Chapter 6 - The Locket Broken Twice
The north service drive was bordered by four-hundred-year-old bur oaks that groaned under the weight of the freezing rain. The two black Suburbans had killed their headlights twenty yards from the gatehouse, but their exhaust plumes rose thick and white into the cold night air like the breath of two waiting beasts.
I stood on the stone steps of the side portico, wearing my wool coat, my hands tucked into the pockets. The gravel path was slick with black ice.
Four men got out of the first truck. They wore heavy work jackets, knit caps, and carried short steel crowbars and iron pipes wrapped in black friction tape. They didn't look like hitmen; they looked like dockworkers who had been promised five hundred dollars cash and a clean slate on their union dues to do twenty minutes of dirty work for the boss’s nephew.
The man in front was Frankie Moretti—thirty-two years old, with an expensive haircut ruined by the sleet and the nervous swagger of someone who had never had someone hit him back with a closed fist.
“Gabriel,” Frankie called out, his voice cracked with cold and adrenaline. “My uncle says you’re getting sentimental in your old age. He says you forgot how the business works.”
“Your uncle is sitting in a roadside diner in Skokie waiting for his heart medication to kick in,” I said, not moving from the step. “You should be with him, Frankie. The road to Chicago is very slick tonight.”
Frankie spat onto the gravel. “We want the girl and the green metal box, Gabe. That’s all. We take them back to Cicero, we verify the ledger, and we’re done with you. You can go back inside and eat your birthday cake with the politicians.”
“The girl is three years old,” I said.
“I don't give a damn if she’s three minutes old,” Frankie snapped, stepping forward and waving the crowbar toward the greenhouse behind the stables. “Her old man stole two million dollars that belonged to my grandfather. That money bought the house my mother lives in. You think I’m going to let some cleaning lady sit on that paper while my family gets audited?”
I took two slow steps down the stone stairs, the leather soles of my boots biting into the gravel. Behind me, the estate was silent except for the low rumble of the backup diesel generator kicking on to handle the power surge from the storm.
“Your grandfather,” I said, each word deliberate and hard as iron, “stole that money from the widow’s fund of Local 402. My brother Julian found the duplicate deposit slips in eighty-one. He was coming to this house to tell me about it the night your father ran him off the bridge.”
Frankie laughed, a short, nervous bark that bounced off the oak trees. “Your brother was a rat, Gabe! Everybody on Taylor Street knew it! He went to the feds like a schoolgirl crying to the principal!”
Something inside my chest that had been cold and calcified for twenty-nine hundred days snapped with the clean, sharp sound of an oak limb breaking under ice.
“Dante,” I said into the small microphone pinned inside my collar.
“Ready, boss.”
The floodlights along the entire four-hundred-foot perimeter of the north stable ignited at once, turning the freezing rain into an explosion of blinding white needles. Frankie and his four men instinctively threw their arms up to shield their eyes, stumbling sideways against the fenders of their trucks.
From the dark tree line behind them, four Valenti transport security officers—men who spent forty hours a week guarding millions of dollars in pharmaceutical freight through the roughest corridors in the Midwest—stepped into the light with pump-action Remingtons leveled at the radiators of the two Suburbans.
The sound of four shotgun slides racking back in perfect unison was the loudest noise on the North Shore that night.
Frankie’s crowbar slipped from his fingers, clattering uselessly against the frozen gravel.
“Now,” I said, stepping right up until my chest almost touched his wet jacket. “You’re going to tell me who gave you the key to the rear service gate, Frankie. Because that gate has a six-tumbler lock that only three people in this county can open.”
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Frankie’s jaw worked soundlessly. His eyes darted toward the illuminated windows of the main ballroom, where the silhouettes of my high-society guests were still swaying to the music.
“It was the lady,” Frankie whispered, his bravado vanishing like grease down a hot drain. “The one with the red feather. She called my uncle forty minutes ago from the powder room. She said if we took the girl out the back, she’d make sure the alarms were off on the terrace.”
