Chapter 7 - The Mountain Pass
By four o'clock, the sleet had turned to dry, fine powder that drifted across the road in white ribbons.
Enzo sat in the wheelchair three hundred yards up the logging road behind the bakery, where the pine trees grew so close together their branches formed a grey tunnel over the ruts. He didn't have his coat zipped all the way up; the cold felt good against his throat—clean and sharp, like vinegar.
He had the black pistol resting on his right thigh, covered by the fold of an old horse blanket Thomas had thrown over his knees before he pushed him up the slope.
The sound came ten minutes later—the low, grinding whine of a four-wheel-drive transmission struggling against frozen mud.
A dark blue Ford pickup with Massachusetts plates bounced around the curve, its chains rattling against the wheel-wells. It didn't stop until it was six feet from the front casters of Enzo's chair.
The door swung open, and Vincent Rossi stepped out, this time without his trench coat, wearing only a grey wool suit and a pair of leather gloves. Behind him in the passenger seat sat a younger man Enzo didn't recognize—someone with flat, pale eyes and a crew cut that looked like it had been trimmed with hedge clippers.
Rossi didn't bother getting out the chains. He walked right up to the front of the wheelchair, his breath pluming white in the freezing air.
"End of the line, Enzo," Rossi said. "Marco's getting impatient. The wedding’s on the third floor of the Parker House, and you're supposed to be cutting the cake."
Enzo didn't look at Rossi’s face. He looked past him, up at the grey ridge where the old mill had stood sixty years ago before the kerosene cans did their work.
"Vince," Enzo said softly.
"Yeah?"
"How much did Marco pay you to look the other way when the mill went up?"
Rossi’s smile didn't vanish, but it tightened—just a fraction of an inch around the corners of his eyes. "I don't know what you're talking about, Enzo. I was twelve years old in sixty-four."
"My father was thirty-eight," Enzo said. "He kept a ledger in his desk that didn't go into the bank books. He wrote down every dollar he paid you to keep my uncle from burning the second mill down after the first one didn't take."
Rossi’s hand twitched toward his coat pocket.
It was a very small movement—the kind of movement a man makes when he realizes the arithmetic has changed while he wasn't looking.
Enzo didn't raise his voice. He didn't even lift the blanket all the way off his knee.
"The driver's dead, Vince," Enzo said. "And I'm tired of the smell of fish."
The shot didn't sound like a gun in the city. In the city, a pistol crack bounced off brick and glass until it sounded like a car backfiring on Atlantic Avenue. Here, between the pines and the frozen shale, it sounded like a dry branch snapping under a heavy boot—short, flat, and final.
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The young man in the truck didn't even reach for his door handle. He sat staring through the frosted windshield at the blue ribbon of sky above the ridge, his hands flat on the steering wheel like a man waiting for a traffic light to change.
Rossi didn't fall immediately. He took one step back, his left heel catching in the frozen rut where the copper wire from Enzo's wheel had left a scratch in the dirt, and then he went down sideways into the snow, his grey wool sleeve turning dark where it touched the slush.
