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2025-06-25 07:44:52
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The Vision She Hid 149
Sicily in summer doesn’t sleep. It just lies there sweating and complaining about the heat.The Marconi villa sat above the shoreline like it had paid good money to look down on people. It was built from stone that cost more per square foot than most people make in a year, with walls thick enough to stop a howitzer and windows set so deep you could hide a body in the sills. Probably that was the whole pointOlive trees lined the driveway. They were silent, dignified, and not about to tell you what they’d seen. Floodlights carved hard white circles out of the darkness, and security cameras blinked their mean red eyes at nothing in particular, recording everything and understanding none of it.It wasn’t just a rich man’s house. It was a rich man’s middle finger to the concept of neighborhood.Elky and I watched it from a ridge where the weeds were dry enough to draw blood if you looked at them the wrong way. The night air was thick as French soup and twice as appetizing, I am being sarc
The Vision She Hid 148
Rick Marconi’s boat was floating the way a fat man floats after a big dinner—smug, bloated, and asking for trouble.It was too big, too white, and too loud with the kind of drunken laughter that doesn’t belong anywhere near salt water. Music thumped from somewhere below deck, that lazy pulse meant to keep the girls loose and the men stupid. The lights cut hard shapes on the water, turning the harbor into a cheap stage set. Everything about it said easy money not earned. Everything about it said target.Elky and I watched from the shadow of a piling that smelled of rotten seaweed and diesel fuel. The night air had that damp salt bite that crawls into your clothes and stays there like a bad memory. I felt calm. Not the calm you get from counting to ten or thinking happy thoughts. The calm you get when your body has already decided what it’s going to do and doesn’t need your permission.Elky checked his watch. Not because time mattered. Because men like to look busy before they do someth
The Vision She Hid 147
The café across from Nicos’s clinic had the kind of quiet that comes after somebody’s been shot dead. No chrome monster hissing steam, no jukebox trying to sell you yesterday’s joy. Just thick white cups that landed soft on scarred wood. The customers talked in undertones, like mourners who’d buried the day and were waiting for the dirt to settle.Elky sat across from me with his mitts wrapped around coffee he hadn’t touched. He looked like something the cat puked out in and the dog wouldn’t eat. His face had that look men get when sleep stops being a friend and starts being a stranger they used to know. His eyes kept jumping to the clinic’s doors—all glass and steel and discretion, the kind of joint where people go to get fixed or at least get lied to about getting fixed. It was my father’s clinic.I stirred my coffee with one of those wooden sticks that’s supposed to save the planet and watched the ripples spread. My hand was steady. Too damn steady.“You’re going to spill it,” I sa
The Vision She Hid 146
I was tired. I had never been so tired before. The life was still there, somewhere in close proximity, but it carried on beyond the cosy bubble of my all-encompassing fatigue. There was nothing else to feel or worry about. No pain, no desire, and no memories. Only the passage of time was still there. I still felt its unhurried flow, but I wasn’t a meaningful part of it any longer. I didn’t even bother to open my eyes. But I could hear the voices alright.Next to the monitor displaying a bed with a motionless woman on it, stood two people in white coats. The woman was me. One of them had a metal badge pinned to his pocket. He spoke first:‘I have to say, she is a rare case in my practice. Her body, the doctor nodded at the monitor, lives an autonomous life, almost on cellular level.’‘Can you explain what it means, doctor?’ the other person in white asked. His voice made me warm and angry at the same time.‘The methods of restoring patients like her are fairly well known. The patients
The Vision She Hid 145
The boat smelled like fuel and old rope and men who didn’t wash their hands because they didn’t believe in hygene.They’d sat me on a chair that looked like it had been stolen from a church basement. It was a notch shaky, wooden, heavy, designed to keep the righteous in place. My wrists were cuffed to the armrests with old-fashioned steel cuffs, the kind that bite your skin when you try to move. They’d strapped my ankles with plastic too. My stinky synthetic hood had come off somewhere between the dock and open water. I’d blinked into a black sea and a sky that didn’t care about my troubles. The men spoke low and casual, like they were running errands for somebody. One of them chewed something. Another kept checking his phone. They weren’t afraid of me. They weren’t even interested.That was the first insult. The second was the chair.It wasn’t bolted to the deck. They’d just counted on the weight, the cuffs, and my desire to stay alive. I tested the cuffs. No give. I tested the stra
The Vision She Hid 144
The thing about Palermo is it can sell you a lifetime of sunrises for a hefty downpayment if you are not careful. The people here can sell anything to anyone, and that included me, big bad Elky Jennings. You wake up to salt in the air and sound of gulls making jokes about your hairdo while flying over the water, and for half a second you believe the city is just a city. Then you remember your wife is missing and your father-in-law is on television in handcuffs, and the Sicilian sunrise becomes what it always was: decoration for dumb tourists.I didn’t sleep, of course. I did tonnes of paperwork in my head and walked holes into old Persian carpet until my legs stopped feeling like mine. But it worked, as it usually does for me. By mid morning I had three names, two addresses, and a peculiar gap in the hotel footage that could have driven a truck through, and a certainty so solid it felt like a fossilized bone.My mother didn’t want a chat over a nice dinner. She’d wanted a clock ticki
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