A Curvy Widow Dragged 2 Pups and a Stranger From Black Ice — Unaware He Ruled the Mafia World

Chapter 3

He hadn’t been running from the law. He’d been running from his own family. For twenty years he had been the second son of old Aurelio Falco — lieutenant, then captain, and finally, when his father’s mind began to slip, the one who actually made the decisions. Six weeks ago his older brother Matteo had come home from out west with a plan involving a shipment of fentanyl the size of a small truck, and Luca had refused to sign off.

Not out of virtue. Out of arithmetic. The Falcos had survived a hundred years by never touching anything that killed its own customers too fast. Matteo was going to burn the family down inside a year, and the old man’s blessing meant nothing because the old man no longer knew his own name half the days.

Luca had said no. Matteo had smiled and said he understood.

Two nights later, a car Luca had been meant to be sitting in went off a bridge at the border crossing with three of his men inside it. The river did the rest. Luca had gone into the woods after that, to a cabin forty miles north, to decide whether to run or to fight.

Yesterday he’d heard the puppies from the frozen creek that fed Black Spruce. He’d followed the sound out onto the lake and put one foot wrong on rotten ice, in a place where the spring came up warm and thin.

“The man with the rifle was one of my brother’s men,” he said. “The sack of puppies was the bait. They threw living dogs into a lake to draw me out.”

“They knew you would come,” Ramona said. Her voice was flat as slate.

“They know it’s a thing I’m known for.” He said it without vanity, the way a man admits to a limp.

She looked at the brindle girl in the basket blinking up at her with milky blue eyes, and something in her chest — some hard, cold thing that had been sitting there since Neil — cracked a little, the way ice cracks when the water under it decides to move.

“Then they miscalculated,” she said. “Because now they’ve got me, too.”

She spent that morning doing the things a woman does when she has decided to fight. She fed the puppies. She fed Luca venison stew he could barely raise the spoon to his mouth. She cleaned the shotgun and brought Neil’s old deer rifle down from the attic and wiped the grease off it with her sleeve, the way Neil had shown her a hundred winters ago. She strung fishing line between the two birches at the head of the driveway and hung three tin cans on it, so anything larger than a fox would rattle the alarm coming in. She banked the fire, she pulled the curtains shut, and she thought for the first time in eighteen months about staying alive on purpose.

Around noon, Luca fell asleep again, and Ramona sat on the edge of the daybed and watched his face in the firelight. She had spent her whole life pulling half-drowned things out of cold places. She had not stopped being that woman when Neil died.

She had only forgotten.

At two o’clock the tin cans rattled.

She was at the window in three strides, the shotgun up, breath held. Through the gap in the curtain she saw a single figure coming up the driveway on foot — a tall, thin man in a dark parka with his hands held carefully out to his sides. A badge hung from a lanyard around his neck.

Even at forty yards, she could read the letters. F.B.I.

She cracked the door six inches and called out. “That’s close enough. State your business.”

The man stopped. Fifty years old, maybe. A lined, weathered face and pale blue eyes that had seen too many winters of paperwork and worse.

“Ma’am, my name is Douglas Vance. Special agent, Albany field office.” His voice was flat, unhurried. “I’m looking for a man who may have gone through the ice on Black Spruce Lake last night. I have reason to believe he made it out, and that he came this way.”

“A lot of reasons,” Ramona said. “You got evidence?”

Vance reached slowly into his coat and pulled out a folded photograph. “Eagle point kennel,” he said. No — he pulled out a piece of paper. “Tracks. Yours and his, from the shore to a snowmobile, and the snowmobile straight to your driveway. I’ve been following them since ten this morning.”

He let that sit. Then: “Ma’am, if I found those tracks, so will the men hunting him. And they will not knock.”

“And what do you want with him, Agent Vance?”

“I want to keep him alive long enough to testify against his brother.” The pale eyes never blinked. “That is the only thing in this world I want right now.”

Behind her, from the daybed, she heard Luca’s voice, low and rough. “Let him in, Marina.” He had used Neil’s name for her by accident; he corrected himself without a pause. “Let him in.”

She turned her head. He was awake, propped on one elbow, his eyes on the agent. “You know this man?” she asked.

“I know of him. He’s been trying to put my family in a hole for six years. Two weeks ago he sent word to me through a priest in Chazy, that if I ever wanted to stop being what I am, he would help me do it.” He looked at her then, and his face was very tired. “I did not answer. I did not know how. But I think it has to be yes — or none of us walks out of this valley.”

Ramona looked at the stranger she had pulled from the ice. She looked at the federal agent standing in her doorway. She looked at the two puppies asleep in a basket by her fire.

And she made her second choice of the day.

“Come in, Agent Vance. Close the door behind you. We’ve got a lot to talk about, and not much daylight left to do it in.”