Trophy 9

“What do you want?” Bella gasped, her bravado now misplaced. Reach for it all she liked, it didn’t present itself.

“I want your husband,” Frank said wryly, his voice momentarily hitting the same syllables that her Jersey accent had. “I want your fucking father.”

“That’s their business,” Bella told him. “The crime, all of that… I’m not involved. I don’t know anything.”

“I doubt that. But even if it is true, you can still be of use. Vincenzo will want you back as a matter of principle. You’re his property. I can use that.”

You’re his property. “Va’ a fare in culo!” Bella told him, and started for Frank. She knew she couldn’t beat him, but a fleeting fantasy had her scratching his face, one of Vincenzo’s men  seeing him wounded and tracing him back here, to her, to rescue her—

She came up to the end of her chain. It only let her go to the end of the circle of light, no further. Standing half in the shadows, Frank was out of her reach.

He held up the thermos. “In case you’re hungry. Chicken soup.” He set it down at his feet. Then he held up his other hand. In it was a pocket recorder. “I want you to tell me everything you know about the criminal activities of the Belucci and Scaglione crime families.”

“I don’t know anything,” she said in a trembling voice. “You think they tell me things? I’m there to look pretty—they don’t even let me cook! Listen, I’ve heard about you. You don’t kill innocent people. That’s me! I’m innocent!”

Frank held the recorder higher. He flexed his thumb over the Record button.

“I want you to tell me everything you know about the criminal activities of the Belucci and Scaglione crime families.”

“I told you, I don’t—” Bella began to gasp, to choke. She was nearing hysteria. Her feet slid out from under her and she ended up on her knees.

Frank lowered the recorder. “It’s a lot to process. I’ll give you time to get your wits about you.”

He turned to leave.

“Wait, wait! You can’t just…” Bella got one foot up, so she was only kneeling, not on her knees. “What are you going to do to me?”

Frank didn’t exactly quirk an eyebrow, but one suddenly seemed higher than the other. “Make you tell me about the criminal activities of the Belucci—”

“Yeah, yeah, I got that. If I do… what happens to me after?”

“I’ll let you go.”

“You’ll let me go?”

“I’m a busy man. I don’t have time to bring you home-cooked meals three times a day for the rest of my life.”

“But I don’t know anything,” Bella persisted. “I can’t help you kill anyone.”

“Bad luck for you, then. You’ll just have to wait here until I figure out a way to destroy the Beluccis on my own.”

“Can’t you just let me go?” she begged, coming up onto both feet but staying hunched down, all but prostrating herself before him. “I’ll leave town. I’ll get out of your line of fire, you won’t have to worry about me, you can blow up their whole place…”

“Or you’ll tell them I’m coming.”

“Fuck no. I hate the Beluccis as much as you do. More, probably. They’re just more criminals to you. To me, they’re family.”

Frank grunted. “Prove it. Tell me everything you know about the criminal activities of the Belucci and Scaglione crime families.”

Bella breathed hard. There was no reasoning with the man. Her voice rose: “You can’t get away with this!”

He looked around the hangar. “I have gotten away with it.”

“They’ll come looking for me. If you’re smart—” Frank grunted again. She barreled on. “You’ll let me go. I won’t tell anyone about you. I’ll leave. I’ll write a note. They won’t think of you, they won’t see you coming—in fact, it’ll distract them! It’ll distract them from you!”

“There’s one problem with your plan.”

“What’s that?” Bella asked hopefully, seeing an opening, a chance to somehow meet with Frank’s approval and win her freedom from him.

“It doesn’t tell me anything about the criminal activities of the Belucci and Scaglione crime families.”

“I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING!” Bella screamed.

“You’ve been married to a crime lord for seven years. What have you been doing all that time if you haven’t found out anything about his work?”

“I’ve been pretending he wasn’t a fucking crime lord, you figlio di puttana!”

Frank calmly inhaled, calmly exhaled. “Think about it,” he told her, and turned around once more.

“Wait, don’t go!” Bella called after him.

He kept going. Disappearing into the inky blackness that ringed her light.

“Vincenzo’s going to find you, you stupid cocksucker! When he gets his hands on you, you’re going to wish you’d never been born!”

Frank appeared again in the next pool of light. He walked unerringly from the end of the darkness to the next interval of it, a one-man military march.

“He’s going to let me fucking watch you die slow, asshole! I’m going to spit on you while they torture you to death and after you die, I’m gonna piss on your grave, goddamn piece of shit!”

Frank stopped in the next span of darkness—he must’ve—because she didn’t seem him emerge into the following patch of light.

“See? There’s something you know about the criminal activities of the Belucci and Scaglione crime families after all.”

“MORTACCI TUA!” Bella screamed at the top of her lungs, trying to make sure he heard her no matter where in the building he’d gotten off too.

She kept screaming, crying for help, venting one obscenity after another against the body and soul of Frank Castle.

He’d put in earplugs while he was in the shadows. When next he stepped into the light, and Bella howled at him like a rabid animal, Frank did not hear her at all.

***

Frank retreated to the terminal he was squatting in. It was half a more or less normal looking building, half plywood and gaping holes where cement was meant to be laid, with plastic sheeting cutting off the desert wind but letting enough through that Frank kept a space heater by his sleeping bag.

He warmed a can of beans on a camping stove, ate it with some greens from the same minifridge he kept his malt whiskey in. From time to time, he checked on the camera he had hooked up in the hangar. It showed him Bella ranting and raving, then despondent, then asleep.

He would let her rest. Once she’d woken up to the same circumstances more than once, she would understand how concrete they were.

He felt tired himself. The rush of adrenaline had sustained him almost addictively in getting Bella back to this compound, securing her, then waiting for the Sodium Luminal to wear off. Now his eyelids were heavy. In the calm of the after-action and the lull of the wait for isolation to work its magic on Belladonna Belucci, he felt his eyelashes draw together. In the darkness, Bella had made herself at home.

He blinked. Looked at the view on the closed-circuit TV he’d wired. Bella slept peacefully, temptingly. He’d like that kind of sleep. Even now, she had nothing to give her nightmares. Her bust rose and fell under the body-hugging corset. Her long, bare legs formed two perfect columns under the blanket, needling his mind with the awareness that underneath there was nothing but nylon and panties.

Frank closed his eyes again. He saw Bella’s marble arms outstretched to him, her dark lips open, forming his name—as much an invitation as the rest of her curvaceous body. In the push and pull between dream and reality, she wanted him, she needed him, and when she cursed him, it was with the same obscenities she had used to vent her passion when she was with those two men he’d brutalized. Now Frank wished he’d watched longer.

No. He remembered that as he’d moved in to complete the mission, he’d already been incensed that scum like that got to enjoy such beauty. It’d been an effort to control his rage, restrain himself to merely rendering them unconscious when he’d wanted to give them the pain they deserved instead of boundless pleasure.

Mentally, he’d been reciting to himself endlessly that there was a chance they were innocent, always the off-chance. At the time, it’d blinded him to how sensuous Belladona Belucci was. But his mind’s eye had still captured that lush sexuality. It came to him like a faithful hound, tantalizing him with the brazen allure of it. He had this woman chained up, alone, far from any help. And yet, she was no use at all when it came to sating his lust.

The paradox seemed more perverse than simply taking her.

He got a bottle of malt from the minifridge. If there was ever a good time to have whiskey dick, now would have to be it.