Page 72 of The Enforcer's Revenge
Tino might be dead, but he knew that much.
Maybe he’d find those bastards in hell.
“Is he dead?” Nova’s voice, loud and terrified, started to wake Tino up a little bit. The gears began churning out of necessity because Nova sounded like he was going to keel over from a heart attack as he shouted, “Did I fucking kill him?”
Lola smacked Tino again, harder this time, and suddenly, pain exploded in his head.
Blonde Lola was mean.
He grunted and touched his temple as he rolled over, realizing now he was lying with his head in Mean Lola’s lap in the back of the Bentley.
“He’s not dead,” she announced.
It started rushing back at Tino too fast. This felt like waking up in the shower when he was twelve. Why the hell did he want to be here in this shit storm?
“What about the other guy?” Tino’s voice sounded scratchy even to him.
She frowned at him. “Huh?”
“Your bouncer?”
“Oh, he wasn’t so lucky.” She didn’t seem too broken up about it.
Tino sat up. He didn’t feel comfortable having his head in her lap. He knew now it was Carmen, not Lola, but the wires were all trying to rearrange themselves in his brain. He got the key information first. Brianna at home. Lola dead. Nova killing someone out in the open for anyone to see.
“Are you okay?” Nova asked Tino frantically in Italian and reached back from his seat behind the wheel, grabbing Tino’s knee like he needed to touch him.
“No, I’m not okay!” Tino reached forward and smacked Nova’s head. “What the fuck, Casanova?”
“I know!” Nova shouted, not sounding nearly as apologetic as he should. “But she was supposed to be protected! Hurting her is like spitting in my fucking face!”
Tino touched his temple again, feeling for blood as they drove over the bridge from Tampa toward their hotel on the Gulf of Mexico. It felt like his skull was cracked open, but he didn’t seem to be bleeding.
He looked at his shirt under the flashes of streetlights, seeing the stain of red on his clothes. He turned to Carmen, really studying her, because her dress was stained, too.
Tino beat on people for a living, and he knew something wasn’t right. If they left the dead guy behind, where was all this blood coming from?
Why was it on Carmen?
He highly doubted she touched the dead bouncer while Tino was out. Wasn’t she in the car when it all went down?
“Are you hurt?” Tino asked her.
She stared down at herself, and it was obvious she was in shock, too. Life had coldcocked her far more forcefully than the 9mm that got Tino. She still hadn’t cried. Instead, she had a horrible, dazed look in her eyes, as if her life suddenly became too horrific for her brain to process.
“I don’t think so.” She pulled at her dress, staring at a large crimson spot. “But where did it come from?”
It wasn’t just the blinding headache.
There was a very important key to this puzzle missing.
The streetlights kept flashing faster and faster in the car when Nova took his anger out on the gas pedal, casting quick, haunting shadows over Carmen’s beautiful features.
“They were fucking selling her! That was against the agreement!” Nova was still raging. “The bastardi are protected by me! They’re protected by our entire Borgata! I had every fucking right to end that motherfucker!”
“Where’s the blood coming from?” Tino asked as a frantic need to know rose to the surface like a freight train. It felt cardinal to survival. As desperately as he would’ve fought for air if it were being stolen from him, that was how badly he needed to know. “Why are we covered in blood? I’m not bleeding! She’s not bleeding! Where’s it coming from?” He pulled at his shirt again, staring at the splashes of red. “Where the fuck is it coming from?”
Something about Tino’s raw terror must’ve broken through the rage. Nova pulled off the road into a weird clearing towardthe end of the bridge. Dark, ominous mangroves rose around them on either side, and Tino realized the car was parked on the banks of the intercoastal. He could hear the slow, steady splash of small waves over the hum of cars still driving by on the bridge.
