Chapter 3
The sound was small — a thin little breath through bloody lips, a twitch of her fingers against the tile. Angela gasped and bent low. “Baby, baby, can you hear me? It’s Ang. You’re okay. The doctor’s coming.” Amelia’s eyelashes fluttered. Her good eye rolled, glassy and unfocused.
Angela sobbed over her, and Vincent Castellano, halfway to the back hallway with one hand on Derek’s back, stopped dead in his tracks.
He turned around, and for the first time that night, his face changed. It softened. Something old and tired and deeply, deeply sad moved across it. He told Paulie to take Derek on, told him he would be there in a minute, and walked back across the diner floor slow and careful, the way a man walks in church, and knelt on one knee beside Amelia Hayes.
He did not touch her. He did not have the right to touch her, and he knew it. “Miss,” he said. “My name is Vincent. I own this diner.
Can you hear me?” She blinked at him. He told her a doctor was coming, two minutes away; that she was not going to a hospital in a city ambulance but in his car, to a place where nobody would bother her and nobody would send her a bill.
“I can’t afford—” “Miss,” he said, and his voice cracked just slightly on the word. “You are not paying for a single thing. Not tonight. Not ever.” A tear came out of the corner of her eye and ran sideways into her hair. “Who are you?” she whispered. “I’m the man who’s sorry, miss. I’m the man who’s sorry this happened on my floor.”
She mumbled something about her tables, and Angela told her they were taken care of.
She said it was cold, and Vincent took off his long black coat — the coat every regular had only ever seen him in — and laid it across her from shoulder to knee like a blanket.
Dr. Russo came hurrying through the back door, a short bald man with a leather bag, and dropped to his knees without a word.
Vincent stood up and looked down at the small, bloodied woman sleeping under his coat on the floor of his diner, and not one person in that room could read the look on his face.
Then he turned toward the back hallway. “Tony. Get me Joey Moretti on the phone. Right now.”
The back room of Castellano’s had one light bulb, burning since 1987, and smelled of old coffee and older secrets. Derek Lawson was already in the chair when Vincent walked in; Paulie had put him there, and Paulie had not needed to tie him down. Derek was done fighting.
He sat with his shoulders curled and his knees together, both hands clenched in his lap, the way a schoolboy sits outside the principal’s office.
Vincent sent Paulie to the car, pulled out the second chair, turned it around backward, and sat down with his forearms folded across the back of it. He did not look angry.
That was the worst part. He looked like a man who had already made every decision he was going to make tonight and was only here now to see whether Derek would make it easier or harder on himself.
“Tony’s getting Joey on the phone right now, son.” Derek nodded, a single jerky nod.
“You understand what that means?” “It means Joey’s going to decide whether I come home tonight.” Vincent nodded slowly.
“That’s right. Joey decides, not me. Because I am a man who keeps his word. Thirty years ago I gave Joey Moretti my word that I do not touch a Moretti man without his blessing.
Even when the Moretti man breaks my rule in my own house. Even when he puts a woman on my floor. I still call Joey. I still ask. That is how men like me live long enough to get gray hair.”
He leaned forward. “So while Tony makes that call, you and I are going to have a small conversation, man to man. And I want you to listen very carefully to the question I’m about to ask you, son. Because the answer you give me will matter more than anything you have ever said in your whole life.”
“Why her?” Derek blinked. “There are eleven waitresses in this diner. Three on shift tonight. You walked past Angela.
You walked past Rosa at the counter. You sat down in her booth, and the second she came over, you started in on her. You grabbed her wrist before she put her pen down. You did not do that to Angela. You did not do that to Rosa. You did it to Amelia. Why?”
“It was random, sir. I swear.” “Derek.” Vincent’s voice dropped to a place that had weight. “Don’t you lie to me in this room.
Because if Joey Moretti comes on that phone in three minutes and tells me to let you go, and then six months from now I find out that you walked into my diner tonight with a name in your pocket, and that name was hers — you are going to wish Joey said something else on that phone call.”
Derek started crying again — the quiet kind, the kind that comes from a place a man does not usually visit.
“He said I just had to scare her, Mr. Castellano.” Vincent went very still. “Who said?” “A guy. A guy in a bar paid me two grand. I never saw him before. He had a picture of her.” Vincent did not move. He did not blink.
“He said the girl used to be his wife and she ran off on him, and he just wanted her to come home.
He said she was going to see me come in and she was going to run out the back, and I was just supposed to scare her so bad she quit her job and packed her bag and got on a bus.” “And you did not ask what happened after the bus.”
“I didn’t ask what the plan was, sir. I just took the money.”
“His name, Derek.” Derek’s mouth opened and closed. Then the name burst out of him like something he had been holding underwater. “Raymond. Raymond Fletcher. From up in Albany. That’s all I got, sir, I swear to Christ. A guy in a bar with a picture in his hand and two grand in an envelope.”
Vincent Castellano sat there, forearms folded on the back of the chair, for a count of five full seconds, and in those five seconds Derek Lawson would later swear the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. “Raymond Fletcher,” Vincent said.
“A man hired you — a stranger in a bar — to come into my diner, onto my floor, to terrorize my waitress so that he could follow her to the bus stop and grab her in the alley. Is that the plan you took two thousand dollars for?” “I didn’t ask what the plan was, sir.” “You just took the money.” “Yes, sir.”
Vincent slowly let out a breath — not a sigh, but something smaller and older and far more dangerous. “Is he still in the city, Derek?” “Yes, sir. He said he was staying somewhere downtown, near the bus terminal. He wanted to be able to see her if she ran.”
The back door cracked open six inches. Tony leaned in, holding the diner’s old wall phone on its long cord, one hand over the receiver. “Mr. Castellano.
Joey’s on.” Vincent did not take his eyes off Derek. “One minute, Tony. Tell him I’m coming.” The door closed. “Look at me, son.” Derek looked up.
“I’m going to make you one promise, and it is the only promise I will ever make you in my entire life.
You are going to tell me everything you know about Raymond Fletcher — his face, his height, his jacket, the bar where he found you, the hand that handed you the envelope.
And if you tell me the whole truth, one hundred percent, I am going to ask Joey for your life. And I am going to get it.”
“Yes, sir.” “And if you lie to me even once, Derek, I’m not going to call Joey back. I’m going to call Raymond. And I’m going to give him your address.” Derek’s face went the color of ash. “Do we understand each other?” “Yes, sir. Yes, sir.” “Good boy.”
Vincent stood up and did not look back.
May you like
He walked out of that back room with the slow, easy step of a man who had just finished the smallest part of a very long night, took the phone from Tony’s hand, and put it to his ear.
“Joey. Vincenzo. I’m sorry to call you at this hour.”
