There were broken, splintered parts. Dark stains circled those areas. He leaned in closer. The wood smelled horrible.
“What the hell is that smell?” he muttered.
Andre spun around fast, dropped to one knee and brought his meat-hook hand across Darwin’s face.
The smack was so fast, he only had time to shut his eyes. He fell to the plywood and rolled to the back door, banging into it with his knees.
Instantly his face lit up. The pins and needles, flaring pain and heat, all worked to remind him what the consequences were for speaking when he wasn’t supposed to.
It also pissed him off.
Ever since he was a kid, something else he blamed on his stepmother, he hated pain. He would react in anger. Nothing fired him up more than pain.
A thought flashed through his mind while he lay at the back of the van, scrunched up against the pain: Will Andre attack again?
He was in this now, to the end. They aimed to kill him. It was the mafia, after all, and he had killed one of their men. Accident or not, a ‘made’ man was dead because Darwin was behind the wheel that night.
He knew this on some level last week, but he wasn’t ready to acknowledge it. Not with Rosina around, anyway.
But now it was him and them. Fitting how twenty-five hundred years ago, prisoners fought to the death in Rome, and now he got to experience the same pleasures, first hand.
With nothing left to lose, Darwin said, “It was an accident.”
He rolled over and looked up at Andre.
“What? What did you say? You’re joking right? This is a fucking joke? After a bitch slap like that and you want to risk talking?”
“I’m just saying, it was an accident. I didn’t
try
to kill anybody.”
Darwin braced himself. At any second Andre would come. Darwin felt real fear and he had no idea what he would do. All he knew was that he had to do something. He wasn’t cattle. He wasn’t going to sit idle while they delivered him to slaughter.
No fucking way. What kind of man would I be for Rosina if I willingly walked into my execution?
“Tell your theories about it being an accident to the boss,” the driver said.
Andre laughed. “Yeah, see what the boss says about you killing his only son and successor. It’ll go over just fine, I’m sure.”
His son? His successor? Oh shit, oh shit, oh fuck. This is worse than I thought. I’m in over my head. I need out. I need help.
“Is he a reasonable man?” Darwin asked, his voice cracking.
“Oh sure,” Andre said. “He’ll make sure you’re reasonably dead.” Andre turned around and looked back at Darwin. “Seriously man, what did you think? That he’d just walk away? Let it go? Man, do you believe in Santa Claus too?”
Okay, I need out of here. I need my temper. I need anger. It’s the only way. If I can get out from under my stepmother, I can deal with these common hoods.
“Tell me Andre, do you have a knife on you?”
Andre looked over at the driver and then back to Darwin.
“What’s it to you?”
“I need to see one. Anything pointy. That kind of thing really pisses me off.”
Andre laughed, a deep, guttural laugh. He held his stomach and leaned into the back of the passenger seat. After he finished, he wiped his eyes and looked back at the driver.
“Hey, Joe, we got a knife so we can piss our guest off? Do we have anything on us that’ll make him angry?”
The driver laughed too, but not as long or hard.
“You are a piece of work.” Andre’s face hardened again. “You want a knife? You wanna be pissed off, is that it? Then what you gonna do? Hurt us? Steal the van, huh? Take us out? Fuck you and your little fantasy world. I’ll show you a knife.”
Here we go.
Andre leaned over and lifted his pant leg up, revealing a brown sheath with a hilt sticking out. Andre wrapped his finger around the hilt and slid out a four inch knife.
“Here, here’s your knife. Nice, huh?”
Andre edged closer on his knees, staying low, the knife extended.
Darwin felt something akin to a chemical change take place. A dark shade of red blurred his vision. Nothing mattered in that moment. Death became an answer, not a question. Choices left him, options died. Nothing remained but anger so vile that an absolute rage coursed through him. Fear became him. Darwin was rage, and rage was Darwin.
He spun in place, landed on his knees, placed a foot on the plywood floor and lunged with every ounce of his one hundred and eighty pound frame. His shoulder hit Andre in the stomach and propelled him forward.
Odds couldn’t have played a better role in that second. As he connected with Andre, the driver who’d been watching in the rear view mirror, applied the brakes at the same exact second, propelling them toward the backs of the front seats.
Andre had been in the center. He continued forward, between the seats, his back smashing into the dashboard.
By this time, Darwin was a mask of rage so intense that his actions didn’t register on a conscious level. He turned with his mouth open and clamped down on the driver’s right ear. He bit so hard and so fast that his teeth severed the floppy top, cartilage and all, blood splattering his face.
He screamed like stuck dog as he dove for the driver’s cheek next.
His teeth missed their mark. The driver shouted in pain and, as the loss of a chunk of his ear registered, he lost control of the van.
The vehicle veered to the right with such force that Darwin shot forward across the driver’s lap.
In the next second, the van swerved sideways then lifted into the air and began to spin, flipping three times before it crashed down to the unforgiving cement highway.
Darwin’s back was braced against the steering wheel, his stomach across the driver’s stomach. When the van landed, he was thrust sideways, out of the front seat and toward the back, away from the breaking windshield. The driver moved along in front of him. When they hit the back door, the driver’s body connected first, snapping his back in two, his body broken in the middle like a twig.
The driver’s body cushioned Darwin, but almost dislocated his shoulder. The van’s impact with the road crushed the back doors as the roof caved in at least a foot.
The van slid along the highway for what seemed forever. Finally, it came to a stop on the shoulder of the road. Darwin heard dirt and rocks slide under the van’s side wall.
With his hands still cuffed behind him, and his shoulder on fire, Darwin got up and crab-walked along the side of the van, which was now the floor.
Andre was dead. No doubt. The windshield had broken, cutting Andre. The oozing blood formed one big splotch of red across most of his body. Andre stared with open eyes, his jaw slack, and his neck broken so violently even the skin had snapped open, like a large, human Pez dispenser.
Darwin spotted the keys in the ignition, the engine still running. A small handcuff key dangled from the keyring.
With his hands cuffed behind him, he backed up and felt his way to the keys. His hands found the steering column. He felt his way up until his wrist bumped into the ring. He latched on and twisted, but they didn’t budge. He twisted the other way, and the keys turned. The engine shut off with a little protest. He leaned forward and yanked the keys from their slot.
He had to get out of the van. People would be coming. Cops would show up. He’d have too much explaining to do. Two men lay dead. It was his fault. The police would want to know how he came to be their prisoner. Too many questions, no good answers.
But what if people witnessed him running from the scene of an accident in handcuffs?
That was a risk he would have to take. It would be better for people to speculate about his intentions than for him to be in custody and know what he’d wanted to do.
Using caution, his anger dispelled like a dam broken open, Darwin stepped through the broken windshield and onto the hot pavement of the highway.
Cars raced by on the other side of the median. Some slowed to look at the accident. He glanced around the back of the van. A long line of cars were now parked, glinting in the noon-hour sun. Limousines, buses, trucks, Smart cars and bikes, all waiting to get around the accident.
He walked down the shoulder and into the ditch. After he’d gone twenty meters, a hole in the fence led to a large parking lot and what looked like a shopping center.
He still had his wallet and passport. He would go into the mall, buy new clothes and use their bathroom to get fixed up. Then he’d rent a car, or take a taxi, and head back into Rome.
It was time to call Special Agent Greg Stinsen, the lead FBI investigator tasked on the Fuccini family meeting back in the abandoned hangar.
The one who said to call if Darwin ever needed anything.
They had tried to kill him. They had attempted to hurt his wife.
They’d gone too far.
He needed something now.
He needed the Fuccini family boss on a spit.
Chapter 3
Rosina couldn’t help herself. The tears wouldn’t stop. Her hands shook and she felt like she was falling apart.
On the way to the airport, they had ridden the Terra Vision bus, but when she ran back to the bus area, it was gone. She found a different one idling at the airport that said one of their stops was Termini Station. She had gotten on and taken a seat.
Now they sat on the highway, not moving. An accident on the road ahead had temporarily blocked all the lanes heading into Rome, the driver had told them. It wouldn’t be long now.
She leaned out into the aisle and stared ahead at the top of a vehicle that had flipped onto its side. At least twenty cars separated her bus from the accident.
Wow, that was close. It would seriously suck if she got hurt in a random accident when she had stayed behind to help her man.
Her man. Her new husband. She couldn’t let him face this alone. Not after all they’d been through together. Years of fighting with their parents and their stupid, old-world customs. Her mother saying she should marry an Italian boy. His father saying he needed a nice Greek woman. Neither side not backing down. Her mother’s reaction had especially disappointed her. Rosina had expected better.
So Darwin had proposed the idea to elope to Rome. Get married in Rome as a show of respect to her family and honeymoon in Greece as a show of respect to his father. Deal with the repercussions later.
But now look at them. On the run, with someone trying to kill them, according to Darwin. Ridiculous. Everyone died that fateful night at the hangar. No one was alive to see Darwin hit that man. Besides, the guy was insane. How did he think he could kill that many people and expect to live?
What did her husband ever do?
Accident
, by definition, meant
not intentional
. He didn’t mean it. Darwin didn’t aim his Ford at the guy.
Rosina shook her head and looked out her window at the traffic rushing by the other way. She wiped at her eyes and took in a deep breath.
She would need to talk to somebody. The cops? The bad guys?
Who were
they
anyway? How could she find them?
She had no idea how things worked, nor did she want to know. She just wanted her husband back and she would do anything for him. Even risk staying in Rome and not running to Greece.
She’d waited too long to find the man of her dreams. She’d lost control, running around, laughing and screaming, when he came up with the idea to run to Rome. His book sales had shot through the stratosphere in the last two months after the news had labeled him the
Hero of the Hangar
. His picture ran in every newspaper across North America, detailing how he
accidentally
killed a mafia killer, with an American Ford Mustang. One sleazy paper even asked,
was there any other way to deal with vermin?
The bus’s engine revved and the driver angled the bus closer to the railing at the median.
It took him a few minutes, but then the bus passed the accident. Rosina stretched in order to see out the window and tried to catch a look at the vehicle, but from her side, she only saw the top of the vehicle, which lay on its side door.
She eased back down and wondered what had happened to Darwin. Why couldn’t he be honest with her? Was it because he knew this is how she would respond? Did he know her that well already?
If so, she didn’t know him well enough. She should’ve figured out what was bothering him lately. She had noticed that he was out of sorts, but she didn’t push harder to find out why. Also, she couldn’t figure it out on her own when she should have.
Whatever happened in the next few days, Rosina would stand by her man. She would be there for him at all costs whether he liked it or not. It was the Italian way. It was her way.