Chapter 4 - The Black Caravan
The fifteen minutes did not pass like time; they passed like water rising in a cellar.
I didn't pack a bag. I didn't try to hide the birth certificates or the nursing license I had purchased for twelve hundred dollars from an old Greek engraver in Astoria who had died of a stroke three winters ago. If Dante Moretti was coming to Elm Street, there was no suitcase big enough to hold the life I was leaving behind, and there was no corner of this country far enough away to keep him from finding the grandmother’s aluminum pot if he chose to look for it.
I took Oliver’s gray wool coat down from the radiator hook. It was dry now, the velvet collar soft beneath my fingers, though the smell of the river rain still clung to the fibers like grease.
"Put your arms in, Oliver," I said.
He stood up from the stool without a word, his small shoulders slipping into the silk-lined sleeves with the easy, mechanical obedience of a child who had spent his life being moved from one secure location to another by men in black suits.
"Are we going to the hotel now?" he asked, looking up at me as I zipped the front closure.
"Your dad is coming to get you, sweetheart," I said, my hand resting for a second on his wet, dark hair. "He's outside right now."
The sound came from the end of the block—not the sound of an engine, but the low, collective rumble of six heavy vehicles moving through the standing water of Elm Street at thirty miles per hour. It was a rhythmic, heavy sloshing, followed immediately by the sharp, metallic crunch of six heavy tires climbing the curb by the industrial fence.
Emma ran to the kitchen window, her small hands pressing against the glass until her nose left a white mark on the pane. "Mommy! There are the big cars! The black ones with the dark windows like the movies!"
I walked into the hallway, my hand opening the top deadbolt, then the second, then sliding the brass chain out of its track. I didn't wait for him to knock three times this time. I pulled the heavy oak door open into the rain.
The street was gone.
Six Cadillac Escalades, all of them finished in a deep, non-reflective midnight black with smoked glass panels that blocked any view of the interior, had formed a perfect, overlapping semi-circle around my small patch of dead grass. Their engines were still running, a collective, six-cylinder growl that vibrated through the floorboards of my porch and turned the rain on the asphalt into a white mist from the exhaust pipes.
The doors of the lead vehicle opened first.
Four men stepped out into the rain. They didn't look like the drivers from the old days—the ones who wore leather jackets and track trousers from the sporting goods store on Broadway. They wore tailored black overcoats over dark gray suits, their ties pulled tight against their collars, their right hands tucked inside their pockets with that flat, unmoving stillness that meant they were holding thirty-eight-caliber extended magazines against their ribs.
They didn't look at the house. They didn't look at the vinyl siding or the frosted globe of the porch light. They took their positions along the perimeter of the sidewalk, their faces turned toward the dark corners of the railyard as if they were expecting a crew from New Jersey to rise out of the weeds.
Then the rear door of the second Escalade opened.
Dante Moretti walked into the light of my yellow sixty-watt bulb.
He was thirty-four now, but he looked forty. His face was leaner than I remembered, the skin over his cheekbones tight and gray from lack of sleep, and the small scar near his left eye had turned a stark, solid white against his tan. He wasn't wearing a coat; his black silk shirt was open at the collar, the rain soaking through the fabric within three steps of the running board until the silk clung to the heavy, square line of his shoulders like skin.
In his right hand, he carried a short, black automatic rifle—a Sig Sauer MCX with a folded stock and a short barrel that had been stripped of its serial markings by an industrial file. He didn't hold it like a man who was trying to scare someone; he held it down by his thigh, his index finger straight along the receiver, his thumb resting on the safety switch with the casual familiarity of a soldier who had spent the last five hours in a trench.
He stopped at the bottom of my three wooden steps, his leather boots sitting in the brown sludge of the fallen leaves.
"Oliver," he said.
The boy burst past my legs, his small loafers striking the wood of the porch with a fast, hollow clack-clack-clack as he threw his body down the steps and into the wet silk of his father's shirt.
Dante dropped the rifle into the weeds by the step, his arms coming around his son with an intensity that looked almost violent. He lifted the four-year-old boy off the ground, his face burying into the wet, dark spikes of Oliver's hair, his shoulders shaking once—just once—before his face became hard again under the yellow light.
May you like
"He's clean, Boss," the lead driver said from the sidewalk, his hand never moving from his coat pocket. "The sector is clear. No traffic from the bridge squad."
Dante didn't look at him. He stood up, his son’s legs wrapped tight around his waist, his blue-gray eyes turning upward until they found my face through the rain.
