Chapter 5 - THE BACK ALLEY IN THE RAIN
“Take the boy out the back door right now,” Luca ordered, his voice dropping to a razor-sharp whisper in the dark living room.
I didn’t wait to be told twice.
I scooped six-year-old Leo straight off the twin bed, wrapping the faded firetruck quilt tightly around his shoulders so he wouldn’t catch a chill in the October rain.
“We’re playing hide-and-seek, buddy,” I whispered against his curls as his small arms locked around my neck. “Rule number one: nobody makes a sound, okay?”
Leo nodded seriously against my collarbone, clutching his shark book to his chest with his red-mittened hand.
In the dark hallway, Elena Conti was already grabbing a worn canvas tote bag from the coat closet—stuffed, I realized with a pang, with envelopes, Leo’s birth certificate, and an inhaler, as if she had spent the last five years waiting for this exact knock in the night.
Only the men outside didn’t knock.
Heavy footsteps thudded up the concrete front stoop.
“Vanessa!” Arthur Bellini’s voice boomed through the thin wooden front door. “Open this door right now! Do you have any idea what you’ve done leaving thirty guests sitting in that dining room?”
Beside Arthur on the porch, a second voice spoke—calmer, smoother, and deeply familiar to me after ten months of serving coffee in the Moretti mansion.
“Luca, my boy, come out before Arthur makes a scene in front of the neighbors,” called Uncle Corrado—Luca’s sixty-four-year-old uncle, his dead father’s younger brother, and the mild-mannered family accountant who sat at the right hand of Aunt Teresa every Sunday dinner.
My blood went cold in the dark kitchen.
Corrado Moretti.
The quiet uncle who wore reading glasses on a gold chain and brought lemon cannoli to the kitchen staff on holidays.
In the shadowed archway between the living room and kitchen, I saw Luca’s jaw clench so hard a muscle jumped in his cheek.
“Corrado,” Luca breathed, looking down at the brass safety-deposit key in his palm.
“He ran the family accounts while your father was sick,” Sal whispered beside the kitchen sink, his hand resting on the back door deadbolt. “Five years ago, your father found four hundred thousand dollars missing from the pension fund. He thought it was bad bookkeeping. He told me on the drive to the doctor that he was handing complete control of the ledgers to you on Monday morning.”
And on Friday night, the brakes on Luca’s town car had been cut.
Only Matteo had borrowed the car.
Corrado hadn’t just killed his own nephew by mistake.
He had watched Luca mourn his little brother for five years while sitting across from him at every Christmas and Easter table.
“Why is he with my father?” Vanessa whispered frantically, her red evening gown hitched up in one hand as she backed into the kitchen beside me.
“Look at you two,” Sal murmured, nodding toward Luca and Vanessa. “Who spent the last year convincing Arthur Bellini and Luca that a marriage between your families was the only way to merge the south-side shipping docks?”
Vanessa stared at the old driver in the blue glow of the stove clock. “Corrado. He brokered the engagement.”
“Because once the companies merged under a joint board,” Luca said, his voice lethal and quiet, “the old Moretti holding company books would be dissolved without an external audit. And if he suddenly found out tonight that Sal took you to Matteo’s old house—”
“He knows Leo exists,” Elena whispered in terror. “Matteo left a handwritten trust agreement with Clara naming his son sole heir to Matteo’s twenty percent voting share of the company. Corrado has been voting Matteo’s proxy shares for five years!”
The brass doorknob on the front door rattled violently.
“Use the crowbar on the frame,” Corrado’s smooth voice instructed someone on the porch. “They’re inside.”
“Go,” Luca told Sal, pushing us toward the back kitchen door. “Take the sedan parked around the corner—no, they blocked the street. How did you get here Tuesday without being spotted by the neighbors, Sal?”
“The unpaved service alley behind the garage,” Sal said immediately, clicking the deadbolt open Without a squeak. “My cousin Tony owns the plumbing supply yard three doors down. My spare keys to his pickup are under the rear wheel well.”
Of course they were.
Thirty-four years of driving in Chicago meant Sal Russo knew every alley, gate, and spare key on the north and west sides of the city.
“I’m staying to hold the hallway,” Luca said.
“Like hell you are,” Vanessa whispered fiercely, grabbing the lapel of his bespoke suit jacket. “You don’t even have a gun on you tonight because it was our engagement dinner, Luca! Corrado brought two men, and my father has his bodyguard!”
For a fraction of a second, Luca looked down at her—really looked at her—seeing the woman who had spent four years secretly paying rent for his dead brother’s child and ten minutes ago had risked her father’s wrath to warn them.
Then Wood splintered at the front of the house as the security chain snapped against the doorframe.
“Out!” Luca hissed.
We slipped out the back door into the pouring rain just as heavy footsteps crashed into the living room behind us.
Sal led the way down the slick wooden steps, moving faster than any seventy-one-year-old man had a right to move, holding the chain-link alley gate open while I carried Leo against my chest.
My sensible black housekeeper flats soaked through instantly in the mud.
Behind us, Vanessa stumbled in her four-inch silver heels on the wet gravel.
Without a word, she kicked both two-thousand-dollar shoes off into a puddle and ran barefoot across the crushed stone in her red silk gown, holding Elena Conti’s arm to keep the older woman from slipping.
Suddenly, a flashlight beam sliced through the rain from the side yard.
“Back here!” a man shouted.
Before the beam could hit me and Leo, Luca stepped squarely into the narrow gap between the garage and the cedar fence, blocking the path with his own body.
The flashlight illuminated Arthur Bellini’s massive bodyguard rushing forward through the wet weeds.
Luca didn’t step back.
He pivoted on his heel, caught the man’s extended wrist against the wet wood of the garage wall, and drove his elbow straight into the bodyguard’s jawline with a crack that echoed over the rain.
The man dropped into the mud.
“Keep moving!” Luca called, sprinting after us down the dark alley as Sal threw open the rusted iron gate of the plumbing supply yard three houses down.
Inside the yard, parked beneath a corrugated tin overhang, sat a beat-up 2008 Ford F-150 with ladder racks on the roof.
Sal reached behind the muddy rear tire, pulled out a magnetic key box, and unlocked the crew cab doors in three seconds flat.
We piled inside, soaking wet and gasping for breath—Elena, Vanessa, and me crammed into the back bench seat with Leo curled in my lap, while Luca jumped into the passenger seat beside Sal.
Sal turned the ignition.
The old V8 engine coughed once, roared to life, and backed straight through the chain-link gate without headlights just as Corrado Moretti ran into the alley behind us.
As we fishtailed onto Belmont Avenue, Leo peeked out from beneath the firetruck quilt and pointed at the dashboard, where a faded laminated prayer card dangled from the pickup’s rearview mirror.
“Nonna,” Leo said softly. “Why is Papa’s watch in this truck?”
May you like
Elena gasped, reaching past the headrest toward the open glove box that had popped loose when we hit the curb.
Inside, resting on a stack of yellow napkins, was a cracked gold pocket watch stopped at 11:42—the exact watch Matteo had been wearing the night he died on Route 53.
