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bedlamsbardI hate this chapter. No, seriously, I hate it, and if I had time, I'd rewrite it again so that it makes more sense. I don't have time, though (orch camp. 8:30 to 8:00 Monday till Friday, excepting this two and a half hour break I got right now). My writing style has totally gone to hell in a handbasket, and I blame it either on the fact that this chapter is being told from Mac's POV, or on the fact that I've been reading HP, which is written in a totally different style than what I usually read. Feedback much appreciated. I just need this chapter to go AWAY.
How could he say, later, that he didn’t know for sure what had happened? That he didn’t remember anything beyond the explosion that had rocked the hose and the death-dance of shattering glass and the screams of the house alarms rending the bright sunlight like sirens? He couldn’t even say what he’d done, and the realization twisted into him like shame.
When he woke it was to Stella’s hands and Stella’s voice. “You hit your head,” she said, hand at his throat, and maybe the words weren’t meant to be accusing, but they should have been.
Mac swallowed past the sourness in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said thickly, and then – “Concussion?”
Stella tilted his head toward her, figners light and impersonal against his chin. “I don’t think so.”
“Astra Pagliuca?” He blinked at the creamy expanse of carpet around him, then at the matching leather couch back to his right. Above them, cracks spiderwebbed across the plated glass windows that covered the upper half of the wall.
“The bastards took her upstairs,” Stella said, jaw working in silent anger. “An couple of them came through here a few minutes later, but I don’t think they expected to find anyone but her here. Good thing we parked on the street, not out front.”
Mac touched the bloody gash on his foehead gingerly, letting Stella help lever him into a sitting position. The world tilted dizzily for a moment, then righted itself, bringing with it a pounding headache that seemed to take a perverse pleasure in making Mac wish he’d never been born. “How long –”
“About fifteen minutes.” She stared at him for a moment, then her hand moved in a flesh-colored blur as his head knocked back against the wall. It didn’t help his headache.
Mac raised a hand to his stinging cheek. “What was that for?”
Stella shook out her hand like it stung, which it probably did. “Don’t you ever do that again, Mac Taylor,” she snapped. “I was fucking worried about you, you sick bastard –” For a moment he thought she was going to slap him again, then she grabbed him by the back of the head and kissed him hard, teeth clicking together and hurting almost as much as the slap had. When she pulled away Mac blinked uncertainly at her, a little dazed. “Stella –”
She was panting, hair hanging in limp curls around her face. “If you ever do anything like that again, Mac Taylor,” she said, “I will personally wring your neck. I do not want your job.”
“Pass – out?” he said slowly, head still spinning. She’d kissed him – more than kissed him – in Chicago, and even now his mind shied away from that like hot coals, but this wasn’t Chicago, this was New York, Staten Island, and they were on the job, not off it and –
Stella patted his hand. “The phone lines are out and we’re in a no service area,” she said. “Let’s go rescue Astra Pagliuca, shall we?”
*
When they’d arrived at Nicodemo Pagliuca’s Todt Hill house Astra had been the only person there. She’d been polite enough, answering their questions easily but a little warily, even letting Mac take a DNA swab to compare to the John Doe’s. She and her brother were close; they’d last spoken only a few hours before the John Doe’s time of death. Astra had sworn up and down he wasn’t dead, but she didn’t know where he was either. She’d just been getting into a heated explanation of the Constantine Family’s standing in Mob circles – she knew Joey Sforza on sight, but not personally – when her phone had rang and she stepped out in the hall to answer it. That was when things had gotten interesting.
She hadn’t bothered to go out of earshot, so Mac and Stella had still been able to hear everything she said. She’d started out antry and stayed there, dropping mobbed up names with the same ease and familiarity Danny used. Val Constantine. Carmine d’Alessandro. Giovanni d’Alessandro. Fat Freddy Patriso. Blue Eyes Patriso. Darin Pagliuca. The Lark. Johnnie Boy Marcatti. And she’d been talking to someone named “Ace” – an interesting coincidence, considering that one of Valentine Constantine’s top men was Anthony Aciello, known on the street as Ace. Mac wasn’t sure exactly how Mafia politics worked, but he somehow doubted street bosses of one family spent a lot of time carrying on phone conversations with the daughter of the boss of a rival family.
Astra had actually seemed to be calming down, her voice slowing and smoothing, when the doorbell had rang. That was when the world had exploded, glass shattering and falling on the wide foyer like rain. Mac had reacted instinctively, dropping from the couch to the carpet, but he hadn’t counted on the coffee table getting in the way.
Stella’s hands on him. Stella dragging him behind the couch and into the gap between it and the wall. Stella’s hands… He couldn’t help the blush that heated his cheekbones briefly, and she glanced over at him and grinned, hands clenched tight around her gun.
There were voices up ahead, Italian voices thick with the accent of the city, brushing short and to the point across something or other. A few words came clearly to his ears as they approached – “Patriso’s framin’ the damned Constantines. The Commission –” then they were cut off. The pops, sharp enough to almost be clicks, were so abrupt and soft Mac wasn’t sure he’d heard them.
Mac knew those sounds.
He brought up his gun with his arms straight and steady, sighting down the barrel before peering around the corner. He had an irrational urge to shove Stella behind him, keep her out of harm’s way, but he couldn’t do that. Cop, soldier, partner – bound together by blood and bone. He’d thought he’d understood it when he first came to the force. He still didn’t. Trust her.
There was a man walking down the dark hallway. His right hand was wreathed in smoke and he shook it absently, as though it was more a nuisance than a sign of the crime he’d done. He held a sleek .45 in one hand, the silencer somehow ugly where it was fixed to the barrel. His hair was shock-white, he wore all black, and there was an eyepatch over his left eye. Behind him, two bodies lay in the hall, the smell of gunpowder thick about them.
Mac lowered his gun, then raised it again. He let his finger tighten on the trigger. Just once, between the eyes, and maybe the sound wouldn’t echo so much. Maybe wouldn’t be noticed. One shot. He prepared to fire.
Stella grabbed his arm and jerked it down. “Are you insane?” she hissed out the corner of her mouth, the words barely a whisper Mac had to strain to hear. “That’s Anthony Aciello – he works for Val Constantine –”
“It’s Ace,” a deep tenor voice said. Ace Aciello rounded the corner and leaned against the opposite wall. “Nobody’s called me Anthony since my mother died.” His single gray eye flicked from Mac to Stella and back again. “Except for Astra, when she’s pissed at me. It’s Detectives Taylor and Bonasera, isn’t it? Val mentioned you.”
“What are you doing here?” Mac demanded as Stella pulled away from him, hands going to her own gun. “Are you with –”
Ace inclined his head at the bodies around the corner. “Those are Patriso soldiers, led by a hitman known as Whackjob. I know; the irony. I came to talk to Astra Pagliuca, which I haven’t been able to do because of extenuating circumstances. First you two, now this. Patriso,” he added, “is not making itself especially popular right now with Pagliuca right now, and they’re really fucking up what they’re trying to do. It’s kinda disgraceful, actually. La Cosa Nostra, and the best they can do is a full-frontal assault in broad daylight.” He paused. “By the way, I already called the police.”
“You asshole, we are the police,” Stella said.
“I know,” Ace said. “And there are two of you, and only one of me. If you’re going to arrest me, get it over with. Just remember that Astra Pagliuca’s upstairs, at the mercy of a sociopathic homicidal maniac named Whackjob who wants nothing more than to cut her into pieces and blame it on me.”
Mac lowered his gun down to his waist, but didn’t holster it. “Is there a reason we should arrest you?” he asked, his voice echoing uncomfortably in his ears. “Besides trespassing, that is.”
Stella said, “Pieces?”
“Illiana Seccio, ’98,” Ace said. “Or such it’s commonly assumed. Fat Freddy’s goomatta, only she had the bad luck to get pregnant. Whackjob cut the baby out of her when she was in her ninth month, cut off its hands, feet, and nose, then shoved an icepick through its chest. Then he punctured Illiana’s larynx with an icicle and –”
“I get the picture,” Stella interrupted. “Whackjob and Astra are upstairs. How many others?”
Ace dropped the good old boy act, syllables roughening out and slipping into outer-boroughs, at once scarier and more familiar, and damned if Mac knew what that meant. “Three dead, two upstairs with Whackjob. Astra will be dead in the hour if we don’t do something now.”
“Why do you care?” Stella demanded. “Our files say you work for the Constantine Family.”
Ace turned his cool gray gaze on her. “I got spies all over the city, and she’s the one that can ehar the most stuff, Cosa Nostra-wise. You know how hard I fuckin’ worked to get this far? I don’t got the time to go through that shit again.”
“So it’s all about business,” Mac said, thinking fleetingly, spies. Danny… He said he wasn’t. He’d never said he hadn’t. Had he?
“Yeah,” Ace said, voice shifting and changing from syllable to syllable. “It’s all business.”
*
They’re good cops, Val had said when he had returned from his meeting with the Agugliaros. He’d been exhausted, bags under his chocolate brown eyes and staggering a little when he walked. Ace didn’t know how long he’d been up – he’d pulled an all-nighter two nights ago, scurrying to get paperwork done, because he was a CEO as much as any civilian in their business suits and fancy offices, and he hadn’t slept since Joey called from the precinct house. Good cops. Know what they’re doing, Constantine had said.
Get some sleep, Ace had replied, and watched Val laugh like it was a joke.
He worked the slide of his pistol, just to feel the metal beneath his finges. Taylor and Bonasera gave him uncertain looks, and returned their gazes to the room across the hall.
It was very obviously a girl’s room. The walls were pale green, decorated with high school and college penants, movie posters, and a pair of red and white pom-poms. Astra may not have lived here anymore, but she’d grown up here, and left her mark indelibly on the room. It didn’t hurt that she was on the bed, wrists tied to the headboard as she sprawled awkwardly on her stomach. Whackjob Cestra was standing by her with a switchblade in his left hand and a cleaver in his right – bastard, and Ace hoped he got to shoot him himself; Illiana Seccio had been one of his agents and he’d liked her, goddammit. He hadn’t slept with her, because that would have been not only dumb but suicidal too, but she had been pretty, and a decent person for a Mob boss’s girlfriend, and a good informant. And Whackjob had killed her, killed her slow and made her suffer and killed her child, too.
One of the Patriso soldiers was standing by the window, holding an AK-47 and looking down at the array of navy and silver police cars in the yard with something like amusement on his ugly face. Ace didn’t know him and didn’t care for an introduction; he’d find out the name when Val told him later. The other soldier was two doors down, his forehead a bloody pulp after Ace had knocked it against the wall a couple times. He’d live, a fact Ace was sorry for, but he’d decided against committing murder in front of a pair of homicide detectives as a bad idea for all involved.
“On three,” Ace said softly, raising his gun. Taylor and Bonasera turned to look at him in surprise. He raised his eyebrows. “It’s three against two, and they’re distracted. I think we can take them. Whackjob’s mine.” He could’ve hit the bastard from here, of course – it was a dead easy shot, what with the range and Whackjob’s back twisted just so – but he guessed the detectives had something they liked to call honor, and shooting an enemy in the back wasn’t honor. Ace knew honor. It wasn’t about how you killed, it was about who you killed and where. Let a man – a man – have the honor to die with his eyes open so he can see his killer; but you shoot an animal in the dark, in the back, where it can’t see you and rush you. Whackjob wasn’t a man, and calling him an animal was a disgrace to the animal kingdom.
Taylor set his jaw. “I think –” he said, and the blare of the loudspeaker outside cut him off.
“THIS IS THE NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT!” a cop announced, the words spluttering slightly halfway through. “PLEASE COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP! THIS IS THE NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT!”
The soldier pushed the window open. “Fuck you!” he shouted down.
Whackjob put the switchblade to the back of Astra’s neck. She flinched but didn’t move, didn’t try to get away or save herself. “If I cut here,” he said in a conversational tone, “do you think I’ll puncture the spine? I tried once, but it was a long time ago, and I missed the spinal cord –”
Ace emptied three bullets in the back of his head without warning.
“Freeze, NYPD!” Taylor yelled, and he and Bonasera swept into the room with their guns out. Ace followed, watching with only half an eye as Taylor slammed the soldier up against a wall with his cuffs already out. Bonasera was yelling out the window at the cops below.
“Ace –” Astra said, as his fingers slipped over the knots in the rope. He yanked furiously at it, then reached for the knife in his sleeve. One of Carmine’s Christmas presents.
Astra swallowed, rubbing at her wrists. “I think Pagliuca owes you,” she said.
“Ma’am, are you all right?” Taylor asked, abandoning his victim and coming over with a policeman’s distant concern writ across his face.
“My brother’s not dead,” she told him.
“Astra, Jesus,” Ace said. “Are you –”
“I think you’d better give Val Constantine a call,” Astra said, ignoring the two cops in the room. “And I’ll better call my dad.” She swallowed. “Thanks, Ace,” she croaked. “I think I’m going to throw up now.”
How could he say, later, that he didn’t know for sure what had happened? That he didn’t remember anything beyond the explosion that had rocked the hose and the death-dance of shattering glass and the screams of the house alarms rending the bright sunlight like sirens? He couldn’t even say what he’d done, and the realization twisted into him like shame.
When he woke it was to Stella’s hands and Stella’s voice. “You hit your head,” she said, hand at his throat, and maybe the words weren’t meant to be accusing, but they should have been.
Mac swallowed past the sourness in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said thickly, and then – “Concussion?”
Stella tilted his head toward her, figners light and impersonal against his chin. “I don’t think so.”
“Astra Pagliuca?” He blinked at the creamy expanse of carpet around him, then at the matching leather couch back to his right. Above them, cracks spiderwebbed across the plated glass windows that covered the upper half of the wall.
“The bastards took her upstairs,” Stella said, jaw working in silent anger. “An couple of them came through here a few minutes later, but I don’t think they expected to find anyone but her here. Good thing we parked on the street, not out front.”
Mac touched the bloody gash on his foehead gingerly, letting Stella help lever him into a sitting position. The world tilted dizzily for a moment, then righted itself, bringing with it a pounding headache that seemed to take a perverse pleasure in making Mac wish he’d never been born. “How long –”
“About fifteen minutes.” She stared at him for a moment, then her hand moved in a flesh-colored blur as his head knocked back against the wall. It didn’t help his headache.
Mac raised a hand to his stinging cheek. “What was that for?”
Stella shook out her hand like it stung, which it probably did. “Don’t you ever do that again, Mac Taylor,” she snapped. “I was fucking worried about you, you sick bastard –” For a moment he thought she was going to slap him again, then she grabbed him by the back of the head and kissed him hard, teeth clicking together and hurting almost as much as the slap had. When she pulled away Mac blinked uncertainly at her, a little dazed. “Stella –”
She was panting, hair hanging in limp curls around her face. “If you ever do anything like that again, Mac Taylor,” she said, “I will personally wring your neck. I do not want your job.”
“Pass – out?” he said slowly, head still spinning. She’d kissed him – more than kissed him – in Chicago, and even now his mind shied away from that like hot coals, but this wasn’t Chicago, this was New York, Staten Island, and they were on the job, not off it and –
Stella patted his hand. “The phone lines are out and we’re in a no service area,” she said. “Let’s go rescue Astra Pagliuca, shall we?”
*
When they’d arrived at Nicodemo Pagliuca’s Todt Hill house Astra had been the only person there. She’d been polite enough, answering their questions easily but a little warily, even letting Mac take a DNA swab to compare to the John Doe’s. She and her brother were close; they’d last spoken only a few hours before the John Doe’s time of death. Astra had sworn up and down he wasn’t dead, but she didn’t know where he was either. She’d just been getting into a heated explanation of the Constantine Family’s standing in Mob circles – she knew Joey Sforza on sight, but not personally – when her phone had rang and she stepped out in the hall to answer it. That was when things had gotten interesting.
She hadn’t bothered to go out of earshot, so Mac and Stella had still been able to hear everything she said. She’d started out antry and stayed there, dropping mobbed up names with the same ease and familiarity Danny used. Val Constantine. Carmine d’Alessandro. Giovanni d’Alessandro. Fat Freddy Patriso. Blue Eyes Patriso. Darin Pagliuca. The Lark. Johnnie Boy Marcatti. And she’d been talking to someone named “Ace” – an interesting coincidence, considering that one of Valentine Constantine’s top men was Anthony Aciello, known on the street as Ace. Mac wasn’t sure exactly how Mafia politics worked, but he somehow doubted street bosses of one family spent a lot of time carrying on phone conversations with the daughter of the boss of a rival family.
Astra had actually seemed to be calming down, her voice slowing and smoothing, when the doorbell had rang. That was when the world had exploded, glass shattering and falling on the wide foyer like rain. Mac had reacted instinctively, dropping from the couch to the carpet, but he hadn’t counted on the coffee table getting in the way.
Stella’s hands on him. Stella dragging him behind the couch and into the gap between it and the wall. Stella’s hands… He couldn’t help the blush that heated his cheekbones briefly, and she glanced over at him and grinned, hands clenched tight around her gun.
There were voices up ahead, Italian voices thick with the accent of the city, brushing short and to the point across something or other. A few words came clearly to his ears as they approached – “Patriso’s framin’ the damned Constantines. The Commission –” then they were cut off. The pops, sharp enough to almost be clicks, were so abrupt and soft Mac wasn’t sure he’d heard them.
Mac knew those sounds.
He brought up his gun with his arms straight and steady, sighting down the barrel before peering around the corner. He had an irrational urge to shove Stella behind him, keep her out of harm’s way, but he couldn’t do that. Cop, soldier, partner – bound together by blood and bone. He’d thought he’d understood it when he first came to the force. He still didn’t. Trust her.
There was a man walking down the dark hallway. His right hand was wreathed in smoke and he shook it absently, as though it was more a nuisance than a sign of the crime he’d done. He held a sleek .45 in one hand, the silencer somehow ugly where it was fixed to the barrel. His hair was shock-white, he wore all black, and there was an eyepatch over his left eye. Behind him, two bodies lay in the hall, the smell of gunpowder thick about them.
Mac lowered his gun, then raised it again. He let his finger tighten on the trigger. Just once, between the eyes, and maybe the sound wouldn’t echo so much. Maybe wouldn’t be noticed. One shot. He prepared to fire.
Stella grabbed his arm and jerked it down. “Are you insane?” she hissed out the corner of her mouth, the words barely a whisper Mac had to strain to hear. “That’s Anthony Aciello – he works for Val Constantine –”
“It’s Ace,” a deep tenor voice said. Ace Aciello rounded the corner and leaned against the opposite wall. “Nobody’s called me Anthony since my mother died.” His single gray eye flicked from Mac to Stella and back again. “Except for Astra, when she’s pissed at me. It’s Detectives Taylor and Bonasera, isn’t it? Val mentioned you.”
“What are you doing here?” Mac demanded as Stella pulled away from him, hands going to her own gun. “Are you with –”
Ace inclined his head at the bodies around the corner. “Those are Patriso soldiers, led by a hitman known as Whackjob. I know; the irony. I came to talk to Astra Pagliuca, which I haven’t been able to do because of extenuating circumstances. First you two, now this. Patriso,” he added, “is not making itself especially popular right now with Pagliuca right now, and they’re really fucking up what they’re trying to do. It’s kinda disgraceful, actually. La Cosa Nostra, and the best they can do is a full-frontal assault in broad daylight.” He paused. “By the way, I already called the police.”
“You asshole, we are the police,” Stella said.
“I know,” Ace said. “And there are two of you, and only one of me. If you’re going to arrest me, get it over with. Just remember that Astra Pagliuca’s upstairs, at the mercy of a sociopathic homicidal maniac named Whackjob who wants nothing more than to cut her into pieces and blame it on me.”
Mac lowered his gun down to his waist, but didn’t holster it. “Is there a reason we should arrest you?” he asked, his voice echoing uncomfortably in his ears. “Besides trespassing, that is.”
Stella said, “Pieces?”
“Illiana Seccio, ’98,” Ace said. “Or such it’s commonly assumed. Fat Freddy’s goomatta, only she had the bad luck to get pregnant. Whackjob cut the baby out of her when she was in her ninth month, cut off its hands, feet, and nose, then shoved an icepick through its chest. Then he punctured Illiana’s larynx with an icicle and –”
“I get the picture,” Stella interrupted. “Whackjob and Astra are upstairs. How many others?”
Ace dropped the good old boy act, syllables roughening out and slipping into outer-boroughs, at once scarier and more familiar, and damned if Mac knew what that meant. “Three dead, two upstairs with Whackjob. Astra will be dead in the hour if we don’t do something now.”
“Why do you care?” Stella demanded. “Our files say you work for the Constantine Family.”
Ace turned his cool gray gaze on her. “I got spies all over the city, and she’s the one that can ehar the most stuff, Cosa Nostra-wise. You know how hard I fuckin’ worked to get this far? I don’t got the time to go through that shit again.”
“So it’s all about business,” Mac said, thinking fleetingly, spies. Danny… He said he wasn’t. He’d never said he hadn’t. Had he?
“Yeah,” Ace said, voice shifting and changing from syllable to syllable. “It’s all business.”
*
They’re good cops, Val had said when he had returned from his meeting with the Agugliaros. He’d been exhausted, bags under his chocolate brown eyes and staggering a little when he walked. Ace didn’t know how long he’d been up – he’d pulled an all-nighter two nights ago, scurrying to get paperwork done, because he was a CEO as much as any civilian in their business suits and fancy offices, and he hadn’t slept since Joey called from the precinct house. Good cops. Know what they’re doing, Constantine had said.
Get some sleep, Ace had replied, and watched Val laugh like it was a joke.
He worked the slide of his pistol, just to feel the metal beneath his finges. Taylor and Bonasera gave him uncertain looks, and returned their gazes to the room across the hall.
It was very obviously a girl’s room. The walls were pale green, decorated with high school and college penants, movie posters, and a pair of red and white pom-poms. Astra may not have lived here anymore, but she’d grown up here, and left her mark indelibly on the room. It didn’t hurt that she was on the bed, wrists tied to the headboard as she sprawled awkwardly on her stomach. Whackjob Cestra was standing by her with a switchblade in his left hand and a cleaver in his right – bastard, and Ace hoped he got to shoot him himself; Illiana Seccio had been one of his agents and he’d liked her, goddammit. He hadn’t slept with her, because that would have been not only dumb but suicidal too, but she had been pretty, and a decent person for a Mob boss’s girlfriend, and a good informant. And Whackjob had killed her, killed her slow and made her suffer and killed her child, too.
One of the Patriso soldiers was standing by the window, holding an AK-47 and looking down at the array of navy and silver police cars in the yard with something like amusement on his ugly face. Ace didn’t know him and didn’t care for an introduction; he’d find out the name when Val told him later. The other soldier was two doors down, his forehead a bloody pulp after Ace had knocked it against the wall a couple times. He’d live, a fact Ace was sorry for, but he’d decided against committing murder in front of a pair of homicide detectives as a bad idea for all involved.
“On three,” Ace said softly, raising his gun. Taylor and Bonasera turned to look at him in surprise. He raised his eyebrows. “It’s three against two, and they’re distracted. I think we can take them. Whackjob’s mine.” He could’ve hit the bastard from here, of course – it was a dead easy shot, what with the range and Whackjob’s back twisted just so – but he guessed the detectives had something they liked to call honor, and shooting an enemy in the back wasn’t honor. Ace knew honor. It wasn’t about how you killed, it was about who you killed and where. Let a man – a man – have the honor to die with his eyes open so he can see his killer; but you shoot an animal in the dark, in the back, where it can’t see you and rush you. Whackjob wasn’t a man, and calling him an animal was a disgrace to the animal kingdom.
Taylor set his jaw. “I think –” he said, and the blare of the loudspeaker outside cut him off.
“THIS IS THE NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT!” a cop announced, the words spluttering slightly halfway through. “PLEASE COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP! THIS IS THE NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT!”
The soldier pushed the window open. “Fuck you!” he shouted down.
Whackjob put the switchblade to the back of Astra’s neck. She flinched but didn’t move, didn’t try to get away or save herself. “If I cut here,” he said in a conversational tone, “do you think I’ll puncture the spine? I tried once, but it was a long time ago, and I missed the spinal cord –”
Ace emptied three bullets in the back of his head without warning.
“Freeze, NYPD!” Taylor yelled, and he and Bonasera swept into the room with their guns out. Ace followed, watching with only half an eye as Taylor slammed the soldier up against a wall with his cuffs already out. Bonasera was yelling out the window at the cops below.
“Ace –” Astra said, as his fingers slipped over the knots in the rope. He yanked furiously at it, then reached for the knife in his sleeve. One of Carmine’s Christmas presents.
Astra swallowed, rubbing at her wrists. “I think Pagliuca owes you,” she said.
“Ma’am, are you all right?” Taylor asked, abandoning his victim and coming over with a policeman’s distant concern writ across his face.
“My brother’s not dead,” she told him.
“Astra, Jesus,” Ace said. “Are you –”
“I think you’d better give Val Constantine a call,” Astra said, ignoring the two cops in the room. “And I’ll better call my dad.” She swallowed. “Thanks, Ace,” she croaked. “I think I’m going to throw up now.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-19 07:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-22 12:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-22 04:59 pm (UTC)which I really need to get off my ass and write.
I would certainly vote for more Black Monday as a Very Good Thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-23 12:03 am (UTC)...which I really need to write, since I want to get both Omerta and Black Monday done before the new season starts, since they take place over the summer, more or less.