I found Margrave Street. It was a tree-lined slice of blacktop that stretched for maybe half a mile. It was idyllic, the sort of street people dreamed about. I didn’t fit here. I knew Southside. I knew Five Points. The rough places, where desperate people hide from the world.
There, at the end of the block, secluded from the rest, was a big fenced-in lot with a long driveway. I caught a glimpse of the house through the bushes: big, white, beautiful. I kept driving past, went around, and rolled along again.
That had to be the place. I noticed a couple of guys standing in the shrubbery, one of them smoking a cigarette, the other pretending to trim a hedge. They weren’t doing much of anything.
Guards. Watching for guys like me.
I parked as close as I dared and stared at my phone, willing Cap to reach out.
I closed my eyes and thought about the day I’d gone to prison. Cap had been at the sentencing hearing, sitting with Carmine and Placido Falsone, her future father-in-law. When the judge had given me a year behind bars, I’d looked back, seen Carmine, seen the old don, but only Cap’s face still remained in my memory. I’d seen the terror and the gut-tearing sadness, and it had struck me, struck me hard, that she’d care so damn much about a piece of shit like me.
I had held on to that. Through the bad nights and the worse days. When Balestra’s boys had tried to kill me, I had held on to that look.
Cap gave a damn.
I put the Chevy into gear and rolled past one more time. But as I turned the corner, I noticed a little black sedan on my tail. I hadn’t seen it before, so it must’ve come from a driveway.
I took some fast turns. Sped at random. The sedan remained a car or two back.
Tailing me.
I let them stick around for a while. I took them on a nice tour through San Antonio. If they weren’t local guys, they’d get to know the city real good. I lulled them into a false sense of security, and when we cut through the downtown district, I lost them. I jumped a light, nearly bowled over some pedestrians, and raced off along a one-way side street. I kept going for a while, making sure they were really gone.
When I was positive, I pulled over in a neighborhood and killed the engine. I stared at my phone.
“Come on, Cap.”
I picked it up and dialed her number.
I still knew it. Even after all this time. It was seared into my mind. I’d never called her before—but I knew it all the same.
It was a risk reaching out. If her father was monitoring her phone, he’d see the strange number, and he’d wonder.
But I had to try.
I hit send and held it up.
“Hello, you’ve reached Capri’s phone…”
Straight to voicemail.
Where the hell are you, Cap?
Chapter 10
Capri
Dad kept me in that hell dungeon for a few days.
I lost track of time. It was hard to tell exactly when it was morning and when it was night, and I fell into a natural rhythm of waking and sleeping. I paced around my cell, talking to myself, singing songs, sometimes doing little workouts. The bruises began to heal. Time lurched along in fits and starts. Meals came at regular intervals. It was always Rolando, and he never talked. Only stared at me, like I was the punishment for turning his back on the Falsone family.
The scratches on his cheek scabbed and made me smile.
I kept thinking of Mal. He was alone out there and in pain. I kept seeing all that blood on his floor, covering the wood in thick, black pools. His face when I stitched him was a mixture of agony and ecstasy, like the pain overloaded and leaked into pleasure. I had it bad, but he might’ve had it worse, beating himself up for every little thing and acting like every wrong turn was his fault. He couldn’t have stopped my dad from killing Carmine and he couldn’t have stopped him from throwing me in a dank, dark basement.
But he sure as hell would blame himself regardless.
I hated my dad for this. I raged, and raged, and raged, but I’d learned a long time ago that getting angry over my situation wouldn’t change a damn thing. I could be pissed that my daddy beat the shit out of me all I wanted, he’d keep on doing it regardless.
Getting mad didn’t fix anything. But working with Mal might.
So I waited. I kept myself together and worked hard not to lose my mind. And finally, one day after the morning meal, my dad knocked on the door and stepped into the room.
His nose crinkled. I sat with my back straight and my hands folded in my lap like an obedient girl. I watched the floor, wary of making eye contact.