“Do we have time to go back to the hotel room?” I asked, imagining his body twisted around mine, his rough hands on my ass, his mouth on my...
“No,” he said, popping the empty mag and sliding in a new one. “Because… don’t look. Don’t change anything, but… take this.” He handed the gun to me, sliding his fingers over my wrist. “There’s a man behind the water heater at the back of the hostel, and one behind the big rock to my right, back there. If they kill me in front of the right witnesses, they get my title. My territory. My crew. So I can’t reclaim it when I return.”
“What?” I didn’t move, but the conversation had turned so casually, I felt like a purse someone had turned upside down and shaken.
“They’re going to try to take me alive.”
I had to take a second to absorb what he said. “How did they find us?”
“The forger, maybe. There might not be any passports.” Nothing about him indicated panic. He looked as if he were about to stroll in the park.
“Don’t leave me.” I choked on the words.
“Are you ready?”
I barely took a breath when I nodded. I was ready.
The whole of my vision went as far as the light that surrounded him, and the hard metal of the pistol between us became a world. I didn’t see either of the men he spoke of, only a light patch of dust behind the shed.
“One behind the water heater,” he said, tipping his head to the hostel behind him. “One behind the big rock to your right.”
“What do you want to do?” I asked as if considering where to go for dinner.
“As soon as I raise my arm, drop to the ground.”
“Then why the gun? If you’re putting me in a defensive position?”
“Only shoot to survive.”
“I’ll shoot anyone who tries to hurt you.”
“Don’t. Trust me.”
I trusted him. I did. The salt of the entire visible world was at my command with him. I feared nothing. Not death, not pain, not my own sin. God was my ally, and evil was my slave inside the quiet torrent of his eyes.
I trusted him to protect me, but not to protect himself for my sake.
He squeezed my hand, then he walked away, his own gun sticking out of the back of his waistband.
What happened then happened so quickly, I didn’t have a chance to think about the feeling that he was shrinking in my vision, or the way the landscape seemed to squeeze him into a smaller space. He was ten steps to shelter. I still didn’t see anyone. My gun weighted seventy pounds or more, and the Sicilians, who wanted him alive more than they wanted me dead, were waiting until he was close enough to get a clear shot.
That, I knew.
And I knew he walked slowly to draw them out.
And I knew the pain in my chest that grew with every step. The twisting feeling, as if my lungs were being played like an accordion.
I was afraid. Desperately afraid.
And my patience ran out like a broken hourglass.
I raised my arm and pointed the gun at Antonio’s back as if I could ever shoot him. “Capo!”
He didn’t spin toward me but pulled the gun from his waist, and shots, everywhere, pinged, popped, cracked against the mountains. I dropped, but not like a child in an earthquake drill. I dropped with intention and pointed the gun in the direction of the shots behind the boulder, while Antonio dropped and rolled to aim behind the water heater.
A rough scrape to my right left a divot in the dirt, missing me by inches. I’d never felt so vulnerable. So distant from my sun, like Mercury cast into Pluto’s orbit. Like a child in an earthquake drill that turned out to not be a drill at all.
I exhausted my bullets and froze. Antonio rolled. Alive? With no more forward movement to take and the center of my orbit down, I was out of ideas, out of thoughts, only knee-deep in a fog of fear that I hadn’t kept pressure on the guy behind the boulder long enough to keep Antonio from getting shot in the back. Oh god, he was out there, alone, and I was light years away.
He rolled onto his stomach and took another shot at the water heater.
One thousand years passed in a split second.