71

Callahan
“Where is he?”
Dante and I are on the chopper along with two soldiers.
“I know one of the officers. He took him home. No arrest was made.”
“Where the fuck were the soldiers. he’s supposed to have with him at all times?”
Dante ducks his head to look out onto the water as we near our landing spot.
“He doesn’t take them with him. Hasn’t in a while.”
“What?”
“As soon as he gets to the mainland, he drops them.”
“What do you mean he drops them?”
Dante takes a deep breath in as the chopper lands then turns to me. “He’s doing something, and I can’t figure out what it is. I have the men tail him but there have been a few times we’ve lost him.”
“And you haven’t thought to mention this to me?”
“You’ve got a pretty full plate, Callahan.”
“My brother takes priority.” We climb out of the chopper and walk across the lot to the waiting SUV.
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s looking for someone. I don’t know who but it’s a girl.”
I look at Dante. “A girl?”
He shrugs a shoulder. “He puts on a good face for you, but your brother’s got demons. And he’s self-destructive.”
Family trait.
“I know about the demons.” I hear him at night. The nights he sleeps at the house that is. The nights he sleeps. “I don’t care what happens but from now on, you double the men on him. Give him space but you can’t lose him. Period.”
I can’t lose him.
Dante nods and we ride in silence the rest of the way to a small, non-descript house along the outskirts of the city. Soldiers secure the perimeter as Dante and I make our way to the front door. We don’t have to ring the bell. The woman who lives here, I’d guess the wife of the man who kept my brother out of jail, opens the door, her expression one of worry.
She meets my eyes for a split second, mutters something under her breath and makes the sign of the cross before stepping aside, almost disappearing behind the door.
“Christ,” a man’s voice says as I look around the small living room with its low ceiling, the tiny kitchen with a kettle on the stove that’s whistling. I watch the man walk into the kitchen to switch off the burner and move the kettle. He gives his wife an irritated look before turning to me and Dante.
He’s middle-aged with a slight paunch to his belly. He’s still wearing his police uniform.
“Dante,” he says, shaking hands with him before turning to me, giving me a nod.
I extend my hand to shake his and he smiles, puts his hand in it.
“Callahan,” I say.
“Emil. Emil Giordano. Pardon my wife for my sake.” He has an accent, like he comes from a rougher part of the town.
“No, nothing to pardon,” I say as we watch her close the door then disappear into the kitchen. “It’s early and we come unannounced.”
He half-shrugs his shoulder.
“This way,” he says, gesturing for us to follow him through the living room and down a hallway to the last door.
“Can you tell us what happened?” I ask.
“He got into it with a couple of guys at a bar in town. Not the best place to begin with. There were six of them against your brother. I gotta say, he held his own for a time but six against one aren’t good odds. Thing is, he started it and the bar owner knows the others. I recognized Antonio. I remember what happened to your family. Terrible thing to go through.”
“Thank you,” I say, trying not to feel any emotion.
“I told my partner I’d take care of it, but we had to make like we were arresting him. Your brother is a little bent out of shape because of it.”
“He’ll get over it. Your partner?”
“Don’t worry about him. I paid him a couple bucks.”
I nod. “Dante will take care of you. I’d like to see my brother.”
“Sure thing.”
The man opens the door to the little bedroom. It’s about the size of my closet with a single bed pressed to the far corner and a nightstand with a lamp on it.
Antonio is sitting up when I walk inside and close the door behind me.
“You smell like a brewery.”
“Distillery,” he corrects, his voice hoarse and scratchy. “It’s whiskey.”
“My bad.”
He looks up at me from his seat on the edge of the bed. “Can you close that?” he asks, shielding his face. The morning sun coming through the window is a glare in his eyes.
“Hungover?” I ask, pulling the ropes to close the broken blinds. “Or are you still drunk?” I turn back to him.
He looks up at me and I see the bruise forming along his jaw, see the cut on his lip and the blood on his knuckles.
“The latter,” I guess. “How do the six men you picked a fight with look?”
He grins but winces, touches a cut high on his cheekbone. “Like shit.”
I sit down beside him. “What the fuck, Antonio? You have soldiers. Why were you alone?”
A darkness I don’t like, but recognize, shadows his features.
“There’s some things I have to do alone, Brother.”
“Like try and get yourself killed?”
“Unlike you, I wasn’t trying to get myself killed.”
The way he says it strikes me. Maybe my brother is more intuitive than I realize. “What were you doing at that place anyway?”
“Nothing.” He shakes his head.
“You just said yourself there’s some things you need to do alone. What are they? Is it those things that have you off the island so much? That have you coming back stinking of whiskey the mornings after?”
He runs a hand through his hair before he turns to me. His hair’s a shade lighter than mine and sometimes, at some angles, he looks like mom in that portrait.
“I leave you to deal with Fernando. Leave me to deal with this.”
“What exactly is this? Tell me and maybe I’ll leave you to handle it.”
“Haven’t you got enough to keep you occupied? Maybe keeping an eye on your new wife and her cousin? Enemies you’ve let have the run of our home.”
“They’re not our enemies.”
He snorts, shakes his head and looks toward the window with the slivers of light still coming in from the old-fashioned blinds that don’t quite close correctly.
“Do you ever wonder what happened to Mara?” he asks.
I’m taken aback but only miss a beat. “Of course, I do.”
“Do you wonder if she’s still out there? All alone?” he looks at me when he asks this part and I see my brother as a kid, uncertain, not cocky, not tough. Just unable to make sense of what happened. “Do you wonder if she needs us and we’re just here getting on with our lives? Forgetting her? Forgetting them?”
“We’re not exactly getting on with our lives, are we?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Why is this coming up now?”
“The kid, Nathan, he had a picture of her.”
“Nathan? Why would he have a picture of her?”
“He’d taken one out of Lizzie’s room and he was talking to Portia. I walked in on them and I don’t know. I didn’t like it. It just got me thinking again if she’s still out there and helpless. They were five, Cal. Fucking five years old. How the fuck do you hurt a five-year-old kid?”
I look away. I can’t see his pain. It wounds me every time I get the slightest glimpse of it. Cuts right through me. It makes me hate Fernando the more. He ruined him. Ruined us. Made us into this vengeful, irrational beasts. I couldn’t bear seeing him this way. My only brother. The both of us, the only Scarfoni survivors.