Page 109 of Blood and Fire
He grabbed the little girl, hugged her, and hid his hot face in her cloud of dark hair, struggling with all his strength not to totally lose it.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” he said thickly. “You keep your locket. It looks better on you than it would on me. Turn around. I’ll put it back on you.” He clasped the trinket around Rachel’s neck, dropped a kiss on top of her fuzzy head, and tried not to think about that last, tight hug, before Mamma shoved him up onto the steps of the bus.
Zia Rosa was all fogged up, too. She gazed at the little girl, and mopped beneath the lenses of her glasses, then seized a napkin from the holder, and noisily blew her nose. “Dolcettina mia, che carina,” she burbled. “Goddamn Tony. He shoulda told me. He shoulda trusted me more. But he couldn’t. He didn’t trust nobody.”
“It’s not your fault, Zia,” Kev said.
“It just ain’t right. I know what I woulda done with them stinkin’stronzi. I’d have done like my papa’ used to say. Yourbis-nonno.”
Bruno glanced Rachel’s direction. “Whateverbis-nonnoused to say, you censor it bigtime, Zia,” he warned.Bis-nonnohad been a pretty hardcore kind of dude, if family legend was to be believed.
But Zia was off and running. She switched languages, thank God, letting out a torrent of picturesque and uniquely nasty Calabrese dialect. Bruno and Kev, the only ones would could understand it, glanced at each other and tried not to smile.
First shadow of a smile that he’d seen Kev crack since he got here. Maybe the worst was over. Good old Zia, always providing the comic relief. Hell on wheels didn’t begin to describe it.
When Zia wound down, red in the face, Lily poked his arm. “Translation, please,” she said.
Bruno groaned. “No way.” He gestured at Rachel. “It’s foul.”
“So paraphrase,” she urged. “Give me the gist of it.”
Val laughed, and put his hand behind Rachel’s shoulders. “Come, Rachel,” he said gently. “Into the playroom with you.”
When Val had herded the little girl safely out of the kitchen, Bruno concentrated to remember the sequence. “OK, so it started out with graphic descriptions of the various sexual aberrations of all the guys who came after me in the diner, most specifically their unhealthy fondness for barnyard animals. Then we moved on to these guys’ kinky long-dead ancestors, and this bit about the unspeakably obscene things that they did in the woods with Santa Anna and San Girolamo, don’t ask me to explain, because I don’t get it, either. And fountains of blood, teeth flying, dismembered corpses of vanquished enemies, yada yada, and then the part about pissing on their disassembled bones until the day of the second ascension ofCristo Santo.And then—”
He stopped, his mouth hanging open. Everyone staring at him while that drum roll crescendoed again. His hairs prickled, ripples chasing around his skin. He had to consciously remember to breathe.
“Zia,” he said, as soon as he could control his voice. “That bit about pissing on the bones. Is that really somethingBis-Nonnoused to say? Or did you add that part in yourself?”
“Ah, nah, Papa always said that when someone got in his face,” Zia assured him. “He wasun uomo cazzoso.Everything bugged him.”
Bruno looked at Kev. Kev was starting to smile. And nod.
“Did Tony ever say it?” Bruno persisted.
“Of course. Tony wascazzoso, too. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, yeah,” Bruno said. “I do remember. And how.”
Kev’s face split in a huge grin. Bruno’s, too. He shook with laughter. At least, he hoped it was laughter. Better not to check. But he covered his face, just in case. His shoulders were shaking.
“What?” Lily grabbed his shoulder. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” Kev said. “Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine.”
“Then what’s going on? Why is he falling apart?” Lily yelled.
Bruno lifted his face, wiped his eyes. “I’m not. I just figured out where to dig, that’s all.”
CHAPTER22
“What part of no do you not understand, Hobart?” King said into the phone, staring down at Zoe’s inert form on the infirmary bed. The machines hooked up to her beeped and hummed in the quiet room.
“But…how do you expect…” Hobart’s voice trailed off. He was intelligent enough to hear death in his creator’s voice, but he continued to whine. “But you saw what these people can do! It’s just Melanie and me! We need reinforcements if we’re going to mount an attack on—”
“I don’t have reinforcements to send with you,” King cut in, staring at the data generated by the machines attached to Zoe. Her body was healing, but she’d indulged in two more doses of Melimitrex to make it to the rendezvous point. Zoe’s tendency for self-indulgence should be no surprise to him, at this point, but still. It was a wonder she wasn’t dead from an overdose. She might be brain damaged. Time would tell.
The trauma had taken its toll. She had lost a startling amount of weight, and her face was gaunt and sunken. Broken capillaries marred her eyelids, and veins on her temples stood out, snake-like and discolored. King shuddered with distaste. Hobart was still babbling. King forced himself to listen. He had to close this tedious conversation.