covert in his jeans and jacket. A black ballcap and sunglasses partially obscure his face.

“Who the hell is that?” Anton asks.

“That’s FBI Special Agent Martin Cohen,” Vitali reports. “Head of the Boston field office.”

“So?” Anton challenges.

“So.” Vitali swipes to another image of Cohen at the café but now seated with—

“Fucking Gavino DiMaggio,” Anton grumbles.

Gavino is the head of the DiMaggio family. Vitali has caught me up on our longstanding feud. The tension between our families goes back generations, but our father and Gavino worked out a truce with a territory division. That truce collapsed when I was captured.

Vitali has started asking me for details about that night, but I’m still locked out of that part of my memory.

“Who took these pictures?” Anton asks.

“One of my men,” Vitali answers. “I increased surveillance on the DiMaggios as soon as Roman … came back. I’ve now put two men on Cohen.”

Anton shakes his head. “Pull them back. I don’t want our men sitting on their asses when we’re already shorthanded from last month’s attack on our west side crew.”

“I’m not pulling them back. We need to know Cohen’s involvement with the DiMaggios. In fact, we need to get into his computer, into his phone, into his shit, so we can be prepared—”

“He’s a dirty agent, so what?” Anton cuts in. “Throw a stone in this city and you’re bound to hit one. We’ve got a dozen in our own pockets.”

As Vitali and Anton continue to argue, their words stop reaching me. Ihearthem, but my brain stops attaching any meaning.

In the same way, I still see where I am, but I feel distant from it, like I’m retreating into some space inside myself. The problem is that everything inside myself—past and present events, past and present emotions—is tangled as fuck.

Maybe that’s why I find myself lifting my tumbler of whiskey to my lips—a force of long-dormant habit.

The smell hits me first, a little sweet, a little sharp. Then the liquor stings my tongue and burns my nostrils.

I hear the familiar voices.

I see the lights glowing through the bottles on the shelves behind the bar.

My thoughts, already tangled, start spinning too fast to make sense of, so fast that the unsettled, queasy feeling I’ve had for hours intensifies until saliva pools in my mouth.

That should be a warning to me, but it’s not. I have no idea what’s going to happen until my stomach heaves.

I turn abruptly aside. As I throw up, I hear shouting. I see movement. But it’s when a stool bangs to the floor like a gunshot that I yank my pistol from the holster at the small of my back.

A figure launches over the bar, tackling me before I can take aim. The gun flies out of my grip as I’m slammed to the floor. I go instantly into fight mode.

My opponent is fast and vicious, jabbing me in the side as a distraction, twisting around behind me to go for a chokehold. I get up enough to shoulder toss him. He slams to the floor. I punch him in the face.

Guards swarm in to break up the fight, but it makes no sense. The fight isn’t over. I don’t get out of the ring until it’s done. Guns are leveled at me. For some reason, my opponent is shouting at them to not shoot.

Give him a second! Don’t fucking shoot!

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