Page 83 of Irish Brute
He laughs. “Where you will go yourself, of course. The proper place for killers like us.”
And just like that, I’m back on the mountain road.
Giorgia is lying down in the back seat, her head in Gianni’s lap. They’re even more drunk than I am, too far gone to manage their seatbelts. They’ve rolled down the windows, hoping fresh air will sober all of us up before we get home.
A man darts out of the ditch beside the road, so bent over that at first I think he’s a dog. The impact knocks the steering wheel out of my hands, and the car skids out of control.
I pound on the brakes, but the car’s already halfway off the mountain road. I yank the wheel as hard as I can, and we don’t go over the cliff. But the wheels lurch over the man, the one I barely saw.
The car flies over the ditch on the uphill side. It rolls twice before it smashes into a massive oak tree.
I black out.
When I come to, Gianni’s sprawled across the back seat, lying on his stomach with his eyes staring at the ceiling. That’s not right. That’s not the way necks work. Eyes don’t work that way either. They need to blink. Gianni’s not blinking.
I start to scream.
It takes forever to figure out how to undo my seatbelt. And even longer before I find Giorgia at the bottom of the ditch, face-down in an ankle-deep puddle. When I roll her over, her face looks black in the moonlight.
She’s dead too.
I struggle up to the road. The man is there, dragged almost to the edge by the wheels of my car. His back… His legs… There’s clearly no need to check for a pulse.
What’s left of his toothless mouth smells like a still. His hair is a solid mat of grease. His sweat-stained shirt reeks of a body odor so sharp my eyes water.
I dig in his bloodied pockets to find out who he is. He has two dollars and twenty-seven cents, all in change.
No wallet. No keys. No ID.
“He lurched in front of me,” I say now, in the safety of the Rittenhouse lobby. “No one could have stopped. He came too fast.”
“Of course,” Russo says conversationally. “Youweredrunk.”
It was a graduation party. We all had too much to drink before the boys and girls started pairing off. Giorgia and Gianni wanted to stay, but I insisted on going home. I wanted tocollapse in my own bed, to sleep off the peach schnapps and the watermelon vodka, the cheap champagne and the joint we passed around.
“No one could have stopped in time.” I insist, because it’s important. “I couldn’t— He wouldn’t— I didn’t?—”
Russo picks up the narration, as if he’s my ally. “Elisabetta had a car. A gift from me. She drove up the mountain to help you.”
I had my whole life ahead of me. So much potential. I could be more than the orphaned brat the Cannas took in. More than the best friend Eliza needed when she married her don. More than the mindless wife Holy Family trained me to be.
I could be so much more.
“Elisabetta learned so much, sitting at my dining room table.” Russo sounds proud, more like a father boasting about a daughter’s college GPA than a husband describing a bride who mastered handling bodies. “Was it her idea to put Gianni behind the wheel? Or was it yours?”
After her initial shock, Eliza suggested it. Giorgia and Gianni were already dead. She couldn’t stand to lose me too. And no lie we told mattered. It only had to look good enough for a bought-off country sheriff to accept.
Because Eliza learned that from Russo too. She arrived at the mountain with stacks of hundred-dollar bills. She said it was her allowance. She said it was our secret.
“Elisabetta gave you money and told you to flee. Your story might have fallen apart if your Zia Sara was still alive, but she wasn’t there to mourn her twins. No one watched the Canna family. Not after Elisabetta was mine.”
I told Eliza it would never work.Someonewould track down Giovanna Canna.
But no one bothered. No one came to New York.
So I became Samantha Mott—a law student, then a lawyer, then a success. I had everything under control. My world was clear, in simple black and white. I didn’t need anything else. I didn’tdeserveanything else—no soft colors, no lace, no ribbons, no bows.
Russo says, “A wise man keeps records. Mileage logs from his wife’s car, for example. Do you know how many fibers show up after a crash like that? How many long, black hairs can be trapped in a headrest? You know fingerprints can identify a person holding a steering wheel. But did you know they can prove that person used marijuana?”
