“Ad Arbatax è arrivata l’oscurità,” the ghost of his wife seemed to whisper.

A darkness has come to Arbatax.

He thought about that for a long time as the man and dog climbed the steep hill.

A darkness.

The echo of those words through his mind seemed to pull the lingering heat of the day out of his world, leaving Bruno Melis cold and frightened.

So he watched and made no call. Not even to his son, who lived not half a kilometer from where he sat.

The shadows of night swallowed the man entirely, and for nearly twenty minutes, there was nothing to see. Bruno even began wondering if senility was finally, after all these years, catching up with him. He was the fifth-oldest person currently living in Arbatax, a town known for centenarians, and there were seventeen people over a hundred who were younger than he was. Some had lost their faculties, but he had not. A fact he ascribed to his daily walks, his daily crossword puzzles, and the wine he shared with his son.

He sat on his little stool and peered into the scope and tried to calculate the rate of climb for the man and where he might reappear among the rocks and shrubs.

Bruno’s estimate was correct nearly to the minute. The dog emerged from the broom shrubs forty meters from Otranto’s garden wall. By now, it was full dark, and the patio lights were burning behind the big house. Otranto himself was smoking a cigar as he strolled along the flagstones in his yard, speaking on a cell phone while two of his men—Bruno assumed they were bodyguards of some kind—stood watching, silent as statues.

The flash of gunfire sparked through the night, but Bruno did not hear the echo of shots. Through the excellent lens of his scope, he saw that the pistol the big man held had some kind of silencer on it. Fire spat from the barrel, but even as the two bodyguards fell, Otranto—looking the other way as he talked on his phone—did not appear to hear.

Then the dog rushed past the man and dragged Otranto down, savaging his arm. Not trying to kill him, though, that much was clear. The big man went into the house while the dog stood guard like Cerberus over the bleeding Otranto. There were many flashes inside the house, and the reports of guns—not silenced ones—bounced up the hills toward Bruno. Then a window exploded outward, and another burly man went flying out and landed badly on the flagstones. After a while—was it thirty seconds or a full minute?—silence and stillness fell over the house of Otranto.