Page 97 of Stolen Kisses
Dante
It was late afternoon.
I was sitting in a chair in the corner of our workshop garage.
I was just sitting there watching Gio and Alex work on an old Harley that a customer wanted modified.
Claudius was pouring over those files again. Looking over anything we might have missed.
The garage door was open. Just ahead I could see the kids out on the dirt track and the skateboard park doing their tricks.
It might look like we were doing nothing, but this was us thinking. It was how we sorted through things. This garage was more like a warehouse with the space for all our ideas and equipment. It had seen us do many things—weird wonderful things and even nothingness.
Today, I kind of felt like I was leaning on the side of nothingness, but unlike most of those times when we came here to brainstorm our problems, I was coming up with nothing.
It was all a bunch of nothing. What was worse that Franco person was probably already here in Chicago waiting for the right time to take Maria and Flynn away from me.
A month hadn’t even passed since this whole shamble of a mess took off. It started with me at Christina’s graveside getting hope that we’d probably found a new avenue to explore. Then Maria had blown into town. Two things at once in just a handful of weeks.
So much information, but still nothing fit.
The creeper from the charity was never picked up on the secret squad radar. He wasn’t on the staff list either, so they were looking into the list of event liaisons. The guy from the other night that escaped from the cellar was never found. Shit wasn’t adding up and I was sitting on my ass like I had all the time in the world.
It was all getting away from me, stuff falling from my grasp and out of my control.
Claudius glanced over to me. He had that look in his eyes that told me he’d come to a dead end too. He couldn’t go any further and didn’t want to say it to me.
He came over and sat on the chair beside me. Gio stopped what he was doing and looked over.
“Can’t find anything, can you?” I asked.
“No, but I won’t stop looking,” he replied.
“It’s all over the place Claudius. There’s literally nothing.”
“Sometimes the truth can be staring you right in the face and you can’t see it. We know we’re close, we just have to find out what we’re close to. Wait to see what happens.”
“Or wait to see what comes to you?” Alex stated drawing our attention straight over to him.
He was looking outside.
A car had pulled up. Black Sedan with the windows tinted— standard mafia car.
We all stood up ready, ready for anything.
Ready for action.
Who was this?
The car door opened and out stepped the devil himself.
He must have come straight from hell except he was dressed in a beige suit and wore one of those old style fedoras.
Barabbas Antonella made his procession toward us with two guys I knew to be Manellos as his body guards.
Fucking hell.
I’d seen this man a few times in my life. There were two prominent times that would always stand out. The first was at a bar in town when I was nineteen, he’d met with the guy who own the bar and the next day that guy was found hanging from the bridge outside his house with two bullets in his head. The next time was just last year when he was helping the terrorist, Goliath, steal nukes.
