Page 52 of The Butcher's Wife

“I saw you,” the man says to Annetta.

She stiffens, and I squeeze her hand, cutting a glance to her dad. Only the muscles in Barbara’s jaw, grinding his cigar into tobacco pulp, give away his nerves. He’s worked hard to make sure his girls never see shit like this.

“You were at the Blue Rooster and your friends were talking about going to a titty bar and you went with them, and I knew?—”

The man’s burst of words is interrupted by loud, gunshot hacking, blood spraying over his knees as he coughs.

“Sorry, I, uh, I remembered your face, ‘cause Mikey—he doesn’t do girls much, so when I heard he was looking for you, I figured I’d look you up and…”

He swallows and glances up at Turi. Even though he’s covered in blood, I recognize him. Rodney, but he likes people to call him Rod because he thinks it sounds cooler, even though no one gives a damn. He’s a piece of shit who beats up his own mom.

He continues when Turi doesn’t react. “Yeah, so I remembered your face. I called Mikey and told him where you were headed.”

“Annetta,” Turi says as he approaches Rodney.

Rodney’s chest rises in quick succession, his focus split between Turi and the pliers in his hand.

Turi snatches Rodney by his hair and exposes his face to us. “Do you recognize him?”

“N-no.” Even as it trembles, Annetta’s voice carries across the small room.

“No,” Turi echoes. “Neither did your brother. Or Checkers. Or Mark. Or Russell. None of you noticed a man making a call to a hitman with your name at the top of his list. And none of you noticed you were being followed.”

Annetta trembles against my arm.

Turi smacks the pliers against his palm once.

“It took quite a bit of effort to get this out of you. I’m glad you finally told me the truth, but I already told you what would happen if you lied to me.”

On cue, Barbara steps behind Rodney and squeezes his face to hold him still.

I wrap my arm around Annetta and shove her behind me so she won’t see, but I can’t protect her from the screams. They echo off the basement walls as Turi tears the man’s tongue from his mouth with a set of slip-joint pliers. He drops it into a bucket with asplat,and the pliers clatter in afterward.

He takes a knife and stabs Rodney through the base of the skull.

When the screams silence, the only sound left is theclick, clickof Barbara’s lighter as he lights up his cigar.

“Annetta,” Turi says in a perfectly calm, quiet voice. He picks up a shop rag and wipes his hands clean before dropping that into the bucket too. “I want to hear from you, and no one else. Why do the Chiarellis want you dead?”

She shifts around me slowly. Her eyes are trained to the ground, and she’s shivering, even in my coat. In the softest voice imaginable, she answers, “I killed Frederico.”

Barbara’s cigar burns a bright red on his inhale.

“Why did you kill your ex-husband?” Turi asks.

“I saw him in bed with someone else.” Annetta swallows. “An underage girl.”

I jerk my head toward her. The fuck? A fuckinggirl?

“Could you have been mistaken?” Turi asks.

“No,” she says, and her voice cracks on the word. “They’d been bringing girls to the house for years. I just believed the lies they told me. I didn’t want to know the truth.”

“How did you kill him?”

“We were on his boat on the lake. I let him get drunk, and I pushed him overboard.”

“You saw the dead body?”