Burn this City by Aleksandr Voinov
13
His wife? Jack was almost grateful that his mind had something to chew on to keep any panicked begging at bay. He managed to conjure up a name—Caterina Rausa, if he remembered correctly. Like most wives in their circles, she hadn’t exactly kept a high profile.
The wife of a boss might be his advisor, but mostly she was the one who birthed and raised his children, and provided the home that her husband returned to between mistresses and business. Caterina had been mostly on Jack’s radar because she was from out of state, but still part of their circles. Her family had been connected to the Marino clan, which had been wiped out in the biggest Mafia trial of the past two decades, with Stefano Marino handing his whole family, root and branch, to the Feds. The pentito boss, the one who’d recanted, lowest of the low. Scum. But that had been before their wedding. Still, Jack imagined the Rausa might have felt a bit tense when the trial had gone national.
Caterina Rausa. He faintly remembered a short, curvy woman with shoulder-length black hair and a heart-shaped face, but otherwise he drew blanks. She’d never figured in his plans. The understanding among men of honor was to leave their women and children alone. Not everybody obeyed that rule; there were stories of mistresses and sisters ending up in the crossfire, but generally violence focused on the men.
Sometimes that might be a mistake—Jack had heard stories of wives running the business successfully while hubby did time. Petra Lo Cascio was mostly a moderating, not a steering influence on her husband, and Sarah Dommarco was primarily visible on the charity circuit. They had been the inspiration behind his ill-fated proposal to Beth—he was reasonably sure that he could have kept her safe.
“I thought …” He swallowed because Rausa looked coiled up as if ready to punch him again. “I honestly thought she’d died in a car accident.”
“You’re fucking with me.” Rausa’s voice was flat and cold.
“I have absolutely nothing to gain from making you even angrier,” Jack tried. “That’s what I heard. Car crash. Didn’t she veer off the road up around Black Hill?”
Rausa stared at him, then grimaced. “Yes, but she was dead before she even hit the bottom of the gorge.” That same flatness.
“So … it could have been an accident, except there’s something that makes you think it wasn’t.”
“Sal.” The blond man, Enzo, walked into view. “He’s playing for time.”
“Yes, I am,” Jack said. “But if you’re going to torture and kill me, at least tell me why.”
Rausa nodded slowly, unevenly, like an automaton. “She missed the hairpin turn halfway up Black Hill, went straight over the edge. Car kept rolling, broke her neck. When the autopsy came in, they found a rifle bullet in her temple. Quite unlikely some killer climbed all the way down to shoot her in the mangled car, so she was shot while up on the road. If you look at the scene, it’s not an easy kill. But it was a rainy evening, visibility was low, and she would have crawled around that turn. He might have used night-vision goggles, I don’t know.” Rausa drew a deep, shuddering breath. “She didn’t have enemies of her own. That was all on me.”
Oh shit.Jack was still working through the information when Enzo placed a hand on Rausa’s shoulder, who nodded and glanced at Enzo, but the gaze didn’t make contact, didn’t see anything on the outside.
“That was toward the end of the War.”
“Yeah.” Rausa blew out a few breaths, steadying himself and then slid from out under Enzo’s touch. “The killing blow.”
So that was the move that had pushed Rausa out of the game. Jack still didn’t have the timeline completely straight, couldn’t quite work out whether that was before or after Rausa had risen from underboss to boss, but those were mere details at this point. One thing he knew for certain, though—when it happened, he’d been sitting in a prison cell sixty miles from Port Francis.
Somebody had straight up assassinated Salvatore Rausa’s wife, and even after all these years, it fucked with the man’s head. Enough to not care if Port Francis burned. He’d turn the whole city into a pyre for her.
“I get why you think it was my family,” Jack admitted. “It’s not Dommarco’s style. I don’t see Cassaro ordering that, either. Both are too old-fashioned. Doesn’t smell right.”
Enzo shot Jack a baleful look, but Rausa nodded. The man’s enormous energy seemed to pool and sharpen, and his attention returned to Jack.
“It also happened right after I’d landed a good blow against your outfit. You could say I’m not terribly interested in negotiating my rightful place with the fucker who murdered my wife.” It came between gritted teeth, all white and sharp like a wolf’s.
“For what’s it worth, I didn’t order the hit. I was still in prison, and this is the first I’m hearing about it.”
“Then Andrea.”
“Or his father. Or my predecessor, Vic Decesare. He smashed up so much shit during the War that it took me years to fix it.” Jack remembered Cassaro’s words when they’d sat down that first time, Jack sweaty in his suit because he half expected to be gunned down then and there, even though they’d rented a conference room in a neutral location. “Seems the Lo Cascio have switched from a war consigliere to one of peace. Is that what you are, Jack?”
At first he hadn’t thought so. Consiglieri had to be able to handle both, but while trying to bury every hatchet that had been dug up over those war years, he realized that he much preferred peace. Maybe because the War had been so painful and costly, maybe because deep down he was a coward.
But talk about painful and costly.
He was under no illusion that all couples married out of love. Rausa was a good catch—attractive, rich, powerful. He’d draw his share of gold diggers based on that alone. But this simmering rage inside Rausa didn’t feel like wounded pride. In Jack’s experience, wounded pride didn’t burn this hot. Those were more like flash fires that blazed bright for a few days or maybe weeks, and then cooled and were added to the ledger for later, when the time came to get even.
The expression he saw in Rausa’s face warned him to not express compassion or condolences. From him, Rausa would consider it nothing but scorn or provocation. Now at least he knew two things: Rausa hadn’t targeted him personally—he was after the whole family, and secondly, while it wasn’t personal, it was inevitable. All he had to do was look at Enzo and his little collection of tools. The war had already begun, the first shots fired.
Rausa looked down at him, studying him with intent. Jack forced himself to meet the gaze, really look at Rausa, from his uneven hairline, strong forehead, deep-set hazel eyes, down to a stubborn chin and amply stubbled jaw. The hazel seemed more greenish tinged than Jack had noticed before.
“I’ll ask again,” Rausa finally said softly, no more than a quiet rumble. “Why are you supporting a man like Andrea? Do you think he’s worth it?”
“You mean worth dying for?” Jack swallowed. “It’ll have to happen at some point, right? Might as well be today.” The truth was, he’d been on borrowed time, ever since that night on the bridge. By some miracle, he’d seen a sunrise again, and then another, and many more after that, but maybe death was like an illness that could go into remission and then return. As the saying went, nobody got out alive.
“Yes, I mean worth dying for.” Rausa stretched out a hand and Jack forced himself to keep his eyes on him. When the cold metal of the claw hammer’s head was pushed under his chin, he shuddered. “Especially dying like this.”
“Nothing is worth dying for,” Jack said. “But people die all the time.”
Rausa dropped the claw hammer into Jack’s lap, and, faster than Jack had expected, pulled the gun from the holster on his hip and pushed the muzzle hard against Jack’s forehead, finger on or right next to the trigger. Jack’s vision blurred and he blinked a few times, but then managed to meet Rausa’s gaze again, even though his blood had gone cold. He clung to the thought that it would be a mercy if Rausa put a bullet in his brain, but it took every ounce of willpower he had.
His mind emptied of all thoughts except one: A mercy.