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

Chapter 7

She had learned how to go slack when she was a girl, helping her father calm a trapped animal — the way you loosen every muscle at once, drop your center of gravity, let the trap believe it has already won. She had used it on a hundred wild things in a hundred bad places.

She never thought she would use it on her own body, lying in the dark on broken ice, pretending to be a dead man.

Luca had tried to give her his coat. She had taken it — not because he offered, but because it was part of the lie, a dark coat that had been cut off a drowning man and mended by hand that very morning, the shape of his shoulders still in it. She pulled it on over her own coat. She took his headlamp and buckled it onto her forehead. And zipped the two puppies into the front of Luca’s coat — warm, asleep, one brindle and one black-and-tan — because a woman playing dead could not have them shivering against her where a man would feel it.

“Do not watch me,” she said. “That’s the hardest part. Watch the shore. That’s your job.”

She walked out along the line.

The ice held under her. The shelf of rock and frozen ledge that had held her every winter since she was nine — that would hold her now. She walked past the place where the first snowcat had gone down, to the edge of the broken water, and there she lay down on her belly with one arm dangling into the black water and the headlamp still burning on her forehead.

And she did not move.

The cold came up through her knees, through her elbows, through the thin place where her hip met the ice. It came up through the sleeve of Luca’s coat and wrapped around her bare wrist like a hand, and the water was warm as a wound against the cold air all around it. She counted her heartbeats to keep from counting anything else.

She waited long enough to wonder whether the ledge went all the way across, whether the ice would hold, whether she had brought herself out here to drown for nothing. Long enough to picture Neil — the way he would have stood at the shore with his hands in his pockets, watching her, understanding exactly what she was doing, and not trying to stop her. He would have argued, and then he would have gone still, the way he always did when she was beyond arguing. He would have believed in her.

She nearly smiled into the ice.

Then she heard the boots.

They came slow, careful, across the packed snow of the shore and out onto the lake — along the same line she had walked, the only line that would hold a man. Matteo Falco was not a fool. He had watched where his brother’s light had walked, out and back, and he was walking there now, on the ledge, in the dark, to look at the body of the brother he had tried to drown.

She heard him stop ten feet from her.

She heard him breathing.

She heard the small, metallic sound of a pistol being drawn.

“Little brother.” His voice was soft, almost kind, the voice of a man who had practiced gentleness the way other men practice holsters. “You always did have to be the one who saved things. I told Papa it would be the end of you.”

She did not move.

He took two more steps. He was standing over her now.

“Turn him over,” he said — to someone. To someone behind him on the ice that she had not seen, had not heard, had not planned for.

There was another man out there.

A boot hooked her shoulder. She let her body roll — loose, dead weight, the way she had learned to let a stunned animal go slack in her hands — and the headlamp swung, and the light passed across Matteo Falco’s face for one full second.

In that second, she opened her eyes and looked up at him.

And she saw him understand.

His mouth opened. The light showed her everything — the slack of shock, the widening of the eyes, the hand that had begun, already too late, to raise the pistol.

The shot came from the timbers before he could pull the trigger.

Vance’s rifle. One round.

Matteo Falco went down on the ice beside her without a sound, and the second man turned to run, and Vance’s second round took him two steps before he had gone three.

Then there was only the wind, and the small hiss of the headlamp still burning on Ramona’s forehead, and the sound of her own breath coming back into her body in ragged gulps that she could not stop.

She rolled onto her side.

She looked at Matteo Falco’s face in the snow. In death he looked very much like his brother — softer than she had expected, younger. The same strong jaw, the same scar through one eyebrow, the same shape of a man who had once been a boy being taught what to want.

She thought about the puppies, still asleep against her chest, unaware they had been bait, unaware they had been saved.

She did not feel sorry for the man beside her.

She got up slowly, testing the ice, and walked back along the line. And when she reached the reeds, Luca was standing behind the log — she could see him pressing his whole weight against it, holding himself upright by strength of will, the two puppies cradled against his chest where she had handed them — no. Where Vance had held them. Luca was crying without any sound at all, his face wet and ruined-looking in the dark.

She walked into him and put her arms around him, and around the puppies. He put his face down into her hair, into the cold wet tangle of her braid.

“You are the most terrifying woman I have ever known,” he said into her neck.

“I know,” she said. “Now help me walk home.”

The helicopter came at dawn, when the wind finally dropped enough to let it fly. Vance’s people took Matteo Falco’s body off the ice. They took the bodies from the camp, four miles up the ridge, in the thin blue light of the morning. They took a statement from Ramona Halstead that ran to nineteen pages and would, over the next four months, be corroborated by every piece of evidence Vance had spent eighteen months gathering.

The storm that had tried to bury them also buried their tracks. The county road stayed closed for three days.

By the time it opened, the case that had begun with a sack full of dogs thrown into a lake had grown teeth.