City of Red | Part 1

Chapter 4 | The Devil

Lila Winters pulled her long brown hair into a ponytail and wrapped an old rubber to keep it in place. Her skin was flawless, save for a few freckles spattered on her cheeks. The prominent bridge of her nose gave the appearance that it was curved downward just slightly. A gift from her late father.

She patted a bit of Vaseline on her chapped lips, courtesy of the harsh winds in Cold Harbor City, and walked out of the bathroom to the suitcase on the motel bed and opened it. Lila inspected the equipment inside: sawed off shotgun, a couple of handguns, ammo, flashbang grenades. She hoped she'd have no use for any of it, but the world she was traveling in was a dangerous one and the man she was hunting was the king of that world.

Lila was a reporter for the National Gazette, but her being in Cold Harbor City had nothing to do with her job. As a matter of fact, no one even knew where she was.

She closed the suitcase and placed it on the floor between the wall and bed, then laid down. It almost six in the morning. Today she would find Alfonso Machetti, but first she wanted to sleep a little longer, if that was even possible.

Every time Lila closed her eyes she had a habit of thinking hard on something innocent, like a favorite television show, or the last book she read, but it never failed. Her dreams always took over, catapulting her into the past, some thirty years, to when she was a little girl and her father was about to be murdered.

She watched it from inside her home, through her child eyes and the large window in her living room.

Lila screamed for her father to get up, but the bad man wouldn't let him. Watching her father get dragged away horrifying, but seeing the bad man stuff her father in the trunk of that car something else. It marked the last time she would ever see him.

Lila had always wondered what happened to his body. Her mind filled in the blanks. Incinerated, chopped up, weighed down and sunk to the bottom of some lake somewhere. Her mind had grown extremely creative over the years, to the point where she began fantasizing about doing those very things to the bad man.

It was this very fantasizing that eventually consumed her life, and now here she was, a world away from her home, sitting in some motel in the southside of Cold Harbor City, looking for the one person that might be able to help her get closure...Alfonso Machetti.

It had been easy enough to track Alfonso. She thought it was funny, though. Considering who his father is, and the fact that Alfonso was adopted as a baby. The apple didn't fall far from the mafia tree. More like the apple fell from the tree, rolled down hill, and found another tree just like the one it came from, just with a different name.

She finally gave up on trying to sleep when her eyes locked on the television and the news broadcast. The words scrolling at the bottom of the screen shocked the hell out of her... "Scarlatti family members dead citywide."

Lila turned the volume up and listened to the voiceover of the male news broadcaster while the screen showed an arial view of Vinnie and Vera Scarlatti's home.

"It's very early on in this, information is fluid as you can imagine, but reports are saying that many, if not all of the Scarlatti crime family hierarchy has been killed, including Vinnie Scarlatti, his wife, their two sons, and many, many more. As to what happened, reports are conflicting. Some say this was due to a war with another family or gang, but an official statement from the office of the mayor says this was a city operation. Here's chief of staff Marion Haywood, just a few minutes ago."

The screen changed to show a tall man with a perm talking in a hall somewhere inside city hall, surrounded by reporters and flashing lights.

"What happened last night was a long time coming," Marion said. "On account of the operation...the investigation. I really wish I could say more but in a short while, Mayor French will address the city. We'll see you then."