Aaron Elkins: Good Blood

As for the blue Honda that had caused it all, it had managed to scoot out of the way back into its lane and was long gone.

The two constables were running toward the driver before the truck tire had finished sinking into the soft earth. “Hey there, are you all right? Are you hurt?” Officer Giuseppe di Paolo called up to him.

The poorly shaven, gray-mustached man raised his head from the steering wheel, looking shell-shocked. “All right? Yes… it wasn’t my fault… there was a car…”

“We saw, we saw,” the officer said. “Did you get the license plate?”

“No, I couldn’t… it was… no.”

At this point Officer Gualtiero Favaretto asserted his natural authority (he was senior by four months) and took charge. “You,” he commanded the driver, “sit there a minute, make sure you’re not injured. Then go inside at once and tell them what happened.” His tone grew more somber. “You’d better ask for Comandante Boldini.”

The driver nodded wanly. “Yes, sir.”

Favaretto turned to his partner. “Giuseppe, this is going to create the mother of all snarls. Nobody’s going to be able to get through town. I’ll do what I can to get started cleaning up here. You better go in and tell them we need to put somebody out on the Corso up by the Regina Palace, and somebody else down at the Villa Palavicino turnoff, to divert traffic.”

Di Paolo started docilely in, then stopped and gestured vaguely in the direction of the warren of narrow, winding alleys and pedestrian streets that constituted Stresa. And in the other direction was the lake. The only avenue of any substance in the town was the Corso itself. “Divert to where?”

“That,” Favaretto replied magisterially, “is their problem. And Giuseppe,” he added, waving at the obstructed police lot, “tell him they’ll have to get there on foot. There will be no vehicles leaving here for some time to come.”

Enrico Dellochio saw the whole thing too; unfortunately for him, from the best seat in the house-behind the wheel of the dove-gray, perfectly kept-up 1978 Daimler limousine that had been trailing the flatbed truck. He’d been stuck in its wake for three blocks, ever since the lumbering flatbed had turned unexpectedly out of Via Prini and cut directly in front of them, forcing him to jam on his brakes and bringing a petulant complaint from Achille de Grazia in the back seat. Enrico would ordinarily have had his suspicions about a truck cutting them off like that, but an empty flatbed with nobody visible in it but the driver? Not much threat there. Still, he checked the rearview mirror to satisfy himself that no one had come up behind to hem them in. No, nothing, just some tourist on a rented moped, driving with the frozen concentration of a man who wished he was anywhere but on it.

Enrico had spotted the blue Honda coming toward them, darting in and out of traffic like a bug, apparently well before the truck driver had. By the time the big rig’s brake lights flashed on, Enrico had already eased the limo to a gentle, anticipatory standstill. He watched with a mixture of satisfaction and disgust-he hated idiot drivers-as the rig made the disastrous, swerving, locked-brake attempt at a stop that would leave it splayed like a beached whale across the full breadth of the Corso Italia. Meanwhile, here came the Honda, picking up speed as it slipped by the careening flatbed and getting back into its own lane barely in time to avoid the now stationary Daimler. It scooted by, gunning its engine, its rear end shimmying, and with maybe ten inches to spare. If they’d both been standing still, he could have reached out and grabbed the Honda’s driver by the neck, which he wouldn’t have minded doing.

“Crazy bastard!” Enrico shouted after him, applying the appropriate finger arrangement.

“Let’s not have any of that,” came the adenoidal injunction from the backseat.

Enrico muttered to himself. He still tried to think of Achille as a polite, quiet kid who respected his elders, but that had been years ago, when Enrico had first started work for the boy’s father, Vincenzo de Grazia, and it had been a misapprehension at the time. Since then, he’d come to know Achille only too well as the snotty, overbearing little turd he was. So much for what being born to a life of privilege could do for a kid.

“Sorry, sir,” Enrico said politely. “I couldn’t help myself.”

It had been a few months now since Achille had suggested that Enrico address him as “sir,” even in private, and it still rankled. Enrico was fifty-one years old, for Christ’s sake. What was Achille, sixteen? And age differences aside, Enrico didn’t take kindly to calling someone wearing a Hootie and the Blowfish T-shirt “sir.”

By now the boy had taken in the mess in front of them. “Oh, no, I don’t believe it. Can we squeeze around that?”

“Not a chance,” Enrico said. “Sir.”

“Well, what are you going to do? My French class starts in twenty minutes. My father will kill me if I miss another one. You better think of something, or you’re in big trouble, Enrico, I’m telling you.”

That was another thing that got to him-this empty, pointless, throwing around of his puny weight-but Enrico had lots of practice repressing the urge to give the kid a whack across the chops. “It won’t be a problem, sir. That lane on our right, that’s Via Principe Tomaso. We can-”

“That’s a pedestrian street, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes, technically, but it’s early, the crowds aren’t out yet, we can get away with it. There are only a couple of tight corners. Principe Tomaso takes us up a block to Via Ottolini, where we can do a short left on Via Mazzini, which-”

“All right, all right, do it. Jesus Christ.”

“I have to back up a little first.”

Enrico stuck his head and arms out the window and made pushing motions with his hands. The moped driver was slow to understand, but finally rolled back a few feet. Enrico waved his thanks, reversed for a few feet, and turned up Via Principe Tomaso, a cobblestoned alley that ran between the sides and backs of buildings that faced the Corso, and was only just wide enough for the Daimler. Instinctively he glanced up at the mirror to see if anybody was following, but there was no one. There wouldn’t be many people who’d be aware that you could get back onto the Corso by circling around this way. Fifty yards up the street, he turned into the equally narrow, equally empty Via Ottolini, edged cautiously around the planter boxes set out in front of the Hotel da Cesare, jogged around the blind corner at the intersection of Via Mazzini (where a surprised grocer setting his wares out on the pavement grumblingly made room for him to pass), eased with care onto Via Garibaldi-

“Enrico, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Yes, I know what I’m doing.” Achille had been in a fouler mood than usual from the start this morning, and Enrico, who was supposed to have had a day off today, was starting to feel a little testy himself. “Don’t get excited, we’ll be back out on the road in two minutes. All we have to do is turn left on Via Rosmini there.”

“Then why are we just sitting here?”

Then why don’t you look out the damn window and see? “There’s a car in our way, sir. That Audi up ahead, it’s blocking Rosmini. It just backed out of the church parking lot, and it takes a while to get straightened out in these little alleys.”

Achille said something but Enrico didn’t hear. He had made another one of his automatic rearview mirror checks and this time there was something there; a gray Opel hatchback with one man in it had drawn up behind them, no more than ten yards away.

Now they were blocked front and back. An edgy little prickle slid up the nape of his neck. Not that there was anything really unusual about the situation-this kind of thing was bound to happen all the time on Stresa’s constricted old streets, and often did-but it was exactly the kind of predicament that he wasn’t supposed to get into, the kind of predicament he was paid to avoid: a narrow, virtually windowless alley hemmed in by walls of stone and stucco, a car in front and a car behind, and no room to get by either one of them.