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

Chapter 4

What Vance told them over the next hour was worse than what Luca had said. And, in a strange way, better.

Matteo Falco had not simply decided to move fentanyl. He had made a deal with a Montreal outfit to trade it for weapons, and the weapons were meant to go south, to a militia that had been drilling in the hills above Crossridge for the better part of two years. Vance had been building the case for eighteen months. He had wires. He had photographs. He had a bookkeeper in Saratoga who was already singing, badly and for money.

What he did not have was a witness from inside the family — someone who could tie Matteo to the Montreal end and put him in a courtroom and keep him there.

Luca Falco was the only living person on earth who could be that witness.

Which was why, Vance said, Matteo had thrown two puppies into a lake. He needed a body. Because as long as Luca was still breathing air out here, he was a loaded gun aimed straight at his brother’s head. Matteo had known Luca would come for the dogs. He had counted on it.

Luca did not say anything. He was looking at the basket by the fire.

“The problem,” Vance went on, “is that Matteo now knows he doesn’t have a body. His man watched Miss Halstead pull you out. By tonight there’ll be six vehicles on the road up here. If we stay in this cabin, we die in this cabin. There’s a safe house in St. Albans. We can be there in four hours, if the roads hold.”

Ramona did not move. She was looking at the window, at the snow already slanting thick and sideways out of the north.

“The roads won’t hold. It’s coming down at an inch an hour, and it’s going to get worse. By dark the pass at Dead Man’s Notch will be closed. By midnight the county road will be under three feet. Nobody is driving anywhere tonight, Agent Vance. Not you, not us, not them.”

Vance’s face tightened. “Then what do you propose?”

Ramona thought about the map of the valley she had carried in her head since she was a girl of nine. She thought about the old Larrabee camp, four miles up the ridge, the one Neil’s grandfather had built with his own hands — a low log cabin under a stand of hemlock, with a single narrow trail running in through country too rough for anything with wheels.

“I propose we don’t sit here waiting. I propose we go up. There’s a camp on the ridge, four miles in, that only three living people know about — and two of them are in this room. We take the snowmobiles, the dogs, the guns, and three days of food. We leave a lamp burning in the window and the wood stove damped down so the smoke keeps coming. When they come through that door tonight, they’ll find an empty house and cold coffee. And by the time they figure out where we’ve gone, the storm will have buried our tracks. From the camp, you can raise your people on a hand radio Neil kept in the loft. And when the weather breaks, we walk out on our own terms. Not theirs.”

Vance stared at her. “Miss Halstead, that is either the best plan I’ve heard in a year or the worst. I can’t yet tell which.”

“It’s the only one we’ve got. So it’s the best.”

They moved fast after that.

Luca was on his feet by three o’clock — unsteady, grey-faced, but upright, wearing Neil’s old wool trousers and second-best coat and boots half a size too big. Vance took the deer rifle. Ramona took the shotgun, and the puppies tucked warm inside her coat, and she lit the lamp and set it in the window. She banked the fire so it would smoke slow and steady until midnight.

And she left Neil’s flannel shirt on its peg by the door.

She could not have said why, in that moment, it mattered. Only that she was not coming back to this cabin the same woman, and the shirt could stay behind with the woman she had been.

The four miles up the ridge took them two hours. The snowmobiles broke trail through drifts up to the handlebars; twice they stopped and dug; once Luca slid off the back of her machine and she had to haul him upright, and he said into her ear over the engine, “I have not been carried by anyone in twenty years.”

“You aren’t being carried,” she said. “You’re being relocated. There’s a difference. Hold on.”

The camp was where she remembered it. A low log cabin under the hemlocks, its roof so thick with snow it looked like a loaf of bread cooling in the cold. She got the door open with her shoulder. Inside it was black, and cold, and dry. And within twenty minutes she had a fire going and a kettle on and the puppies wrapped in a wool blanket on the hearth.

Vance climbed into the loft and came down with the hand radio in a canvas case and began, patiently, one dial at a time, trying to raise Albany.

Luca watched Ramona move around the room. She did not turn around.

“You should have left me on the ice,” he said finally.

“Probably.”

“Why didn’t you?”

She turned and looked at him straight. “Because I spent a year and a half being someone things happened to, and I got tired of it. You were the first thing in a long time I could do something about. That’s the whole reason. It’s not pretty and it’s not noble. It’s just true.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “My father used to say the only people worth trusting are the ones who tell you exactly why they did a thing.” A small, tired sound that might have been a laugh. “He was wrong about most things. He was right about that.”

Out in the dark, the wind came up over the ridge like a freight train, and the whole valley went white.