Chapter 2 - The House That Aldo Built
The smell of Moretti Auto Repair was something Frankie carried in the lining of her lungs. It was an ancient, layered scent: fifty years of scorched transmission fluid, solvent wash, iron dust from the brake lathes, and the faint, sweet trace of the cheap filterless Luckies her father used to smoke behind the parts counter.
It was nearly eight at night when her rusted Ford F-150 rattled across the cracked concrete apron on Dragoon Street. The neon sign in the front window—the blue script that read MORETTI AUTO & TRUCK REPAIR—was only half-lit; the word AUTO sputtered in a rhythmic, dying buzz that she’d meant to fix since August.
Through the rain-streaked glass of the garage bay, she saw the silhouette sitting on an overturned plastic milk crate beside the hydraulic lift.
Frankie killed the engine, took a deep breath of the damp, cold Detroit night, and reached into the passenger seat for her heavy steel breaker bar. She didn't plan on hitting her brother with it, but holding eighteen inches of drop-forged chrome-vanadium steel always helped keep her hands from shaking.
The side door squeaked on its unoiled hinges.
Leo looked up. He was thirty-one, two years older than Frankie, but he carried himself like an overgrown boy who had spent his life waiting for someone else to clean up his spilled milk. His left eye was swollen into a purple knot the size of a plum, his bottom lip was split in two places, and his knuckles were wrapped in bloody toilet paper.
"Frankie?" His voice was hoarse, rattling with panic. "Frankie, did you go there? Tell me you didn't go to Vanguard."
Frankie walked past him without a word. She hung her heavy canvas jacket on the iron hook behind the door, dropped her breaker bar onto the steel workbench with a sharp CLANG, and picked up a rag soaked in mineral spirits. She began wiping the grease from her fingers, methodical and slow.
"Frankie! Jesus, talk to me!" Leo scrambled up from the milk crate, his knees wobbling. "Dante came by the pool hall yesterday. He told me if Costa didn't have the deed by midnight, they were going to put me in an incinerator at the Rouge plant. Did you give him the paper? Did you sign it?"
Frankie turned around. Her eyes were small, hard slits.
"You offered him the garage, Leo."
Leo flinched. He looked at the floor, at the grease stains around the base of the rotary lift. "I didn't have a choice! I was down eighty grand on the college games, and then the guys at the back table offered to float me to get it back, and the dice just... they died, Frankie. It happened so fast. They had me in the back room with a gun in my mouth before I even knew what the tally was. I told them our dad left us the shop! I thought—I thought we could take out a second mortgage, pay Costa his piece, and then work it off!"
"There is no second mortgage," she said, her voice dropping into a deadly whisper that was worse than screaming. "The bank turned us down in June. We're thirty days behind on the property taxes. The roof over bay three leaks every time the wind comes off the lake, and the compressor is running on three cylinders. There is no money, Leo. There has never been any money."
"Then what did you do?" Leo cried, grabbing her arm. "What did you tell him?"
Frankie looked down at his hand on her sleeve until he pulled it back as if the wool had burned him.
"I told him you were an idiot who owns forty percent of nothing," she said. "And I told him his ancestors were pigs."
Leo’s face went from purple to a translucent, sickly white. "You... you cursed Gabriel Costa? To his face?"
"I did."
"Oh, God. Oh, sweet Jesus. We're dead. He's going to send his boys down here with cans of kerosene. We're going to burn in this pit—"
"Shut up!" Frankie barked.
The command cracked like a pistol shot in the echoing concrete bay. Leo snapped his mouth shut, his chest heaving, his good eye wide with terror.
"The debt is cut in half," she said.
Leo blinked. "What?"
"One-fifty. Zero interest." She walked to the small office in the corner of the bay, flicked on the fluorescent light that buzzed like an angry wasp, and pulled out the legal pad where she kept the shop's accounts. "We have eighteen months. But you don't touch a wrench. You don't answer the phone. And if I see you within ten feet of a craps table, a bookie, or a deck of cards between now and next winter, I will call Gabriel Costa myself and tell him where to find you."
Leo stumbled after her, leaning against the glass partition of the office. A grotesque, wet smile began to form on his split lips. "Half? You got him to drop half? Frankie... how? Did you sleep with him? What did you—"
Frankie’s right hand moved before she even made the conscious decision to strike. Her open palm caught him across the good side of his face with the sound of a two-by-four slapping wet mud.
Leo staggered backward, his head hitting the steel door of the parts cabinet. He slumped against the metal, holding his cheek, staring at her in shock.
"Don't you ever," Frankie whispered, her teeth bare, "speak to me like that again. I didn't sleep with him. I sold my hands. I sold my time. Starting at six tomorrow morning, this garage is a Vanguard service terminal. I maintain their priority fleet. Every hour I log knocks five hundred dollars off your stupidity."
Leo looked at the floor. The relief in his face was sickening; he didn't care that his sister had just signed herself into indentured servitude to Detroit's most dangerous syndicate boss. He only cared that his skin was intact for another day.
"Vanguard fleet?" he muttered, wiping blood from his nose with his sleeve. "Frankie, those trucks... they run hot. Everybody on the docks knows Costa moves more than auto parts across the bridge. If the feds or the state troopers look sideways at this place—"
"Then you should have thought about the feds before you put your name on three hundred grand of mob paper," she snarled. "Now get out."
"Frankie—"
"Get out of my shop, Leo. Go to your apartment. Stay there. If I see your face around here while Costa's trucks are in the yard, I won't need Dante to take you out back. I'll do it myself with a twenty-four-inch tire iron."
Leo didn't argue. He scrambled toward the side door, pulled his jacket tight against the rain, and slipped into the darkness of Dragoon Street.
Frankie stood alone in the center of the garage.
The wind rattled the corrugated steel of the bay doors. High above, near the rafters, a small leak in the gutter dripped steadily into an empty five-gallon oil drum: ping... ping... ping.
She walked over to the photograph hanging beside the service desk.
Aldo Moretti stood beside a 1971 Dodge Challenger with the hood off, his arms crossed over a grease-stained apron, a crescent wrench tucked into his back pocket, smiling that broad, stubborn, Calabrian smile that never admitted defeat to any machine, any bank, or any man.
Frankie reached out and touched the glass with a thumb that still smelled of Gabriel Costa’s linen handkerchief.
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"I kept the doors open, Pa," she murmured to the cold glass. "I don't know how long I can keep them from burning down, but the sign still says Moretti."
She turned off the fluorescent lights, pulled a cot out from beneath the tire racks, and lay down in the dark with her boots on, listening to the rain beat against the iron roof until the clock on the wall crept toward five.
