OWN HER: A Dark Mafia Romance(55)
“Nice shot,” he commented.
Then he slumped over onto his side, dead.
Before Carla could call out to see if Gio was there, she heard a gunshot, then another. She felt a light pressure in her right shoulder, almost as though someone were gently pressing on it with a fingertip. When she looked down at it, she saw that she'd been shot twice—once high in the shoulder, and once in the chest.
Mario stood at the top of the stairs, pointing his gun at Gio as another gangster aimed his smoking pistol at her. The gangster had a huge can of kerosene at his feet. In his other hand, Mario held a shopping bag that looked like it contained the journals.
“You killed Julius, you fuckin' bimbo!” the gangster yelled, his face contorted with rage.
Carla tried to level her gun at him. Instead it slipped nervelessly from her hand, clattering to the floor. Her arm dangled, limp and useless.
The brachial nerve, she thought. Shit.
“See, this is exactly the kind of scene I was hoping to avoid,” Mario said, shaking his head sadly. “Now we need to leave in a hurry. I'll keep an eye on Gio and the broad. You start dousing the place, and do it fast.”
The gangster nodded dutifully and picked up the kerosene, sloshing it on the walls and floor. Mario grabbed Gio by the ear and twisted it savagely, pulling Gio down the steps as he kept his gun trained on Carla.
“You stupid Feds,” Mario said. “You pick men like Louie Grammatica to lean on because they're weak and easy to scare, and then you wonder why they don't keep your secrets better. You never learn.”
“You're calling me stupid?” Carla asked. She was scrambling, trying to come up with anything that would buy her some time. “Thirty years of murder and racketeering, and you wrote everything down. You kept journals, for God's sake. Your ego was so inflated that you thought no one would ever find them or be able to translate them. You have to be, without a doubt, the dumbest son of a bitch in the history of the mob.”
“Insults, insults,” Mario sneered. “I've heard them from so many people right before I've shot them. Believe me, all the nasty names in the world won't make you bulletproof, so you can save your breath.”
The sloshing noises upstairs slowed to a halt. The gangster with the kerosene appeared at the top of the steps a moment later with a frown of confusion. “What's she mean, you kept journals?” he asked Mario. “What the fuck is she talkin' about? You wrote shit down?”
“It's nothing, don't worry about it,” Mario said, waving him away. “Just go back to soaking the place in gas, and we can be done with this.”
But the gangster merely continued to stare at Mario in disbelief. “She's lyin', though, right? You'd never keep notes on all the stuff we did, would you?”
“Of course he would, Bruno,” Gio said. “He wrote it all down, every deal, every heist, every murder. It's all right there in those diaries he's carrying in the bag.”
“Shut your rat mouth, you punk,” Mario snarled, twisting Gio's ear again.
“There's stuff in there about me an' Julius, too?” Bruno asked, setting the kerosene down. “Jesus, what if the Feds had found those books, huh? We'd have been fuckin' ruined.”
“It's bullshit,” Mario insisted. “There's no journals. I never wrote down nothing about you or Julius that could get us arrested. Now pick up that can and get to work.”
Bruno raised his gun, pointing it at Mario. “Show me,” he said, his voice shaking. “If it's nothin', if you didn't write nothin' down about us, then hand the bag over to me so I can see for myself.”
“Jesus, Bruno, if you want to see so bad, I can show you after we're gone from here!” Mario yelled. “But with the gunshots, there's no way of knowing when the cops are gonna arrive, so...”
“No. Now.” Bruno cocked his gun. “I wanna see it now. All these years, all the loyalty Julius an' I showed you, all the stretches I did in County an' upstate to protect you...if you did this to me, if you stabbed us all in the fuckin' back like this, then I wanna see it. Right fuckin' now.”
“All right, fine,” Mario sighed. “If you're gonna be like that about it, here, take 'em and look over 'em. Quick, so we can still get outta here.”
Mario held out the shopping bag. Bruno lowered his gun and reached out to take it.
Mario pointed his gun at Bruno's face and pulled the trigger.
Bruno's hands went to his ruined face, blood spurting between his fingers. He let out a wet squeal and then tumbled backward down the stairs. When he hit the bottom, his lifeless body crumpled into a heap.