“I’ll be with you in half an hour. We’ll go up there together.”
But his car door was already closing. She heard his footsteps crunch on the gravel.
“Alessandro!”
“There’s another car here at the gate,” he said. “A green Panda. With one of those cards lying on the dashboard that doctors display so that they can leave their vehicles in no-parking areas.”
“It must belong to the doctor I called for Valerie.”
There was a metallic click.
“Do you know him?” asked Alessandro.
“Not well. He comes from Piazza Armerina. He’s kind of…a friend of the family, you might say.”
“He’s lying in the trunk of his car, shot dead. Michele must have stopped him on the way. Wait a minute…”
“What is it?”
“I’m just looking around. There are at least two trails of blood here leading into the bushes beyond the gateway. The gate itself is open…the control box has been destroyed. And there are bullet holes.”
The dry, hilly landscape was racing past her windows in the dim light. It would be a few miles before she saw more trees. Now and then headlights came toward her, and she was dazzled by another pair in her rearview mirror. Her eyes were reacting more sensitively to bright light than usual.
“Okay,” said Alessandro. “I think I know what happened now.”
“Are the men dead?”
“Yes. He hauled their bodies behind the bushes. When they realized that the man in the car wasn’t a doctor they must have tried to lock the gate again, and someone destroyed the control box.”
“The gate wouldn’t have kept anyone out! And there isn’t even fencing on both sides of it.”
“There’s a slope, though. And trees. Like it or not, Michele must have had to go a mile up to the palazzo on foot. And I’ll have to do the same.”
“Wait until I get there, and we’ll go together.”
“No, this is my fault, and I’m not letting Michele do anything else to you.”
“Our chances are much better if there are two of us.”
“Rosa, listen to me very carefully. Stay exactly where you are now, and wait until I call you again.”
“Oh, sure!” she said. “You bet I will.”
“Michele wants to take his revenge on me. That’s why he means to kill you first.”
“He’d better start a club with the Hungry Man: the Kill Rosa to Punish Alessandro Club.” She was making a great effort to hide the unsteadiness in her voice. “There should be twelve of my guards somewhere around the place. What about them?”
“Can’t see anyone.”
“But Michele can’t have eliminated them all on his own.”
“The Hundinga have stopped howling.”
“Maybe they left.”
“Maybe.”
Her hands clutched the steering wheel. “But they didn’t, did they?”
“No,” he said. “They’re sure to be roaming around here somewhere. And if they’re on their way to the palazzo, or there already, then your people won’t—” He let out a low curse.
“What?” she called into her phone, in too much mental confusion to get out a complete sentence. Her fears for him were growing by the minute.
There was a sharp explosion in the background.
“Are those shots?” She tasted iron on the tip of her tongue.
“Farther up the slope,” he said. “Near the palazzo, I think.”
“I’ll call the judge. Quattrini can send reinforcements and—”
“The police? How long do you think it will take them to get here? An hour? Two hours? Forget it. And when this is over, you’ll be glad there were no police here turning the whole palazzo upside down.”
“I don’t care whether—”
“Yes, you do. Well, you should. We’re capi. People like us have no choice but to take charge ourselves.”
“If any harm comes to Iole—”
“The police couldn’t do anything about that if it would take them forever to get here.”
“Men from Piazza Armerina? A couple of calls and I could summon twenty or thirty of them.”
“It’d all take far too long. Anyway, I’m already on my way up to the house.”
She felt choked by her helplessness and fear. “Stupid idiot,” she whispered, but he knew what she meant.
“Love you, too.”
“Take care of yourself.”
“So will you stop somewhere and wait?” he asked. The climb through the olive groves was beginning to make him sound breathless.
“Okay.”
“Really?”
“Of course not!” she said.
“Then I’ll have to make sure all this is over before you get here.”
“Twenty minutes max. And don’t do anything silly.”
“Twenty minutes against the rest of our lives. Sounds like a good bargain to me.”
“The rest of our lives,” she repeated softly, and stared into the gathering night. The outlines of the landscape blurred before