Free Headstone City by Tom Piccirilli

hit them both at the same time. Their lives had meant nothing to each other so far, but this moment took the structure of a great and fateful sharing.
    You couldn't get away from it. Sometimes people entered your sphere only by the force of their own deaths.
    The sucking wound in JoJo's chest gurgled faintly, but didn't affect his voice much. Strings of blood trailed down his chin and dribbled over the fresh carnation in his lapel. Fat beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and clung to his brow, his skin now a sickly, bright yellow. The bullet graze along his jaw had cauterized the flesh in a fiery, jagged pattern.
    “Please—God, please—”
    The bakery girl remained frozen in place, so completely still that Dane wondered if she'd fainted on her feet and just hadn't fallen down yet. Apparently no one had called 911. Dozens of people strolled past the store window, everybody so wrapped in their own worries they didn't even glance to one side or the other. Fifty bullets flying around and not one crack in the plate glass.
    “You need help,” Dane said.
    “Too late for that. Were you over there in the Middle East?”
    “No, I spent most of my time in the stockade.”
    “For what? Brawling? You look like a brawler.”
    “Apathy, mostly,” Dane admitted.
    He thought, Hell, if only Grandma hadn't gotten a sudden jones for sugar, I wouldn't have stepped into this mess. She's probably climbing the walls by now, waiting for her
biscotti.
The thought alarmed him nearly as much as all this shit.
    The hitter squirmed on the floor, his dripping hand stretching for Dane's ankle. Touching him lightly there the way Mako had done in the showers.
    The stink grew worse, but there was also a pleasant aroma of fresh
struffoli
and
sfogliatelle
wafting in from the back room. Dane eyed the scarred knuckles, wavering, praying the guy would just die already.
“Please—please . . . am . . . ambulance—”
    “Don't let that piece of shit bother you,” JoJo told him. “Listen, I need you to do something for me.”
    The gun barrel eased into an angle, leveled directly at Dane's guts. Dane said, “Threatening me isn't going to help you much at this point.”
    The .32 steered away and pointed toward the far wall again. “Sorry about that. Bad habit.” JoJo grinned, his teeth smeared with bile. “I suppose all my vices have about run out to the end.”
    “Jesus, you gotta help—”
The hand wrapped itself weakly around Dane's cuff, those ragged, dirty fingernails clawing. Dane tugged his foot away.
    “I need you to give a message to Maria Monticelli for me,” JoJo said. “You know her?”
    “Yeah.”
    Dane had been in love with Maria since he was about seven. Every guy his age had been and maybe still was. A soft tragedy welled inside him at just the mention of her name. And Angelina had looked so much like her.
    JoJo was fading fast, but he tightened his face against the pain. He reached his blood-smeared fingertips into his jacket pocket and came out with a satin box.
    “I'll pay you ten grand to tell her I love her. That I've always loved her. You give her this.”
    “A ring?”
    “An engagement ring. I planned on asking her to marry me.”
    “I don't mean to bring you farther down, JoJo . . . but why's it matter now?”
    That made the dying man chuckle until his lips were flecked with bubbling red froth. He strained to keep his voice under control. “I've been carrying this engagement ring around for six months but I never managed to get up the nerve to give it to her. I've meant to propose . . . seriously, you know, doing the whole down on one knee bit . . . three or four times, but something always threw me off track. Some deal that had to be done or another enterprise. But I always loved her. I don't want to kick without her knowing . . . for certain.”
    “Isn't that the kind of thing she'd already know?”
    “Probably, but it always went unsaid. I finally want to say it to her.”
    Dane let it go by that JoJo