Kill the King

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  Don’t you never try to look behind my eyes

  You don’t wanna know what they have seen.

  —Frank Zappa, “A Token of My Extreme”

  BEFORE

  Colomba bent over Giltine and determined that she was dead, while Dante furiously wheeled around on Leo. “There was no need for that. There was no fucking need!”

  Leo put a new clip in his gun, then went over to Colomba. “Is she dead?”

  “Yes.” God, she’s tiny, thought Colomba. She couldn’t weigh a pound over ninety. “What was that explosion, Dante?”

  “One of Giltine’s old friends tried to arrange an escape route for her.”

  “And he came mighty close to succeeding,” said Leo, grabbing the knife that Giltine had dropped.

  “Leo, you know that you’re contaminating a crime scene, don’t you?” asked Colomba.

  “How careless of me.”

  Something about the way he said it sent a shiver down Dante’s spine. “Don’t touch her!” he shouted. But it was too late, because Leo had plunged the knife into Colomba’s belly and then twisted it, ripping the wound wider.

  Colomba felt her stomach turn to ice and she fell to her knees, dropping her pistol, watching as her blood filled her hands. She watched as Leo punched Dante and knocked him to the ground and then bent over Belyy. The old man stared at Leo in horror, incapable of moving because of the terrible pain in his pelvis. “If you spare my life, I’ll make you a rich man,” the old man said.

  “Dasvidaniya,” said Leo, and cut the man’s throat with as much indifference as you’d use to cut a slice of cake.

  Dante crawled toward Colomba, who was curled up in a fetal position, already in a lake of blood. “CC,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “Don’t move. Now I’m going to compress the wound. I’ll compress your—”

  Leo grabbed Dante and yanked him to his feet. “It’s time to go,” he said.

  Dante felt his internal thermostat shooting past level ten, level one hundred, level one thousand, and Leo’s face became a dark dot at the edge of a megascreen in Berlin, and then the passerby who, months before that, had triggered the psychotic episode that had sent him to the Swiss clinic. “So it’s you,” he murmured.

  “Be good, little brother,” said Leo, then he wrapped his hands around Dante’s throat and squeezed until he lost consciousness. Then he slung Dante’s inert body over his shoulder.

  The last thing Colomba saw was Dante’s hand trying to reach out to her over Leo’s shoulder. She wanted to tell him that she’d save him, that she’d win out over everything, that they’d never be apart again, but she uttered the words only in her dream.

  When the EMTs showed up to save her from death’s door, Leo and Dante had already disappeared, and no one had seen them go.

  It took a week of searching to determine beyond the shadow of a doubt that Leo Bonaccorso had never existed.

  PART ONE NIGHTMARES

  CHAPTER I

  1

  Darkness.

  Dante is suffocating. The darkness crushes him like cement, grinding him, shattering his bones. It enters his mouth, seeps into his lungs. He can’t scream. He can’t seem to move, much less vomit. He faints again, and his exhausted slumber is a black screen upon which his memories burn. He sees a woman in green who smiles at him, dripping with blood. The sound of an explosion. The screams.

  The screams awaken him.

  Darkness. Darkness. Darkness. Darkness. Darkness. Darkness. Darkness. Dar—

  Light.

  It’s only for an instant, a fraction of a second too brief to measure. But Dante latches onto it. His eyes drink in the light, and he starts to think again. A little bit. He can smell wood and dust. He thinks back to the explosion he heard and felt … did something fall on his head? Is he in a hospital?

  The strain is too much for him. He recedes back to the black screen. He goes back to his memories. To the woman covered with blood with the strange name in that strange place that resembles a discotheque. To the five bullets hurtling toward her. Dante manages to see them moving through the air like snails and slamming into her back. The woman’s flesh turns to gelatin, her face becomes liquid, her smile shatters into a thousand pieces. On her left collarbone and on her belly, two small volcanoes of flesh erupt. The volcanoes rip open and the two bullets that have made the complete passage through her body burst out into the open air, spraying blood and bone fragments in all directions. The woman starts to fall forward. Behind her …

  Darkness.

  Dante is awake but he doesn’t make the mistake of opening his eyes right away. First he tries to feel his own body, to reconstruct it in spite of the waves of pain that wash over him whenever he moves. He realizes that he’s lying on his back and that something is constraining his wrists and ankles. He has leather in his mouth; something soft is wrapped around his hips. Otherwise, he’s naked. Has he been intubated? Is he in serious condition? He remembers the sound of a diesel engine that was vibrating in his skull. It was a boat engine. Maybe that’s how they transported him to the hospital.

  He tries to move his hands and the pain in his wrists only worsens. They’re fastened with something sharp, something that sinks into his flesh with every movement.

  Plastic zip ties.

  Zip ties are the cheapest form of handcuffs available on the market, but they’re not standard issue in hospitals. He isn’t in a hospital. He’s somewhere else.

  He’s being held prisoner.

  The wave of horror takes him back to the screening room of his memory. The movie resumes and the woman in green continues falling, allowing Dante to look behind her. There are glass cubicles, little rooms shattering now, garishly colored plastic furniture, dust, and rubble. And bodies on the ground. Men in tuxedoes, women in evening gowns. All drenched in blood. Even in his hallucinatory state, Dante realizes that he saw that explosion with his own eyes. He was there. He doesn’t know how long ago it happened. But he knows it was in Venice.

  He opens his eyelids, back in the present once again, and he focuses on the tiny dot of light above him, looking at it out of the corner of his eye, more sensitive to light now. As he turns his head, he sees it shift, disappear, and reappear. He’s not looking directly at the ceiling of a darkened room; there’s something between him and that dot of light. Something, he realizes only in that moment, that’s very close. A wooden grate.

  Those are airholes.

  He’s closed in a wooden crate.

  2

  The blood started flowing again after the blizzard that hit the Marche region. Many small towns and villages between the Monti Sibillini and the steep slopes of Monte Conero remained cut off, and the department of disaster management, Italy’s Protezione Civile, was forced to distribute food with helicopters. In those days of brutal snowfall, hundreds of heads of livestock froze to death after their stables collapsed—in one case, dying along with their owner. Though it was far from the epicenter of the blizzard, the long dirt road that connected the tiny village of Mezzanotte to the paved provincial road was buried in snow, and that meant the tanker truck that normally delivered liquid propane gas to the houses scattered over the hillsides was now stranded down in the valley. One of these houses—right at the far end of the dirt road, perched high atop a sheer cliff that tu
mbled dozens of yards straight down behind it—was a poorly maintained gray-stone farmhouse. It had been built by peasants at the end of the nineteenth century, and subsequently expanded and modified, generation after generation, often without taking into account the slightest concept of uniformity or consistency. There were windows of every size, shape, and color, five front doors, and patches of different materials in the walls; the most recent wing of the house had been built out of cement, following the curve of the soil instead of excavating a foundation, and so the farmhouse wound up with one section that was two stories tall and another section that had only one floor, like a gray wedge plowed into the earth. Withered bushes and hedges protruded out of the blanket of snow that covered the garden, along with weeds and vines that blocked it from view.

  The boiler was in the cellar, its surface scratched by the countless wrenches that had been used on numerous occasions to unhook its pipes and scrape out the calcium buildup that constantly threatened to block them. The boiler sucked natural gas from a long conduit that ran under the garden, all the way out to the buried tank just beyond the fencing, one of the many fuel tanks that the truck had been scheduled to refill.

  At two in the morning, the boiler sucked down the last drops of liquid propane gas, coughed like a decrepit old lunger, and stopped working.

  A woman with iridescent green eyes, broad shoulders, and high prominent cheekbones lay on her back in bed, listening to the creaking of the radiators as they cooled now. Her name was Colomba Caselli, she was thirty-five years old, and she was an adjutant deputy captain of the state police, on leave since a phantom had stabbed her in the belly and kidnapped Dante Torre, the Man from the Silo.

  Fifteen months had passed since then.

  No one had heard a thing about either of them in all that time.

  3

  Colomba got up, switched on the electric kettle to brew a cup of tea from a used teabag, donned an old parka over her indoor tracksuit, and stepped out the front door into the harsh wind. Outdoors, everything was white and icy, the dirt driveway a brilliant white serpent that wended away into the milky nothingness. The only sounds that could be heard were the gusting of the wind and the cawing of the ravens.

  Colomba pulled the hood down over her forehead to protect her face from the blasts of pulverized ice and trudged all the way around to the gray lean-to made of corrugated metal roofing that stood next to the gate. She had a box of kitchen matches that she’d stuck in her pocket, its rattling emphasizing every step she took. She’d never lit a fire in the fireplace, but she knew there was a stack of firewood under that lean-to, buried under years of clutter and plastic.

  Instead, though, she froze in place before she got there, standing knee-high in the fallen snow.

  From behind the woodpile ran a line of human footprints. Someone had climbed over the fence and lowered themselves to the ground on the other side, only to vanish behind the house.

  Colomba couldn’t move, she couldn’t turn her head, she couldn’t stop staring at the footprints that designed a half arc in the dazzling white snow, passing just inches from the outside wall.

  Her hand darted down in search of her pistol, and only when she found the pocket empty did she remember that she’d left it in the drawer of her nightstand. The first few months after being released from the hospital she used to take her gun to bed with her, and she’d regularly wake up with the taste of mineral oil in her mouth. Why the fuck had she given up that habit?

  Was it because you were starting to feel safe? a voice asked her, a familiar voice inside her head, a voice so clear that she could have sworn it had come from right behind her back.

  Her lungs shut down, and she lost her balance. She fell on her back, right onto the skeletal branches of a rosebush that had run wild. Staring up into the white sky, she could only think that the end had finally arrived.

  She braced for the swooping knife blade. She braced for the gunshot. She braced for the stab of pain.

  But nothing happened.

  Little by little, Colomba regained the use of her rational mind. Her trembling came back under control.

  She slid down off the rosebush and got to her feet. Leo Bonaccorso—the phantom from her previous life—would never have left his footprints out in plain sight where she could have seen them. She would simply have found herself face-to-face with him one day when she opened her eyes first thing in the morning—as he silently finished murdering her in her sleep.

  Unless he has something else in mind. Maybe he means to lure me somewhere else to …

  “Cut it out,” she muttered, furious at herself. “You nut job, you asshole.”

  She took another look at the footprints—she certainly hadn’t imagined them—and ran into the house to get her Beretta. Holding it at arm’s length, gripping it with both hands, she followed the intruder’s footprints around to the tool shed at the rear of the house, which served as a storeroom for old junk. The bolt was undone, the door was ajar, and something was rustling inside in the darkness. Colomba raised the handgun to eye level. “I see you! Put your hands behind your head and come out.”

  There was no answer. The rustling sounds fell silent.

  “I’m going to count to three: don’t make me lose my temper. One, two …”

  Before reaching three, Colomba strode the couple of yards that separated her from the shed and shoved the door open with the tip of her boot. Daylight revealed the massive silhouette of a man standing amid the old sticks of furniture shrouded in cobwebs. He was half-hidden behind the side of a clothes closet, and Colomba could only glimpse his back.

  “I told you to come out of there!”

  She took a step forward: the intruder hunched even further behind the tall cabinet, but now at least Colomba could see him. He was strapping big, all muscle and fat, and his hair was yellow as straw. He was wearing nothing but an old tracksuit and a pair of felt slippers. Trembling with fear, he stood with his face to the corner.

  “Who are you? Turn around, and let me take a look at you.”

  He didn’t move, and it was Colomba who finally stepped closer to him, discovering a face that was pink and hairless. He couldn’t have been any older than eighteen, and he was staring into the empty air, expressionless. Colomba wondered whether he was like that all the time, or if he was in a state of shock. All the same, she lowered her handgun. “What are you doing here? Are you lost?” she asked. The boy didn’t answer. Without warning, he bolted toward the door, with stiff, uncoordinated movements, his slippers spraying dirty water as he ran. Colomba grabbed him. The boy bit her hand, and so she tripped him, sending him sprawling headlong, facedown in the snow. “Come on, stop acting like an ass,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to know who …” The words died in her throat.

  The snow around the boy had turned red.

  4

  Colomba knelt down next to the boy, conquering her plunge into panic. Had he hit something? A rock? Any of the pieces of junk scattered across the ground?

  “Where are you hurt? Let me see.”

  The boy turned over and lay there staring at her, his eyes wide open and full of confusion.

  He’s in a state of shock; before long he’ll pass out from loss of blood. Colomba unzipped his tracksuit.

  Underneath was a T-shirt drenched in blood—blood that was starting to clot.

  Ignoring the boy’s inarticulate laments, she lifted the T-shirt, revealing the bare flesh beneath. There was no wound. She felt around to make sure and the boy tried to pull back, then she decisively rolled him over onto his belly and examined his back: nothing there, either, and nothing on his legs.

  Colomba tucked his clothing back in place: the blood wasn’t his. Good.

  Are you sure that’s a good thing?

  She helped him to his feet and the boy stood wobbling in front of her. “If you try to run away again, I won’t be so nice, okay?” she told him. “Come inside before you freeze to death.”

  The boy didn’t move
.

  “Into the house.” Colomba pointed him in the right direction. “That way.”

  The boy didn’t follow the hand that she pointed. Colomba took him by the arm, ignoring his efforts to wriggle free, and dragged him after her into the kitchen, which also served as a dining room, occupying half of the ground floor. That space had once been a stable, built directly beneath the master bedroom to heat it with the warmth from the clustered livestock. The walls were covered with stains, and the furniture, dating back to the pre-IKEA era, was covered with dust. Perched atop a three-legged kitchen stool was a portable television set, turned on, though with the sound off, and tuned to an all-news station. Colomba never turned it off.

  She wrapped the boy in a blanket, then took the cordless phone from atop the credenza to call the nearest police station, only to discover without anything like surprise that the phone line was down. The cables ran high over the fields for miles, winding through the tree branches to a switchboard that dated back to before World War II. All it took was a gob of spit to short-circuit the whole network, much less a massive blizzard. Anyone who lived around there made sure to equip themselves with cell phones and short-wave radios, but Colomba had neither device.

  She looked at the boy with distaste.

  Once again, she tried to ask his name, but he wouldn’t even look at her. Was he deaf? She dropped a spoon, and saw him start at the sound. No, he wasn’t deaf. He just wasn’t listening.

  “If you don’t talk to me, I’m going to have to try to see if you have any ID. All right?” she asked him. “Okay, silence is a form of consent.”

  The boy put up no resistance to her search, recoiling only when Colomba touched his bare flesh, after which he’d scrub away at it with his fingers as if he somehow felt filthy. In his pockets she found neither wallet nor identification, but on his wrist, under the sleeve of his sweatshirt, Colomba found a green plastic bracelet.