Subject Seven

Chapter Seventeen
Tina Carlotti

“Mrs. Ramirez? Hi, this is Tina Carlotti. I used to live next door to you. I-I was hoping maybe you’d remember me and my mom.” Tina licked her lips nervously. She’d called almost everyone she could think of, but mostly what she’d gotten for her trouble was answering machines, busy signals or no answer at all. She couldn’t leave a message. She didn’t want anyone calling her back. She didn’t have any close friends and money was tight and what if they called the wrong people and reported where she could be found? Maybe she hadn’t done anything. Maybe Tony Parmiatto was just fine and she could go home, but any way she looked at it, she had crazy loads of money in her possession, and that sort of cash had to belong to someone. It sure as hell wasn’t hers, but she was holding on to it.

She’d almost completely run out of phone numbers that she could remember and the lady who’d finally answered was one of the few where she would have felt safe leaving a phone message.

Lucille Ramirez was close to sixty years old, and there had been a time when the woman had watched her while her mom worked. Back before her mom fell for the wrong guy and got hooked on smack.

“Oh my!” The woman’s voice shook. It almost always shook. Her voice was like a mouse, small and shaky and maybe a little scared of everything. “Oh, Tina, sweetie, I was so sorry to hear about your momma.”

“My mom?” Her stomach tried to shrink down to nothing and Tina licked her lips again. “That’s why I’m calling. I haven’t been able to get her on the phone. I-do you know where she is?”

“Tina, honey. Oh, sweetheart, I heard it on the news. Your mother’s dead, honey. They pulled her body out of the river three days ago. They just now identified her.”

“I-what?” She had to have heard that wrong. That was all. There was a mistake.

“Honey, the police, they’ve been trying to find you. They wanted to let you know, and now they’ve been worried that something happened to you too. But your mother, she’s dead, baby. I’m so sorry.”

The phone fell out of her fingers. Suddenly it weighed too much to hold. She watched it bounce across the cheap carpeted floor and flop to the side.

“Mama?” Her voice was tiny, so much smaller than Mrs. Ramirez’s that she could have been a flea in comparison to the woman’s mouse. “My mama’s dead?”

She fell back on the bed, the nice old lady who used to watch her completely forgotten.

They pulled her body out of the river three days ago.

They just now identified her.

Somewhere out there, Tony and his friends were maybe looking for their money. Tony and his mob friends. How much damage would they do for two million dollars? They’d killed for a lot less. She knew that, even when she tried to pretend that part didn’t matter. They’d killed people and tortured people and sometimes they’d gone after the loved ones of people that did them wrong because for them it was more important to have what they wanted than it was to be good people.

Did they find my mama instead?

“Oh no. Oh, Mama. Mommy. No… ” Her lips kept moving, but there were no words. There were only tears. Tears, and that feeling like her whole universe was falling apart.