Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)(68)

Ralph dropped his baseball bat. I lowered my gun. I couldn’t bring myself to drop it. Not yet.

Alex smiled. He should’ve shot us immediately, but he was too busy enjoying the moment, surveying us as if we were two more fixtures on the estate that would soon be his.

“Come on over,” he called amiably. “Let’s talk.”

Smoke boiled from the kitchen windows, making a black twister that stretched into the winter sky.

Behind Alex, the glass doors opened. Two mobsters wheeled out a very annoyed-looking Guy White in a hospital chair. Madeleine stood behind him, still in her painting clothes, still looking stunned.

I called, “Good morning, Mr. White.”

Alex turned involuntarily.

Mr. White snapped, “Watch them, you idiot!”

That moment of surprise was all we needed. Ralph and I dove through the doorway of the pavilion tent and hit the ground as the assault rifle opened fire, ripping through the cloth sides of the tent, shattering punch bowls and glasses.

The firing stopped.

My ears were ringing, but, miraculously, Ralph and I both seemed to be unharmed.

Mr. White was wheezing, “—thousand-dollar rental tent! Put that damn rifle away!”

Alex: “But—”

“Go get them, you idiot! Madeleine, you, too!”

Ralph and I were surrounded by broken glass ornaments and smashed finger sandwiches. Red punch made a waterfall off the edges of the tablecloth.

“Go out the back,” Ralph told me. “I’ll distract them.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“Vato, you got to get to Maia—”

“No, Ralph. We leave together. Come on.”

I didn’t wait for an argument. I ran for the back exit, but before we could bust through, the tent flap opened. I found myself staring down the barrel of Madeleine White’s pistol.

“Drop it,” she said.

I couldn’t think of anything better to do than comply. I set the .38 on a folding chair, in the middle of a platter of shrimp.

“Madeleine,” I said. “Thirty feet, we hit the woods and we’re gone. Maia is in trouble. Please.”

She stared at me bitterly, as if I were offering her an impossible choice—a decision where all her options were fatal.

“Step aside,” I pleaded. “Five-second head start. Anything.”

“I have a better idea,” said a voice behind us. Alex was standing at the front of the tent, his rifle aimed at my chest. “Why don’t you two come with me, and we’ll start the morning over again.”

I DISLIKE EXECUTIONS. ESPECIALLY MY OWN.

Guy White sat in his portable wheelchair in the gazebo, before the giant Christmas tree. He listened in deadly silence as I told him about my phone conversation with Lieutenant Hernandez.

Alex stood at his boss’s side, assault rifle ready. Two other guards, plus Madeleine. Our odds of survival were somewhere south of hopeless.

I noticed small details with perfect clarity. White had an oxygen tube strapped around his nose, but it wasn’t plugged into anything. There was a toothpaste stain on his burgundy Turkish bathrobe. His white flannel pajamas were missing the middle button. In the morning light, his skin was translucent, every vein in his hands and face inked in perfect detail.

The air smelled of smoke. The column billowing up from the house could probably be seen for miles. Sirens wailed in the distance.

I’d lost the bear slippers somewhere between the kitchen and the gazebo. Under my feet, the frozen grass felt like ice shards.

“You expect me to believe this,” Mr. White said at last. “You expect me to believe a police lieutenant—”

“He has my girlfriend.” It took every ounce of my will not to run, to make a mad dash across the lawn. “He’s going to kill her. We have to leave now.”

“How foolish do you think I am?” White’s voice trembled with rage. He looked at Ralph. “Why did you kill my son?”

Alex Cole cleared his throat. “Sir, the police’ll be here any minute. If we’re gonna take care of these—”

“I want to hear,” White said. “I want to hear his reasons.”

“Sir,” Alex insisted, “the house—”

“Let it burn.”

The house obeyed that order. Flames flickered in the second-story windows.

White stared at Ralph, waiting.

If Ralph was scared for his life, he didn’t show it. His feet were flecked with grass, his sweatpants sooty, his T-shirt peppered with shrapnel holes and red punch stains. Bits of broken glass glinted in his hair. But he stood up straight, looked Mr. White in the eyes.

“I didn’t kill Frankie, patrón,” he said. “You did that.”

The old man’s tiny supply of blood collected in his cheeks. “How dare you.”

“Maybe you didn’t hold the murder weapon,” Ralph said, “but that doesn’t matter. Frankie died because he hated you. He told me what was going to happen. I just didn’t understand.”

“I trusted you—”

“To save him. I know. Couldn’t be done. Couple of nights before he was murdered, Frankie came into the pawnshop. He’d been drinking. He said he’d had an argument with you. Said you were trying to arrange a marriage for him.”