“Boss, it’s not true—” Mitch said.
“Of course not,” Nicolazzo told him. To Tricia he said, “Enough. I lose patience. You’ll tell me what I want to know or say goodbye to your boyfriend here.” He nicked Robbie again, beneath the ear this time.
“He’s not my boyfriend!”
“Who robbed me?”
“I don’t know!”
“You don’t believe I will do it,” Nicolazzo said. “It’s too bad. Next time you will.” He looked in the doomed man’s eyes. “Stronzo. I’ve wanted to do this since the wedding.” And switching to an overhand grip, he buried the blade in Monge’s chest.
“No,” Tricia shouted, and ran to him, but Nicolazzo grabbed her, his arms like steel bands around her chest, his bulk an impassable obstacle. Mitch let Monge’s body down slowly to the floor, where his blood spilled onto a circular throw rug that almost looked as if it had been put there for the purpose of catching it. He pulled the knife out of Monge’s shuddering chest, wiped it off with a handkerchief, and made it disappear inside his jacket.
“Now we send you down to the cellar, to think,” Nicolazzo said, his breath hot against her face. “You think carefully for your old Uncle, eh? You come back with answers, my dear, or more of your friends will die. You don’t want that, do you?”
Tricia felt her stomach heave. How had everything gone so terribly wrong?
Nicolazzo pushed her into Mitch’s arms. “Take her downstairs,” he said. “Put her in with the boxer, not with Borden or the other girl. I don’t want them hatching any schemes together.” He wiped his palms against the seat of his pants. “Then come back and—” he waved a hand at his employee’s body, at the bloody rug “—clean this up.”
“Yes, sir,” Mitch said.
Nicolazzo raised a finger and wagged it in stern correction. “What’s this ‘sir’?” he said. “Yes, Uncle.”
13.
The Colorado Kid
The boxer, Tricia thought as Mitch led her downstairs, the burlap sack over her head once more. That’s what he’d said: Put her in with the boxer. It wouldn’t be Stella—it had to be the other one, this Colleen King. The Colorado Kid. Another innocent, dragged into this for no reason. Unless, of course—
Unless she was the one who had robbed the place. Unless she’d pumped Stella for information about the book and decided to carry out the heist she’d heard described. But how could that be? Anyone who thought the book was a true story would have thought the robbery had already taken place—and anyone who thought it was fiction would have no reason to think the plan would actually work. Especially the combination to the safe. Who would risk everything on the remote possibility that a made-up combination might just possibly be correct? Of course, it apparently had been. But no one could have counted on that. And you don’t risk your life on a guess.
Tricia heard a key going into a lock and the cylinder turning, then the hammer of a gun being drawn back. “Miss King,” Mitch called out, “I’m coming in. I’m bringing you a roommate. I’ve also got a gun. If you’re not at least five feet away when I open this door, I’ll shoot you dead, do we understand each other?”
A woman’s voice came through the door: “Yes.”
“All right. Just step back, keep your distance, and no one’ll get hurt.” Tricia heard the door swing open. “That’s good, like that. With your hands up, please.”
From the other end of the room, the woman said something that was a little hard for Tricia to make out, the sound muffled by the sack. It sounded like, “Who is she?”
“Girl named Trixie,” Mitch said. “No one you know. She’s a friend of your sparring partner.” He touched Tricia on the shoulder. “You can take the bag off when you hear the door close.”
Tricia waited till she heard the latch click into place, then turned and ran to the door, tearing off the bag as she went. She tried the knob. Already locked. She rattled it, tugged at it, rammed the door with her shoulder. Nothing.
“Don’t bother,” the other woman said, from behind her. “I’ve tried, and I’m bigger than you are.” The voice was improbably familiar, and when, after a second, she realized why, Tricia’s blood ran cold. It couldn’t be.
Tricia turned to face her.
They stared at each other, dumbstruck. The other woman (the Colorado Kid? why not Nebraska, at least?) stood up from the bunk where she’d been sitting, came forward into the light. “Patty?” she said.
“Cory?” Tricia said.
14.
The Girl With the Long Green Heart
Coral Heverstadt, Tricia’s older sister, had been born the year before Alfred Hitchcock made his movie The 39 Steps and been gone by the time Tricia found herself sitting in the dark in the Aberdeen Cinerama watching it. She’d lasted at home two years longer than Tricia, moving out the day of her twentieth birthday rather than her eighteenth. She’d been better made for rural life, with her wide, powerful legs and muscular frame. She could push a loaded barrow through mud half a foot deep or lift a hundred-pound bag of feed, if not barehanded then with the assistance only of a pair of heavy work gloves, and so had found work reliably on the farms on the outskirts of town. Tricia, at fourteen, still child-small and fencerailthin, had looked up to her with an admiration bordering on awe.
Her odd jobs had meant Coral always had some cash in her pocket—not much, perhaps, but enough to treat her kid sister to lunch or a movie or a treat from the drugstore, with its spinning wire racks of brightly colored novels. She’d enjoyed the feel of folding money under her fingers, the freedom it imparted—to do what she wanted, to go where she wanted. But the amount you could make for pushing barrows and lifting feed bags was limited. A few dollars here, a few there. She wanted more. And so she began a quest for more remunerative employment, finding work as a waitress, a bar hostess, a day-shift worker at the 3M plant running the machine that wound the Scotch tape onto those little spools. In each of these roles, she confided to Tricia as they lay in their beds at night in the room they shared, she found herself the center of a certain amount of attention—male attention, to put a finer point on it. Coral took after their mother and was big all over, not just her muscles but her feminine parts, and the local farmboys and mill workers and 3M middle managers gazed at her appreciatively as she approached and longingly as she passed.
These were men with wives at home and families, but they also had money in the bank—not the farmboys so much, but the middle managers for sure—and not just the drugstore-treat variety either. They had dough, in the vernacular of the paperback novels Tricia devoured so eagerly—cabbage, lettuce, mazuma, the long green. And they spent it on her happily. They took her out for meals, bought her gifts, once even paid for an overnight business trip to Sioux Falls. And in return they expected, well...to hear Coral tell it, never anything worse than a kiss or a hug, maybe gave her a pinch now and then, but she sternly told them off if they made any advances less proper than that. Anyway, that’s what she told her sister at the time, and it was the picture she continued to paint of her experiences in her letters back home after she left the Great Prairie for the Big Apple. She was a good girl, if occasionally put upon by a certain predatory type of male, and well equipped to handle herself, thank you very much.