BOBBY RAY THUMPED to the floor ten feet away from me. For a second he looked dumbfounded, like a dog kicked for the first time by his master, until the light went out in his eyes.
He’d landed not far from Marie, four of us on the floor now, Sonja the only one left standing.
I needed to get to Marie. I tried to crawl over to her. My hand on my numb hip brushed against something hard in my pocket. Jumbo’s lady gun, the little .25 Raven, the same gun that had brought down the great and loyal Drago. I stopped and struggled to pull the little gun out.
Sonja walked over and stood right next me. A white curl of smoke came out of her gun. “Why’d you stick your nose into this, Bruno? Why?”
“What are you talking about? You called me, remember?”
She squatted down and grabbed onto my hand, pulled it out of my pocket. “What’s that you got in there, Bruno?” She reached in and got the gun. Our last chance. Our last hope.
“I called you,” she said, “because I wanted you to talk some sense into Bosco. He wouldn’t listen to me anymore.”
“He was a grown man of twenty-five,” I said. “What could I say to him? That . . . wait, what? Why me? Why would you call me? I wouldn’t have any sway over your son.”
“You’re an idiot,” she said. “You had more than enough information to figure this whole thing out long before now. And you didn’t. And you still don’t know, do you? You want to know why you couldn’t figure it out? Because you didn’t want to know, that’s why. You’ve always tried to live in that perfect world, that morally correct world, saving all those kids from abusive parents. What a big joke. That’s irony, Bruno, the very definition of irony, and it makes me sick.”
She stuck the Raven .25 up against the left side of my chest, her finger on the trigger, and spoke through clenched teeth. “That’s right, Bruno, I can see it in your eyes that you’ve finally figured it out. And if I were really mean and wanted to milk every ounce of revenge outta what you’ve done, I’d let you live. That’s right, let you live with what you’ve done. But I’m not like that. I live for the moment, always have. You know that. And I want my pound of flesh now, right now.”
I wasn’t afraid of dying. But I wanted her to shoot before she said the words I knew were coming. I did know all along. I didn’t want to hear the words that would bring the truth out into the light of day. I turned my head away from her, brought my bloody hands up to my ears, and closed my eyes tight.
“That won’t help, Bruno. You can still hear me.” She raised her voice. “So here it is. I had twins, and I named them Sebastian and Olivia. Twins run in families, I know you know that. You should’ve realized it long ago. That was the big clue, Bruno. Olivia had twins, remember? Alonzo and poor little Albert, remember?
“I tried to tell you in the hospital, but you cut me off, and I didn’t push it, remember? Go on, think back on that conversation, I was going to tell you then. What I did tell you was that I couldn’t imagine raising a girl, not in this crazy, screwed-up world. So I gave Olivia to you to raise and I kept the boy. Our boy. And you screwed that up, too, didn’t you, Bruno? What do they call it? I remember from my patrol days. Failure to supervise. That’s what happened with Olivia. Ain’t that right, Bruno? But that wasn’t good enough, you killing our little girl, was it, Bruno? You had to go and take my son, Bosco, away from me, too, didn’t you?”
I shifted around to look at her, awed at her intense hate, awed at her ugly words.
She drove the gun into my ribs and gritted her teeth even more. “You tossed your own son out into traffic, Bruno. You killed your own son. That’s what I wanted to tell you when I called and asked you to meet me here tonight. I wanted to look you in the eye and tell you that you’d killed your own son, just before I dropped the hammer on you.”
She took a deep breath and said it again, said it for the last time. “You killed our son, Bruno.”
She pulled the trigger.
The round parted skin and muscle and burrowed past the cartilage between the ribs. The small lead round, fired point blank, entered my chest cavity with a pain like nothing I’d ever felt before. I welcomed it as the darkness slammed down on me one final time.