Vendetta Trail by Robert Vaughan Page B

hands to his throat. His eyes were open wide in pain and surprise, and she saw his hands turning red with blood.
    “It is Tangeleno!” Hennesy shouted. Pulling his pistol, he spun around, but the police commissioner went down before he could get off a shot, taking a hit in the chest by a shotgun blast.
    The first few shots were followed immediately by a fusillade of gunfire as more than a dozen men suddenly burst into the garden, shooting pistols, rifles, and shotguns.
    Nearly all of De Luca’s men were armed, and they began firing back. Bullets and loads of buckshot whizzed through the air. Wine bottles burst, sending out showers of wine, food was hit, and pieces were scattered across the table.
    The men screamed at each other, and even though it was in Italian, Rachel knew that they were shouting curses.
    Rachel and Fancy were exchanging looks of terror when suddenly the front of Fancy’s lavender dress turned red with blood as she was hit.
    “Fancy!”
    “Rachel?” Fancy said. She sounded more surprised than frightened. As Fancy called out Rachel’s name, blood began oozing from her mouth. She went down.
    “Fancy, oh my God, no!” Rachel cried as she started toward her.
    “Rachel, get down!” Pietro Fanchetti shouted, suddenly appearing as if from nowhere. Pietro ran across the garden,firing at the invaders, roaring curses at them as he did so. When he reached Rachel, he shoved her hard, pushing her down to the ground.
    Rachel lay where she fell, trying to block out the horror of what was going on. She looked up at Pietro and saw him take a hit from a load of buckshot that sent a shower of blood and brains bursting out the side of his head.
    That blast slammed Pietro against the dining table, knocking it over. The table fell on Rachel and she felt a blow to her head.
    After that, everything went dark.

Chapter 17
    IT WAS DARK.
    The soft cooing of the pigeons and the fluttering of their wings seeped into Rachel’s consciousness.
    She felt a little chilly and wished she had put the window down, but didn’t want to get out of bed to do it. She reached for the sheet and pulled it up over her shoulders.
    The sheet was wet and sticky. What was it? What had she spilled on her bed?
    Rachel opened her eyes and saw the pigeons eating bread from the ground.
    What was bread doing on the ground?
    She turned her head and stared directly into the face of Fancy, who was staring back at her. Fancy’s once-beautiful brown eyes were open, opaque, and sightless.
    Suddenly Rachel realized where she was! She remembered, also, the screams, the shouts, the gunshots, and the blood.
    “Oh my God!” she said in a quiet sob.
    The sheet she had pulled over her shoulders was the tablecloth; the wet stickiness she had been feeling was blood. Recoiling in horror, she pushed the tablecloth away.
    Rachel wanted more than anything in the world to scream, but she fought hard to hold it back. What if the people who did this were still here? Would they be coming for her now?
    Rachel wasn’t really hurt, except for a bump and a very tender spot on her head. She was lying under the table and had evidently been knocked out by it when it overturned. The fact that she was covered by the table—and unconscious—probably saved her life, because the shooters thought she was already dead.
    Slowly and carefully, Rachel got to her feet, then looked around. She counted eight bodies, including Fancy, De Luca, Provenzano, Guido, Luigi, and Pietro. She realized then that Pietro, as much as the table, was responsible for her still being alive, because he had pushed her to the ground when the firing started.
    If only there had been someone to do the same thing for Fancy.
    “Oh, Fancy,” she said. A lump came to her throat and tears filled her eyes. She crawled over to Fancy and then reached out to close her eyes.
    “They’re in the back,” a voice said.
    Someone was coming and for a moment Rachel was glad. She started to call out to them, then she