Chapter 6 - PIER 19
My knees buckled.
If Luca hadn’t caught me by the waist and pulled me against his chest, I would have hit the concrete floor of the station corridor.
“That’s my dad’s blue flannel jacket,” I choked out, my fingers digging into the wool lapel of Luca’s coat as I stared at the security printout. “Luca, why is he there? He told me on the phone this morning he was fixing his neighbor’s snowblower in Elgin!”
Luca didn’t pull away.
He held me tight against his side with one arm while his eyes scanned the timestamp at the bottom corner of the photograph.
Thursday, 4:18 PM.
“Look at his left wrist in the picture, Emma,” Luca said quietly.
I blinked through hot tears and looked closer at the grain of the black-and-white printout.
Around my father’s wrist wasn’t his old Timex watch.
I was wearing his Timex watch right now because I had taken it to a jeweler on Michigan Avenue last week to replace the worn-out battery for him.
Around my dad’s wrist in the photo was a plastic hospital identification band.
“He went to St. Luke’s on Thursday afternoon for his six-month cardiology checkup,” I whispered, horror dawning in my chest. “Martha’s brother didn’t recruit my dad—they picked him up outside the clinic!”
Luca flipped to the last page of the folder.
Written in neat, block letters across a slip of butcher paper—the exact kind of paper used in the mansion’s kitchen—was a message:
Moretti. Midnight. Pier 19, Slip 4. Bring the harbor deeds for the south terminal and come alone, or the nurse and the maid’s father go into the canal the same way Dante did.
No wonder Martha had made sure I found Mrs. Moretti in the kitchen at six-thirty.
She knew that if I brought that soup into the dining room, Luca would walk out on Vanessa, break the alliance with Arthur Bellini on the spot, and go hunting for the truth—right down the trail of breadcrumbs Martha and her brother Victor had laid from Union Station to Pier 19.
They had used Vanessa’s fear, Clara’s love for her grandson, and my love for my father to split Luca away from his bodyguards and his allies in a single night.
“It’s eleven-twenty,” Luca said, slipping the folder and Dante’s watch inside his coat.
He started walking fast toward the tunnel exit, pulling me with him.
“You’re dropping me at the brownstone, aren’t you?” I asked, half-running to keep up with his long strides.
“No.”
I blinked at him as we reached the black SUV idling by the curb. “No?”
“If Victor Novak has had eyes on Union Station tonight, he already knows you’re with me,” Luca said, opening the passenger door for me. “And if your father has a bad heart, you’re the only person who can keep him calm when we get him out of that warehouse.”
He climbed behind the wheel himself—since Marco had stayed back at the brownstone to guard Mrs. Moretti and Leo—and pulled out onto the expressway.
As the speedometer climbed past seventy along the dark industrial corridor south of the river, Luca reached into the center console and pulled out a heavy black Glock, checking the magazine with one hand before sliding it into his waistband.
Then he looked over at me.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
I stared at his profile against the passing sodium lights of the highway. “For what?”
“For seven months you’ve been scrubbing floors in my house at five in the morning to pay off your father’s surgery,” Luca said, his voice rough. “And tonight you risked your job and your safety for an eighty-year-old woman and a little boy you didn’t even know—while the people sitting at my table drinking my champagne were tearing my family apart.”
My throat ached.
“Mrs. Moretti was eating cold noodles out of a chipped bowl by a trash chute, Luca,” I said softly. “My mother died when I was twelve. If anybody had treated her like that, I would have wanted someone to carry that bowl upstairs too.”
Luca reached across the console and covered my cold hand with his warm palm, squeezing once before the rusted iron cranes of the Calumet Harbor loomed out of the fog ahead.
He killed the headlights two blocks from Pier 19.
The SUV rolled silently over cracked asphalt and weeds until we stopped behind a stack of rusted shipping containers near Slip 4.
The smell of lake water, diesel oil, and wet rust hung thick in the midnight air.
Ahead of us sat a corrugated tin boat-repair shed with a single yellow bulb burning above a sliding steel door.
Parked out front wasn’t an old getaway van.
It was a sleek black town car with municipal plates.
Arthur Bellini’s car.
“Stay behind the container until you hear my voice,” Luca whispered against my ear as we slipped out into the damp shadows.
He didn’t go through the front door.
Seven months of listening to his dock supervisors had taught me one thing: Luca Moretti knew every broken lock and loose board on the Chicago waterfront.
He pried open a rusted side vent window near the hull hoist, lifted me quietly through onto a wooden catwalk lined with coiled ropes, and climbed in silently behind me.
Below us, the concrete floor of the boat shed was lit by floodlights.
My heart jumped into my throat.
Sitting on two wooden crates near the edge of the open water slip were my father and a thin dark-haired woman in a nurse’s cardigan—Elena.
My dad’s face was pale and sweaty, one hand pressed against his chest under his blue flannel jacket, though his eyes were fierce as he kept his shoulder angled protectively in front of Elena.
Standing ten feet away from them was Martha Novak, wearing her sensible gray wool coat, alongside a burly man with a scarred jaw holding a heavy iron wrench.
And lying on the concrete floor between them—bound to a rusted folding chair with blood trickling from her split lip—was Vanessa Bellini.
Arthur Bellini stood beside the open boat slip, a revolver in his hand pointed not at my father, and not at Elena, but at Martha’s brother.
“You lost your mind, Victor,” Arthur snarled, his silver hair disheveled in the draft. “I paid you fifty thousand dollars six years ago to cut Dante Moretti’s brakes and dispose of the car! I didn’t pay you to blackmail me with my own daughter!”
Martha stepped forward, her prim housekeeper’s voice cold and sharp as a razor.
“You paid Victor fifty thousand while you made fifty million off the Moretti docks, Arthur,” Martha said smoothly. “And when the feds came sniffing around the harbor contracts ten years ago, you and old man Moretti let Victor take a ten-year prison sentence while we cleaned your toilets and served your coffee.”
She reached into her gray coat pocket and pulled out a small silver lighter, holding it over a plastic five-gallon can of kerosene sitting right beside the wooden crates where my father and Elena were tied.
Wait.
I looked down from the shadowed catwalk and saw something none of them on the floor had noticed yet.
The kerosene wasn’t just splashed around the crates.
A dark, shiny trail of fuel ran all the way across the concrete to the tires of Arthur Bellini’s town car—and the heavy steel sliding door behind Arthur had been padlocked from the outside.
Martha and Victor weren’t planning on trading hostages for harbor deeds.
May you like
They were going to burn everyone inside Slip 4 alive and blame the dead mafia boss and the corrupt alderman for wiping each other out.
Before Luca could raise his gun, my father coughed—a deep, rattling chest cough that echoed off the tin rafters—and looked straight up at the catwalk where I was crouching.
