Emmanuelle shook her head. When was it ever enough money for some people? What was all the money needed for? Why did some human beings get the idea they were so superior to others? She didn’t get it, yet she had believed her family was “good” and the Saldi family was “bad.” What did that make her?
Stefano broke them up into teams. They had to first take out the eyes on top of the buildings. Once they did so, they had to study the way the roving patrols on the ground worked. That would help to show where any of the minefields were buried. All of them were well versed in noticing details. Looking for freshly dug earth or scattered garbage would be easy enough, but when lives were at stake, they couldn’t be too careful.
Emmanuelle and Vittorio were paired together. Stefano sent them to cover the west side of the neighborhood, with two of her cousins from LA, Max and Tore. They took the rooftops first, trusting that whoever had the apartment rooftop would get their job done fast. The apartment building was the highest point and therefore was considered the “eagle’s nest.” Those eyes had to be taken out first so all of them could take out Miceli’s sentries without his knowledge.
She chose a shadow that took her to the western tip of the subdivision, if one could call the neighborhood a subdivision. Even the trees reminded her of the scary Halloween movies she’d seen where half-dead creatures climbed out of the twisted trunks and assaulted the living with sticklike limbs. What once had been picket fences were broken, shattered sticks, either missing or lying in splinters, mostly long buried in rotting vegetation. Broken windows were boarded or left with large shards of yellow glass hanging. Dirty sheets attempted to keep the cold or heat out. The houses were small, but at one time, they had been nice. Now the porches sagged and boards were cracked on stairs and floors.
Emme stepped out of one shadow into the next to ride up the side of the house to the roof. She couldn’t imagine the roof faring any better than the porch. A man lay on his belly facing the narrow street, looking completely ridiculous in a three-piece suit. He looked so out of place she wanted to laugh. She might have, but she saw that he had laid a child’s blanket down to prevent his precious suit from getting dirty while he waited to kill the rescuers. That blanket had to belong to one of the children held captive.
Emmanuelle didn’t hesitate. She rode the shadow right up beside him, straddled him, snapped his neck and left him lying there with his semiautomatic in his arms because damn him to hell. Stepping back into the mouth of the shadow, she stood for a moment, studying the ground below her, looking for roving patrols. Once she spotted three different pairs of men walking covertly through the narrow housing, she studied their movements carefully, committing them to memory. All riders had to be able to have a photographic mind for maps and grids. Really, everything.
She observed the men for a few more minutes as they did a second circular pattern, overlapping with a fourth pair of men from a different grid, making their rounds stealthily through the neighborhood. Another brother would be memorizing that pattern. She didn’t find one instance of anyone so much as pushing a curtain back to peek out and look from any of the surrounding houses.
Emme caught another shadow that took her down to the ground, across the yard and up to the next house. She went building to building, removing the sentries that Miceli or Angelo had placed on the western end of the subdivision, waiting for Valentino’s arrival.
Once she had cleared those on top of the houses, she went to the ground. That was a little trickier. She had to avoid any of the traps set for Val’s soldiers as they swept through. She carefully marked the land mines she found or suspected for her brothers to dismantle as she followed her prey. The shadow tube she chose was fast. She stopped only to place the little mark her brothers would recognize before once again proceeding after the first pair of roving sentries.
She came up on the two men and waited until one dropped back just a little before coming out of the shadows. She gripped his head to administer the wrenching break and then was on his partner before the first body dropped. She dragged them against the side of the house so the bodies lay in the deeper unkept grasses, appearing part of the debris building up around the crumbling buildings. As always, she had calculated where to find the next pair of roving sentries and she’d already chosen her shadow. Calmly, she stepped into it.