No. No way. I’d be in the open too long. If the man on the road was any kind of shot, he’d drop me before I made it halfway. I crouched beneath some brush and waited for him to make a move, listening to the splashing sounds where Ryan and the Clip were struggling. The numbness in my wrist started to give way to pain. I wondered if it was broken.
“Ricky!” the other man called. “Ricky, answer me.”
I peered up through the leaves. I could see his arm and chest, his gun pointed at the water where Ryan and the Clip were entwined. No way he’d shoot; he’d be as likely to hit one as the other. As he watched them, I smeared more mud on my face and arms and started up the bank. My bad wrist made crawling awkward. I felt a gnarled root tear the skin of my belly as I dragged myself over it.
I reached the top and peered over the edge. Across the road metal glinted in the cold light. Something I could use as a weapon? No. A shopping cart miles from nowhere.
In the water behind me someone grunted loudly. There was a thrashing sound like a gator taking down its prey.
As I neared the top of the embankment, I could see the second gunman bracing himself against the trunk of an oak twice as thick as he was, pushing branches aside to get a better view of the water. I closed my left hand around a stone the size of a tennis ball and eased myself up onto the road. I stood looking at the gunman’s profile. Like Roni Galil had said to me once in firearms training: you could be our King David, our Melech David, going up against Goliath with a slingshot. I wished I could get closer but the more I moved, the more noise I might make. I breathed in slowly, trying to blend in with the background and stay out of his peripheral vision. Just envision a catcher’s mitt where his head is, I told myself, and whip it sidearm. An accurate shot would knock him out or kill him. And if it didn’t kill him, I was fortunate to have on hand someone with the necessary skills, experience and tools to finish the job.
As I cocked my wrist to throw the stone, something rustled behind me in the bushes along the riverbank. The gunman turned to see it and swung his pistol my way, holding it in both hands, firing twice. I hit the road, scraping my hands and elbows. Eyes flashed in the darkness behind me as a red fox dashed across the road to the Parkway embankment and disappeared near the base of a willow.
The gunman looked at me, half-naked, smeared with mud, lying on the road. “Don’t move,” he said. “I’ll shoot you, I swear.”
I stayed where I was. I could see all of him now and he certainly wasn’t Vito Di Pietra. He was all of five-five, slightly built and well dressed. Fine features. Delicate hands. It was the earnest young man I had seen at Meadowvale arguing with Alice Stockwell. His eyes were wide and the hand holding the gun on me didn’t look steady.
“So you’re Geller,” he said.
“And you’re Stefano Di Pietra,” I said. “Also known as Steven Stone.”
“Make one move and I’ll kill you.”
“I believe you.”
The thrashing in the river had stopped; there was just the sound of shallow water moving over rocks. The sound of traffic. The sound of Stefano’s breathing and mine.
“Ricky!” he called. “Are you okay?”
The silence was comforting to a point. If the Clip was dead, Ryan might be able to take Stefano down before he shot me. But even if Ryan were still alive, he only had one good eye. In the land of the blind that might make him hot shit, but here and now I couldn’t count on him. That left just three possible outcomes: rescue my own damn ass; pray to God to drop an anvil on Stefano’s head; or take it like a man and hope that Katherine Hollinger would avenge me like a demented angel.
“Ricky?” he brayed. No answer. “Ricky!” Still nothing. “God help you if he’s hurt,” Stefano said.
I had to keep him looking at me, not down at the river where Ryan might be moving. If he was moving. I stood up. Stefano pointed the gun at me. I held my ground and kept my hands where he could see them. I said, “It’s been you all along, hasn’t it? The little brother. The one who wasn’t supposed to be a player.”
“Only because they never let me.”
“Your brothers?”
“My father, too. Morons, all of them. They’d look at a truck full of medication and think, ‘Hijack it.’ I looked at the same truck and envisioned a fleet crossing the border.”
“Your father should have put you in charge.”
“Damn right. He named me for Don Magaddino, you know, because I was born the year he died. But I was small and sick a lot and mysteriously prone to being beaten up by my brothers. So my father made me the family bookkeeper, adding up numbers while my brothers ran the crews and made all the money. Got all the women. Played with the toys.”
“You hooked up with Jay Silver when you did your MBA?”
“Taking that course was the smartest thing I ever did. I started to really see how things could work if they were run by a businessman instead of a thug. I truly understood how huge the market could be for good, clean Canadian pills.”
“But when the law changed, you needed your brothers to keep the business going.”
“My brothers? What do they have to do with this?”
“Isn’t Vista Mar owned by all of you?”
“No. The Vista Mar Care Group is owned and operated by me.”
“But what about Buffalo?”
“What about it?”
“Who was running the operation on that side?”
“You still don’t get it, do you? When I say I run this show, I mean I conceived, coordinated and carried out the entire production.”
Executed would have been a good word too. I was glad he didn’t use it.
“My brothers never knew about it. Their confreres in Buffalo never knew about it.”
“Then how did Ricky-”
“Ricky was with me, you idiot! Me. Not Marco, not Vito, not anyone in Buffalo.”
“You could handle all the distribution with just one guy?”
“We didn’t need a big infrastructure,” Stefano said. “That was the beauty of it. It was already in place. This New Fifty club has chapters all over the Northeast. Full of people who’d go broke if they had to pay full fare for their meds.”
Only then did I solve the mystery Dante Ryan had engaged me to investigate. Stefano had put the hit on the Silvers. Killing Page had not had the desired effect. It only pushed Jay Silver into committing the same rash act: telling Stefano he wanted out. Maybe Silver was counting on their school ties to shield him from harm. He had probably never seen Stefano as I saw him now; coldly murderous and without affect.
Now I just had to live long enough to tell Ryan the news.
“Why did you hire out Jay’s killing?” I asked him. “Why pay fifty grand when Ricky could have done it free?”
“I wanted Silver and his family dead. I wanted the other pharmacists to know what would happen if they threatened me. And I wanted Dante Ryan kept busy while we took care of Marco. I was always afraid of Dante Ryan,” he said. “He never hit me or did anything bad to me-he never even threatened me-but there was something about him. The way he looked at me.”
“He looks at everyone that way.”
Stefano’s eyes darted toward the river and back at me. The silence was unnerving, but not to me. The longer it stayed quiet, the more sure I felt that Ryan had prevailed over Ricky. But where was he? Could he even see what was going on?
“Ricky killed Marco and his men?”
“I helped,” Stefano smiled. “Ricky shot Tommy and Phil when we came in, but we both shot Marco. Ricky shot him in the chest and I shot him in the head.”
“While he was asleep.”
“Asleep or drunk, it was hard to tell.”
“Good thing you were there to help,”
“Shut up! Every shitty thing he ever did to me-every time he beat me up or put me down or embarrassed me in front of friends because I was different-he’s lucky all I did was shoot him in his sleep.”