Bound by Bullets

I had been in the wrong place before.

The wrong bar at the wrong hour, the wrong street at the wrong time — the small miscalculations that most people survived without incident because most wrong places contained nothing worse than inconvenience. I had survived those. I had learned from them.

The parking garage on Meridian Street at eleven on a Tuesday night was a different category of wrong.

I had been working late — tax season, the specific cruelty of April, with three clients’ extensions and a filing deadline that had eaten the last two weeks of my life. The parking garage was the one attached to the building where my firm occupied the sixth floor, and I had been parking there every weekday for two years without incident.

I heard the voices before I saw the men.

Two of them, arguing in the specific low-intensity way of people who had moved past the stage where raising voices was available. I stopped at the stairwell door because the voices were in front of the car I was heading toward, and I had the instinct — the wrong-place instinct — to not enter a situation until I understood it.

The third man arrived from the other stairwell.

He was tall, dark-suited, moving with the specific economy of someone who had done this before. Not violent motion — contained motion. The motion of someone who had decided the result before the action.

What happened was brief. The argument stopped. One of the two men produced a gun. The third man — the one in the dark suit — moved very fast, and then one of the two men was on the ground and the gun was in the third man’s hand and the second of the original two was backing away with the specific quality of someone who was reappraising their life choices very rapidly.

Then the man in the dark suit looked up and saw me.

I had been trained to freeze in dangerous situations. The training was wrong. Freezing was exactly what I did, and it meant that instead of being in the stairwell with the door closed between me and what had just happened, I was standing in the fluorescent light of the parking garage with my laptop bag over my shoulder and my keys in my hand and no exit that didn’t involve walking toward the man who had just disabled someone with the efficiency of long practice.

He looked at me for a moment. Then he handed the gun to the man standing beside him — the second of the original two, who had apparently just been recruited from opponent to assistant — and walked toward me.

“Don’t run,” he said. His voice was low and even. “Running would be a poor decision.”

“I wasn’t going to run,” I said.

This was not entirely true.

He stopped three feet from me and looked at me with dark eyes that were doing the specific thing that very dangerous men’s eyes did when they were assessing you — not threat-assessment, something more fundamental. The kind of look that categorized.

“You work in the building,” he said.

“Yes.”

“What floor?”

“Six,” I said. “Accounting firm.”

“Late night,” he said.

“Tax season,” I said.

Something moved briefly through his expression that was not amusement but was adjacent to it. “Name,” he said.

“Sienna Greco.”

He absorbed this without visible reaction. Then he looked at the man on the ground, who was conscious but still, and then back at me.

“What you saw here,” he said.

“I saw nothing,” I said immediately.

He looked at me for a moment. “You saw nothing,” he repeated.

“The parking garage was empty,” I said. “I came down from the sixth floor, got in my car, and went home. The garage was entirely empty.”

“Good,” he said. “Stay that way.” He looked at me steadily. “Do you know who I am?”

I looked at him — the suit, the posture, the quality of the two men who had deferred to him, the specific way the man on the ground had not gotten up. The name had been in the news enough that the face, in the right context, connected.

“Cavalieri,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

I had correctly identified Matteo Cavalieri, the head of the Cavalieri family, which was either the most or least helpful thing I had done tonight, and I was still working out which.

“Go home, Miss Greco,” he said. “Forget this.”

“Already forgotten,” I said.

I walked to my car. I did not run. I drove out of the parking garage and onto the street and made it seven blocks before I had to pull over and sit with my hands shaking on the steering wheel for two full minutes.

Then I drove home.

And tried, with the specific unsuccessful effort of someone who had seen something they were not going to be able to unsee, to forget it.