Page 51 of Bastard Prince
“Sure thing,” he answered sincerely. “But I don’t like you going without me.”
“I won’t be alone, Vin. But I appreciate the sentiment. I’ll miss you, too.” I nudged him with my shoulder, my smaller size barely making him shift. “We make a pretty great team, you and me.”
“We sure do.” Opening the car door, Vinnie looked at me seriously. “Be safe, Frankie.”
“I will. Thank you.”
Rocco and I chatted on the drive, him filling me in on the status of the explosion atWrathand everything the police and fire marshal had to say.
“It should all blow over fine,” Rocco said confidently. “Enzo contributes nicely to the Police and Fire charity funds every year. He sponsored their annual Ride for Cancer event last year, so he’s got some friends in all the right paces.”
“Well, that’s good, then. But what about the van? The one I saw leaving the parking lot? I’m pretty sure it’s the same one that tried to flatten me in the parking garage.”
“We’ve got people looking into that, too.” Rock turned to me, his face solemn. “We’ll find them, Francesca. I promise.”
I smiled, touched by his determination. I knew Enzo was committed to me, but to hear from Rocco that he was concerned meant something to me. It meant acceptance, which was something I had never really felt before.
“So,” I said, ready to lighten the mood, “tell me about the mysterious Shed.”
Rock laughed. “It’s literally a shed. Well, more like what you’d call a hanger, really.” Rock continued to talk as we drove farther and farther into the empty desert. “You know, your man is a lot of things, but I gotta say, his eye for real estate is fucking incredible.”
Rocco pointed out into the dark and empty land surrounding the vacant highway we traveled down. “Back in the fifties, the government used all the open desert from here to Tucson for nuclear bomb testing. Can you believe that shit? They saw the mess those bombs made in 1945 and thought, what the hell? Let’s give it a try?” He gave a humorless laugh. “Anyway, between that and the panic of the Cold War, the desert around these parts is full of abandoned military bunkers, missile silos, and other things that make for pretty fantastic hiding places, for the right price.”
“And what was the right price?” I asked, picturing a broken-down building infested with rats and spiders.
“He scooped it for less than half a million.” Rocco was beaming, but I wasn’t convinced. The place sounded terrible. But I guess for the purpose it served, it was probably perfect.
We continued to drive out into the night, the darkness on this part of the highway so all encompassing that the world outside the glow of the headlights seemed to have disappeared completely. Rocco took one turn after another, with each road getting less and less well-maintained, before I finally saw something. Up ahead, in the pale light of the moon, I could see a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. The fence seemed to go on and on in each direction, with a squat, square building on the other side, fairly far from where we stopped at the gate.
“This land is all his?” I asked, staring out my window as the fence disappeared from sight.
“Five acres of formerly government owned Nevada desert. You have any idea what it costs to fence five acres? That shit took ages to arrange.”
Rocco put the car in park and climbed out, strolling over to the chain link gate and inserting a key. Once he had rolled the gate open, he got back in and moved the car forward, then repeated the process to close the gate behind us. After that, it was only a little farther until we reached the building, which really did look more like a moderate sized airplane hanger than a shed. Rock pressed a button on my visor and the garage style door on one side of the building opened wide. He pulled into an empty space, parking beside Enzo’s Audi and a couple of other vehicles I didn’t recognize, then closed the door and exited the car. Following Rocco to the door, he flipped up a panel and entered a code, waiting until the light above the numbers turned to green before opening the door and ushering me inside.
The door clanged shut behind me as I stared around in awe. The building was nothing at all like I expected, with its clean lines and poured concrete floor. The place was huge and well lit, with a section near the door that held a small kitchenette and seating area with a television and a couple of couches as well as a desk and computer station. On the far side of the space was an actual airplane, which honestly surprised me.
“Is Enzo also a pilot?” I asked, feeling stupid for not knowing this information about my own husband.
“Nah.” Rock shrugged. “That baby is all mine.”
“Impressive.”
“You should have seen this place when we first picked it up. It was literally just a hole in the ground.” Rocco pointed to the section of floor behind the plane, a spot about twelve feet by twelve feet square that looked like it was covered in metal sheeting split into even sections like a tic-tac-toe board. “Enzo constructed this entire building over the entrance, trying to disguise it as much as possible. Now it just looks like it’s for the plumbing or something.” Reaching down at one section, he lifted a latch and twisted, the sound of metal on metal loud in the quiet room. He hefted the hatch open, revealing a set of iron stairs that descended down into the darkness.
“This is starting to feel like a Bruce Willis movie or something, Rocco.” I laughed, albeit a bit nervously.
“It was even sketchier before we renovated. It’s perfectly acceptable, boss lady, I promise.”
Swallowing hard, I stepped past him and started down the stairs, my boots heavy on the steps. As I reached the first landing, Rock followed, closing the hatch behind him, and we were plunged again into darkness. It only lasted for a moment, though, because he flipped a switch and we were flooded by severe industrial lighting, strips built into the ceiling above us giving off a low hum.
“How far down does it go?” I asked, looking over the railing. There were at least two more levels that I could see from here, but I noticed doors leading off of each landing.
“The stairwell is about forty feet deep, I think,” he answered, his voice bouncing off the thick concrete walls. “There are other sections that go deeper, but we don’t really use those.” We reached the bottom of the fourth flight of stairs and came to what could only be described as a hatchway, the rounded corners of the door like something you’d see on a submarine.
“This was the original crew passage when they were actively housing a nuclear warhead in this space.” As he opened the door, I could see that it was ridiculously thick and heavy. “This door leads to the personal areas, and so they built it to literally withstand a fuckin’ atom bomb. The concrete walls are like three feet thick all around us.”
Following Rock through the door and down another hall, we came to a second door, this one much less substantial. We entered a living area, like a small dorm or something. I could see a row of bunk beds through the archway across from us, the entire place screaming with military precision.
