“Just some cut-up ping-pong balls,” Natalie soothed. “It’s mostly for effect.”
“Mostly?” He choked a little more.
Helen pecked him on the cheek as Mary Alice thumped his back. “How did you get here so quickly?” Mary Alice asked.
“Quick connection through Sicily,” he told her. “I got here last night.”
Mary Alice stood on tiptoe, peering over his shoulder, and he smiled, understanding what she was really asking.
“Akiko isn’t here yet. Her flight is scheduled to arrive this evening.”
“How was the trip?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Uneventful. No tail.”
I breathed a little easier then in spite of Natalie’s smoke bomb.
“Sorry about that,” Nat said as she went to hug him.
He shrugged. “It’s your own fault if you’ve ruined lunch.”
She lifted her head, sniffing like a dog. “Lunch?”
“Roast lamb. And homemade bread, of course,” he finished. “I never travel anywhere without my sourdough starter.”
Mary Alice looked like she wanted to cry. “Taverner, if Akiko and I ever decide to open our marriage to a platonic third, you’re the one that I want.”
Chapter Twelve
We ate and took theSardinian version of a siesta, waking only when the sun was dropping behind the mountains. I joined Mary Alice on the porch to watch the long purple shadows stretch over the landscape, the edges of the mountains turning a softly smudged violet. In the distance, a plume of dust powdered the air in the wake of an approaching car.
“Akiko,” I told her.
She cut her eyes around at me. “Can we trust the driver?”
I nodded. “He’s the son of the man who owns this house.”
She lifted a brow like she had a fishhook in it. “You don’t own it? Sloppy.” I didn’t take offense. Owning a safe house outright was the only guarantee of it being completely secure.
“I’d trust Bernardu with my life. And yours.”
“Bernardu?”
“He’s a shepherd. The sheep you saw coming in belong to him.”
“And how did you meet a Sardinian shepherd?” she asked.
“Where else? On the job,” I answered with a shrug. “The target was a judge who was taking a shit-ton of money to let the Sicilian mafia get a foothold on the island. Sardinians don’t take kindly to that.”
“They don’t have mafia here?”
“Nope. They are suspicious of strangers and they’re just as likely to shoot you as invite you in for coffee. But they steer well clear of anything like the Cosa Nostra. It was my bad luck that when I took out the judge, I got clipped by a shot from one of his bodyguards before I finished him off. I couldn’t make it to the pickup on the coast.” For jobs like that one—sensitive and high-profile—we often avoided airports and large port cities. Sardinia’s coastline offered a few thousand miles of quiet coastline to hitch a ride to Barcelona or Rome, Monaco or Tunis, or any one of a hundred other destinations. But the pickups were tightly arranged and if you missed one, you were on your own. The presumption was that something had gone badly wrong, and it was up to you to find your own way out.
I went on. “I found this house and holed up here because it was deserted. Bernardu’s mother had lived here until her death and he hadn’t gotten around to clearing out her stuff yet.”
“I noticed the wallpaper,” Mary Alice said with a shudder. There was a fashion among the younger Sardinians for gutting the old stone farmhouses that dotted the countryside and finishing them with fresh plaster walls and limestone counters. They kept the stone fireplaces and brought in sofas upholstered in natural duck and scattered goatskin rugs on thechestnut floors and hung copper pots in the kitchen. They pruned the olive trees and shaped the rosemary bushes and made everything tidy until the results were worthy of the cover ofArchitectural Digest.
This farmhouse…wasn’t. When I had crawled in, bleeding and delirious, it was like falling into a time warp. The house had been wallpapered—probably in the 1950s—in an eye-watering pattern of red and yellow flowers. There was a brown carpet on the floor that smelled like goat, and the refrigerator growled like it needed an exorcism. The towels were more flowers, pink and orange this time, but I hadn’t cared. They’d sopped up the blood I’d left puddled around. Bernardu followed the trail of gore to the bathroom where he found me slumped on the green tiles and unconscious with fever. He’d cut the bullet out and stitched the wound back together before I came to, for which we were both grateful.