Page 27 of Played By the Fool

Salvatore stands up in front of him. “Do you know someone named Paul? Or Kathleen?”

“No, who are they?” He finally looks and sees Kali. “What’s going on? Why are you here with these thugs?”

I watch John’s facial expressions as he sits there. I don’t get the feeling that he’s lying.

Kali laughs. “They’re protecting me. They’re not thugs.”

“Of course they are. Look at what that one did to me!” he says while pointing his tied-up hands at Celestino.

Celestino rolls his eyes.

“Are you sure you don’t know who they are?” Salvatore asks again.

“For fuck’s sake. I said no.”

Salvatore tells John what we found out.

“You’re fucking delusional. My mom is Sheila Mulberry.”

“Do you have baby pictures with her? Real baby pictures, from before you were two years old.”

John stops and thinks. “There’s no fucking way. My parents would never do that. You’re saying that my dad walked away from my identical twin brother?”

“We think he’s taken Emilia. Unless it’s you that’s been texting and threatening her,” I snap at him.

“I haven’t done anything. Why would I threaten her?”

“Because you’re a cheating asshole. So we thought it was you that was sending her the texts. And tonight? Someone attacked Frank and kidnapped Emilia,” Kali tells him.

“Baby, I had nothing to do with any of that.”

“I’m not your baby. So stop calling me that.”

“I don’t know anything. Can you at least take the zip ties off? I wouldn’t hurt Emilia.”

“You already did.” I frown.

“And I apologized for all of that. I never meant to hurt Kali or Emilia. If I could take it back I would. Now tell me how I can help find her.”

“You can’t, you don’t know Paul. So you can’t help us find him.”

“Has he hurt Emilia?”

“We don’t know.”

“I found an address. It’s about a twenty-minute drive from here,” Francesco says.

“What are we waiting for? Let’s fucking go! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell but please. We need to go now.”

“We need a plan. We can’t just storm over there without one,” Zio Giacomo says to me.

Salvatore was able to confirm that it’s the house that Kathleen bought when she and Roland divorced. We spend the next half hour forming a plan. The plan is to go in from the front door, the hard part is we’re basing it on a picture of the house from the outside. An hour later, we’re all standing outside of the house. Carmelo and Keegan quietly do a quick walk around the house to look for any other doors. They find one in the back yard. Half of us will go in the front door and the other half through the back door.

Emilia

I pray that Ciarán got my message. I didn’t want him to text me back in case Paul came back. Now I wish I hadn’t told him that.

I hear some noise coming from above me. Voices yelling. Then there’s a few loud popping noises and more yelling. I hear someone yelling my name, it sounds like my Ciarán.

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