Headstone City by Tom Piccirilli Page A

day, for years. Raising a kid by herself. His father, just a toddler, told to be quiet, don't move, wait until Mama's done, staying there for sixteen hours with nothing to do. His own father dead on the job, whacked by upper brass because he didn't take enough graft, busting ass and spoiling the take for them. Under investigation, found posthumously guilty, no pension.
    Every time Dane thought he was hard, he just thought about shit like that and realized how listless he truly was. The army hadn't shaken his apathy, and neither had the can. Now she's saying he's gotta go take out the local mob when all he wanted to do was flatten Vinny onto his ass. One nice shot, and then the rest, whatever happened afterward, wouldn't really matter.
    “Vinny's got the edge,” he said.
    “Why? Because he says he can see the future?”
    “He can.”
    Grandma Lucia's hands in the air, like Pepe, like Dane himself. How would they communicate if they ever broke a finger? “That he can walk three different trails and decide which to follow? Go back and forward in time? He can't see anything, Johnny. If he could, you think he'd still be in Headstone City, leading a fading mob family?”
    “Grandma, I've seen him do it.”
    She didn't hear him. “The Monticellis went legit and lost most of the money they made from all the illegal action. What his father earned on trucking hijacks and prostitution, him and that Berto lost on mutual funds and junk bonds.”
    They drank another glass of wine together. Dane had a question he needed to ask, but his grandmother was in a fierce mood. That threw him, made it even harder to keep focus. “Has she ever spoken to you?”
    “Who?”
    He stared at her.
    “Your mother?”
    He hissed air through his teeth, thinking of Ma in the back room, seeing angels, choking on cancer, calling his name.
    “Oh, that other one? Angelina? No.” Shaking her head, the pink curls bobbing left and right. Her voice lost some of its edge and took on a delicate quality. “Sometimes in dreams I hear the two of you talking, but I can't always hear the words. Only that she's giving you a hard time.”
    Dane finished his dinner, picked up his dirty dishes and took them into the kitchen, put them in the sink and poured some soap and ran the hot water tap so the sauce wouldn't crust. When he got back to the table she was having more wine, her cheeks covered with red splotches. It was the histamine in the wine, it made her face turn beet red.
    He asked, “Is my gun still here?”
    “I cleaned it this morning and put it on your bed, wrapped in a clean rag.”
    Some kids had little old grannies who did nothing but go to church and crochet. Vinny's grandmother used to listen to him play the violin and accompany him on the piano.
    Dane's—she's breaking down and oiling a Smith & Wesson .38 with a four-inch barrel, laying it out on his pillow. Overhearing him talking with the dead.

 
    SEVEN
     
    W ith the night came a heavy, abiding fog rising off Long Island Sound.
    The kind that seemed intent on action, wanting to chase Dane down. Throbbing as it coiled against his tires, calling him along the expressway mile by mile. He could race into the heaving clouds and hide his crimes, hunt for the ambitions he'd set aside until no one was looking. This was the living darkness that matched what was locked inside his rib cage.
    Swirling gray threads swallowed the headlights, laid across the road to snare his front end. The nimbus of twin beacons looked like burning souls wandering lost in purgatory, side by side down the road. Maybe him and Vinny, after they'd finally done each other in.
    Dane drove over to the warden's house out in Glen Cove, right on the north shore. He wheeled past million-dollar estates that compelled men of meager salaries into jealous rages and flipped them over the big edge.
    All you had to do was stare up at the third-floor windows, look at the wide expanse of lawn and trees in the yards, the three-car garages, to