“Of course it’s fake! What, you think they’d let me bring a real gun into a hospital?”
“Why do you have a fake gun?” I wanted to know.
“Because my great grandson, Mikey Junior, left it behind when he and his family visited me yesterday. Who knew it would come in so handy?”
A few minutes later, after a fairly death-defying drive through town, we pulled up to the very grand, very historic Mark Hopkins Hotel. Mrs. Dombruso apparently didn’t believe in turn signals. Or slowing down to less than fifty, ever, not even on crowded city streets.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“I’m checking in. Not like I can go home,” Dante’s grandmother said. “My family would find me there and drag me right back to that goddamn hospital.”
Austin turned to me with wide eyes. “Can we have a drink at the Top of the Mark while we’re here? Pretty please?”
“Are you even old enough to drink?”
“I’m old enough for a bottled water with a panoramic view of San Francisco.”
“How old are you, anyway?” I asked as we climbed out of the cab and Mrs. Dombruso handed over the keys to a valet.
“Twenty.”
“Really?”
“Want to card me?” he asked with a grin.
Mrs. Dombruso plucked off her glasses and shucked her robe, draping it over her arm along with her purse. She was wearing a sparkly black suit underneath. She kept the velvet headpiece on though, and held her head high as she strolled regally into the Mark Hopkins.
Austin slipped his hand into mine beneath the draped jacket as we waited for Mrs. Dombruso to check in. He’d become subdued since entering the lobby and stood close to me, his head down. “You ok?” I asked.
“Any minute someone’s gonna walk up to us and ask us what we’re doing here,” he said quietly, darting looks around the lobby from under his thick, dark lashes.
“If they do, I’ll tell them we’re here with the Queen of Sheba,” I said, tilting my head toward Mrs. Dombruso with a little grin.
He smiled at that and looked up at me. “This place intimidates the hell out of me. I still want to see the Top of the Mark, though. I’ve always wanted to see it.”
“Ok, we’ll do that.”
Mrs. Dombruso had procured a huge, lovely suite with stunning views of the city and the bay beyond. Once she was settled, I told her, “Ok, so we’ll just go ahead and get out of your way. I wanted to make sure you got in safely, and now you have. So, call me if you need anything.” I fully intended to rat her out to her family the moment I got out of here.
“Oh no,” she said. “You’re not running away so quickly. We’re going to have drinks and dinner together at the Top of the Mark. I heard the little pretty one saying he wanted to see it. And I want to get to know the handsome boy that has my Dante smitten.”
Oh man.
Her cell phone rang and she pulled it out of her purse and looked at the screen, then rolled her eyes and put it on the writing desk. It stopped ringing after a moment. And then mine started.
I pulled it out of my pocket. There was an unfamiliar number on the screen, but I could guess who it was. I hit speaker and answered with, “Hi Dante. Where are you?”
“On a plane bound for Sicily. Charlie, did you bust my grandmother out of the hospital?” The connection wasn’t so great. He sounded a bit tinny, and there was a constant hum in the background. But I could still hear the exasperation in his voice.
“I….”
“Did you?”
“No. Not…technically.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean, technically, I was a hostage.”
“What?”
“She had me at gunpoint,” I explained.
“Where did my grandmother get a gun?” Dante demanded.
“It turned out to be a toy gun,” Austin chimed in. “Mikey Junior’s, apparently. How’s your flight so far, Mr. Dombruso? Are you calling from one of those phones in the back of the seats?”
“It looked real,” I said in my defense.
“Mikey Junior’s? Do you mean his Toy Story cowboy gun?”
“Yeah, that one,” I confirmed.
“Are you serious?”
Mrs. Dombruso grabbed the phone from me and said, “Aw, quit busting the boy’s balls, Dante. He didn’t have a choice. He tried to talk me out of leaving the hospital. But I was a desperate woman. So I did the only thing I could do. I took him hostage.” She sat down in a big upholstered chair and put her feet up, grinning smugly.
“With a plastic gun,” Dante said.
“What, you would prefer that I pointed a real gun at your love muffin?”
“And he didn’t know the difference?” Dante asked incredulously.
“Charlie’s a nice boy. So he doesn’t know a real gun from a fake one. So sue him.”
Dante changed the subject and said, “You need to go back to the hospital, Nana.”