Canidy glanced at his watch. It was just shy of five o’clock. They would have to hurry to beat the sunrise.
He quickly looked around. When he glanced up, he saw a street sign bolted to the side of the building. It read VIA MONTABLO.
And he recognized that from when he’d first come to Palermo. He remember it intersected with Quinta Casa street. Which led to the port.
“This way first,” he said, nodding downhill. “I have to see the harbor. It’s only a few blocks. Then we go to your cousin’s.”
As they went, Canidy thought he heard the sounds of movement coming from one of the buildings they passed, then from another.
I must be imagining things.
Willing there to be someone moving, getting up.
But, he realized, it was the right time. It wouldn’t be unusual for some people—one, two, a few—to be getting up.
Even Sicily has to have its own early risers.
At the next corner, where the sign on the building read VIA QUINTA CASA, they turned left.
Then across the street, in a window, Canidy saw something move.
It was a curtain being drawn back. Then, beyond that, a candle was being lit.
“Look!” he said, pointing.
Nola and Fuller followed to where he was pointing.
Human life, Canidy thought.
Maybe it is okay here after all.
Or at least not a horrific human disaster….
He picked up the pace. They now were about two blocks from the fishermen’s pier where the cargo ship had been moored.
And then they were within one block.
And then…they suddenly encountered a stench.
“What the hell is that?” Fuller said.
Not fish decay, Canidy thought. It’s a far more corrupted odor.
He looked back at Nola and Fuller.
Fuller had the collar of his T-shirt pulled up over his nose, using it as a makeshift air filter.
Nola had buried his nose in the crook of his arm, breathing through the fabric of his shirtsleeve.
They finished walking the last of the final block and turned the corner.
Nola literally gasped at the sight.
Shit! Canidy thought, and instinctively stepped into the shadow of a doorway, out of sight.
Nola and Fuller followed him, their eyes fixed on the heavy wooden beams that formed a fifteen-foot-tall framework over the foot of the pier.
There, from the uppermost beam, the bodies of two fishermen hung from wire nooses, their silhouettes backlit by the ruby horizon of the sun that was just about to rise. Dried blood caked their faces and upper torsos.