Chapter 7 - The Return of Raymond
The victory at Moretti’s office was sweet, but Philadelphia has a long memory, and ghosts have a habit of showing up when the weather turns cold.
It happened on a Tuesday evening in November.
Amelia was walking back from the dry cleaner’s with a folder of quarterly statements under her arm, the wind whipping dry leaves across the pavement of South Street. The neon sign of Castellano’s was buzzing softly through the dusk, casting a warm red glow over the wet sidewalk.
A car pulled up to the curb—a battered black Ford sedan with New Jersey plates. The passenger door opened, and a pair of heavy, square-toed shoes hit the concrete.
Amelia stopped dead.
The breath left her lungs as if she had been punched in the solar plexus.
Raymond Fletcher stepped out of the shadow of the brick building. He looked older than he had three years ago—his hair was thinner on top, the skin around his eyes sagging into heavy, bruised pouches, but the stance was the same: the loose, heavy-shouldered slouch of a man who believed the world was an oyster he could crack with his bare hands.
"Well, well, well," Raymond said, his voice greasy and low as he stepped into the light of the diner sign. "Look what the bus dragged in. I heard through some friends down in Kensington that little Amelia had found herself a sugar daddy with a silver mane and a restaurant."
Amelia didn't move. The old cold thing—the terror that had lived behind her ribs since the night he broke her jaw—spread through her arms and legs like liquid nitrogen. She dropped her folder. The papers scattered across the wet sidewalk, white sheets fluttering into the gutter.
Raymond laughed—that same wet, cruel laugh she had heard in the dark apartment in Charlotte right before the first blow landed. He reached out, his heavy fingers closing around her wrist, exactly where Derek Lawson had grabbed her three months ago.
"You thought you could run off with my fifty bucks and hide out in a grease-joint with a bunch of greaseballs?" Raymond sneered, jerking her toward him. "Get in the car, Amelia. We're going home."
For a second, she was twenty-six again, trapped in the kitchen with her back against the refrigerator, unable to breathe, unable to scream.
Then she remembered the sound of the metal latches snapping on her briefcase in Rocco Moretti’s office. She remembered Vincent Castellano sitting in the back room, sipping grappa and telling her that nobody walked into a room where she sat and thought they could touch her wrist.
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She didn't scream. She didn't cry.
With her free hand, she reached into her coat pocket, wrapped her fingers around the heavy brass cylinder of the commercial-grade pepper spray Vincent had insisted she carry, and drove it straight into Raymond Fletcher’s left eye.
