Chapter 2 - The Long Ride to Long Island City
The Escalade cut through the damp twilight streets of Queens like a black shark through dark water. Inside, the cabin was dead silent except for the low hum of the climate control and the ragged, pathetic breathing of Marco Ricci tied up in the third row.
I sat in the front passenger seat, staring out the window at the flickering neon signs of bodegas, auto repair shops, and brick apartment buildings that rolled past. These were the streets I had built my life on. Every corner had a history, a debt, a bloodstain, or a victory attached to it. For thirty years, I believed I had absolute control over this territory because I understood the code. Loyalty was currency. Respect was law. Betrayal was punishable by death.
Marco had violated every single line of that code. Not just by committing murder, but by doing it like an amateur, and then lying to my face about it while standing in a room dedicated to mourning his victim.
"Tony," I said without turning around.
"Yeah, Boss?"
"Did you check his phone before we left?"
"Got it right here," Tony said, tossing a sleek black smartphone onto the center console between us. "Unlocked it using his face before we tossed him in the back. You want the highlights or the whole grim story?"
"Give me the highlights."
"Well, for starters, he wasn't just handling the Russian drop alone. He’s been skimming off the top of the port operations for six months. Probably funding some side gambling habit or a second apartment in Manhattan. But more importantly... look at the texts from three nights ago, right around the time of the accident."
I picked up the phone, tapping the screen to bring up the message logs. An encrypted messaging app, the kind we used to keep federal agents off our backs.
The chat was with a contact saved under a generic burner name: Driver-42.
Marco: "Clean up the dock perimeter. Someone saw the plates." Driver-42: "Secured. Nobody's here." Marco: "Not the dock. A kid. Down by the fence with a notebook." Driver-42: "Did she get a look?" Marco: "Too close. I'll handle it myself. Stay off the radio."
My jaw tightened until the bone ached. It wasn't just Marco acting alone in a blind panic. He had a co-conspirator. Someone who helped him track her down, someone who helped him cover his tracks, someone who was still walking around free in my organization.
"Who owns Driver-42?" I asked, my voice dangerously soft.
"We're running the burner number through the tech guys right now," Tony replied, his eyes fixed on the road ahead, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. "Should have a location by the time we hit the Pulaski Bridge. But Boss... if Marco had someone else helping him cover up a hit-and-run on a kid, that means there's rot deeper in the upper management than just him."
"Find out who it is," I said, dropping the phone back onto the console. "And dig up everything on Elena Vasquez's father. The restaurant. The forty-two grand he owed us. I want to know why his debt was flagged for special collection in the first place."
"You think the debt was tied to the docks?" Tony asked, glancing over at me.
"Nothing in this city happens by accident, Tony. Not anymore."
We turned off the main thoroughfare and headed down toward the industrial sprawl of Long Island City, where corrugated steel warehouses sat shoulder-to-shoulder against the murky, oil-slicked waters of the East River. It was our territory—a place where problems could be solved permanently without the police ever finding a single trace.
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As the Escalade rolled to a halt in front of Warehouse 42—the same building where Marco had spent a decade enforcing my will—I felt a strange sense of finality settling over my bones. The world I had built was changing. The loyalty I thought was absolute was proving to be fragile glass.
And out there, somewhere in the dark, a dead little girl in purple sneakers was waiting for justice that only a mafia boss and a seventy-five-dollar bag of dog food could deliver.
