Tom Piccirilli - Headstone City

The stink grew worse, but there was also a pleasant aroma of fresh struffoli and sfogliatelle wafting in from the back room. Dane eyed the scarred knuckles, wavering, praying the guy would just die already. “Please-please… am… ambulance-”

“Don't let that piece of shit bother you,” JoJo told him. “Listen, I need you to do something for me.”

The gun barrel eased into an angle, leveled directly at Dane's guts. Dane said, “Threatening me isn't going to help you much at this point.”

The.32 steered away and pointed toward the far wall again. “Sorry about that. Bad habit.” JoJo grinned, his teeth smeared with bile. “I suppose all my vices have about run out to the end.”

“Jesus, you gotta help-” The hand wrapped itself weakly around Dane's cuff, those ragged, dirty fingernails clawing. Dane tugged his foot away.

“I need you to give a message to Maria Monticelli for me,” JoJo said. “You know her?”

“Yeah.”

Dane had been in love with Maria since he was about seven. Every guy his age had been and maybe still was. A soft tragedy welled inside him at just the mention of her name. And Angelina had looked so much like her.

JoJo was fading fast, but he tightened his face against the pain. He reached his blood-smeared fingertips into his jacket pocket and came out with a satin box.

“I'll pay you ten grand to tell her I love her. That I've always loved her. You give her this.”

“A ring?”

“An engagement ring. I planned on asking her to marry me.”

“I don't mean to bring you farther down, JoJo… but why's it matter now?”

That made the dying man chuckle until his lips were flecked with bubbling red froth. He strained to keep his voice under control. “I've been carrying this engagement ring around for six months but I never managed to get up the nerve to give it to her. I've meant to propose… seriously, you know, doing the whole down on one knee bit… three or four times, but something always threw me off track. Some deal that had to be done or another enterprise. But I always loved her. I don't want to kick without her knowing… for certain.”

“Isn't that the kind of thing she'd already know?”

“Probably, but it always went unsaid. I finally want to say it to her.”

Dane let it go by that JoJo wasn't going to be able to tell her anything much in another five minutes.

“We all got one thing in the world that we love more… than anything else, Danetello. That makes us do… what we do… makes us who we are. You understand that?”

“Yeah.”

“I've got the money on me. A hundred c-note bills. A deadbeat sold his house and finally paid off the vig from three weeks ago. You give me your word of honor you'll tell her for me, and it's yours.”

Dane looked over at the killer, who was still on the floor plying his guts, pulling out pieces and moaning in torment. “Isn't Don Monticelli the one who sent him?”

“Nah, not the Don. Probably Roberto. That bastard never liked me. It's all so stupid. Not even about business.”

“Because of Maria?”

JoJo's eyes opened wide and he shook his head as if he still couldn't quite believe what had brought him to this. “Yeah. He wants her to marry a dentist. Or a podiatrist like her sister Carmella did. I worked a lot of good deals between them and the Ventimiglias. For ten years I've been making money for them, good enough to hand over… green bundles that could choke a cow. But because I walk in his father's footsteps… I'm not good enough for his sister. The hypocritical stugots. ”

It was like a scene out of Romeo and Juliet. Dane had never read the play but he knew it didn't end well.

JoJo gave an agonized leer. “You're smart, and you're a little pazzo. I'm glad. You'll get the job done.”

“It might take me a while. I got some other pressing matters. What makes you think she'll talk to me?”

“The rest of us, we know you were only trying to help Angelina. Maria… she'll listen.”

That sent a buzz through Dane's chest, his heart rate picking up speed at the sound of her name. “You think so?” It came out almost joyful, hoping that Maria was the one person in the family who didn't hate Dane's guts anymore.

“Sure-”

“What can you tell me about what's been going on in the Monti family since I went away? The feds have been sniffing around.”

JoJo let out a dry laugh. Wheezing harshly, at least one lung collapsing. “Heard you nearly got clipped your… last day in the joint.”

“Something's been stirring them up. What is it?”

“Dunno, but your friend Vinny… he thinks he's the new Bugsy Siegel.”

“What do you mean? He wants to start up in Vegas?”

A clot of ruby dark blood poured over JoJo's bottom lip. “You… haven't given me your word. I want… it… your oath…”

“I'll tell her,” Dane said.

JoJo reached inside the folded newspaper and pulled out an envelope stuffed with cash. He started to rise, like he wanted to die on his feet, then fell over backwards. He hit the floor hard with a crack and his death rattle lurched loose. Dane looked over at the Monti hitter on the floor and noticed he was dead too.

The baker's girl stood there gasping with tears tracking her cheeks. When Dane said, “Go get the cops,” she finally broke into motion and ran out onto the street.

Dane took the money and the diamond ring, thinking of Maria's exquisite face, and the sorrow of his life.

His myths were quiet ones without heroes, where the storms broke wide and heavy across the lawns of churches, and neighbors hid in their homes full of small tragedies.

Dane had always been too observant for his own good. He could clock the passing of time by the divorces down the block. The swelling bellies of his schoolmates. Those who went missing, one by one, down through the yearbooks. Who drowned off Fire Island, and which one died in a car crash over on the Major Deegan. And how she died on this surgeon's table, and she died on that one, and she was the first girl he ever felt up, who died a year ago from ovarian cancer.

Dane hadn't hung around the bakery waiting for the cops. He expected them to find him by the end of the day, but they never came to see him. It made him wonder, were they just sloppy, or had the baker girl been too out of it to identify him? Or were the feds on to this too, and already had him under surveillance? Bugged?

Now that he was back in Brooklyn, he didn't want to leave. It stirred too much inside him, kept his head alive with memories that made him bark laughter for no reason. It wasn't so much the going away as it was the constant coming back.

When he was a kid, every Friday afternoon Grandma Lucia would send him down to Fielding's market for the same order. First time he did it, he was about eight. He clenched the cash tightly in his fist, walked the four blocks to the store. She'd made him recite the order about ten times before he left, and he'd let Mr. Fielding have it word for word. “Gimme two portions of shrimp, two of potatoes, three fillets and don't burn them.”

But Mr. Fielding screwed him up and asked, “How about fish cakes?”

“What?”

“Your Grandma Lucia want some fresh fish cakes? I bet she does. She loves my fish cakes!”

Dane frowned and repeated the order like he'd been drilled, feeling the squeamishness of terror filling his stomach.

“Is she sick?”

“No.”

“She always orders the fish cakes, every week the past thirty years. What's this? You don't look after your poor grandmother? She's so sick she doesn't order fish cakes and you're just standing there?”