"So he hit her," I said, the words tasting like ash in my mouth.
"He swerved!" Marco wept, dropping to his knees on the carpet, his hands clasped together in a pathetic plea for mercy. "The driver swerved to clip her, just to scare her, to knock her down so we could get her out of the street! But the truck was too heavy! It mounted the curb... I tried to stop him, Carmine! I swore to God I screamed at him, but he didn't stop!"
The room seemed to spin around me. The smell of the lilies, the soft spotlight, the tiny white box—it all coalesced into a single, blinding point of absolute rage.
Victor Harlan, an upstart syndicate boss from Long Island who had been trying to push his synthetic drugs and human smuggling rings into Queens for two years, had bought my underboss with two hundred thousand dollars. And a seven-year-old child had paid the price because she knew her father's friend and waved to him from a sidewalk.
Bruno didn't bark. He didn't growl anymore.
He slowly walked past me, his heavy paws treading silently on the carpet. He stopped right in front of Marco, who was kneeling, sobbing with his face in his hands.
The mastiff lowered his head until his dark nose was an inch from Marco’s ear.
He didn't bite. He didn't tear out the throat that had lied to us.
Instead, Bruno let out a long, heavy exhale—a hot puff of air against Marco’s cheek—and turned his back on him, as if the man no longer existed in the realm of the living.
The dog walked back to the white coffin.
He raised his front paws, placing them heavily onto the edge of the brass rail. He leaned his broad head forward, pressing his right ear flat against the polished white panels of the casket lid.
And then, his entire body began to tremble.
It wasn't fear. It wasn't rage.
Bruno’s tail gave a single, weak twitch. He pressed his ear harder against the wood, his dark eyes widening until the whites showed around the edges.
From inside the white box, underneath six inches of silk lining, copper screws, and mahogany veneer...
Bruno heard something.
And as I watched my dog's ears perk up toward the lid, my own heart stopped beating altogether.