Chapter 6 - Iron and Lace
The invitation arrived at Moretti Auto at two in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve.
It didn't come in the mail. It came in the passenger seat of an all-black Cadillac Escalade driven by Sal, who walked into the bay holding a long, flat box wrapped in white linen paper with a silver ribbon, looking like a hitman who had been forced to moonlight for an upscale florist.
"Boss said you're coming with him tonight," Sal said, setting the box on the edge of the workbench between a can of brake cleaner and a set of feeler gauges.
Frankie wiped her hands on her apron. "Tell your boss I have three rear-axle seals to replace on a Kenworth before eight tonight."
"Boss said the Kenworth can wait until Tuesday," Sal replied, his scarred face deadpan. "Boss said if you're not ready by eight, he’s going to come down here with six guys, drag you out by your coveralls, and make you sit at his table in your grease boots."
Frankie looked at the box. "What is this?"
"Read the card, lady," Sal grunted, turning on his heel and walking out into the gray afternoon. "I just drive the car."
Frankie pulled the silver ribbon. The linen paper parted with a soft, crisp sigh.
Inside was a dress.
It wasn't the kind of dress they sold at the Somerset Collection in Troy. It was heavy, midnight-blue silk, cut on the bias with a modest, square-cut neckline and long, fitted sleeves that ended in delicate points over the wrists. It had the clean, architectural lines of something designed in Milan in the late fifties—unapologetically feminine, but structured like a suit of armor. Beneath the silk lay a pair of black suede pumps with three-inch heels and a small velvet envelope containing a single index card written in Gabriel’s neat, heavy script:
The Detroit Port Authority Annual Gala. The DAC on Madison Street. Eight o’clock. You don't have to wear the shoes, but you're wearing the dress. We have business with Dominic Marcone.
Frankie stood alone in the quiet shop for a long time, looking down at the silk.
Her hands were rough. The calluses along her palms were thick as horn; her left thumb had a black blood-blister under the nail where an impact wrench had kicked back two days ago. She hadn't worn a dress since her father’s funeral five years ago, and even then, it had been a boxy polyester thing she’d bought off the rack at a department store forty minutes before the viewing.
She reached out and touched the silk.
It was cool. It felt like the surface of a polished chrome intake runner before the engine fired.
"Business," she murmured to the empty bay. "Always business with you, Costa."
At precisely seven-forty-five, Frankie stood in the small bathroom off the office, looking at herself in the cracked mirror above the sink.
She had spent forty-five minutes with pumice soap and a stiff nylon brush scrubbing the oil from her hands until the skin was raw and pink. She had washed her hair twice with rosemary shampoo she’d bought at the corner pharmacy, drying it until the dark curls fell around her bare shoulders in thick, shining waves.
The dress fit as if it had been tailored to her ribs. The silk clung to her waist, skimming her hips, the weight of the fabric pulling the hem down to two inches below her knees. The long sleeves covered the scars on her forearms, leaving only her throat and the clean, stubborn line of her jaw exposed to the light.
She didn't have perfume. She smelled of cold water, cedar soap, and the faint, permanent trace of motor oil that lived in her pores.
A horn tapped twice on Dragoon Street.
Frankie picked up her small leather clutch—inside was her driver’s license, eighty dollars in cash, and a six-inch hardened steel scribe she’d sharpened to a needle point on the bench grinder—and walked out into the snow.
The Detroit Athletic Club on Madison Street was a fortress of limestone and Gilded Age arrogance.
Through the tall, arched windows of the grand ballroom, the lights of Comerica Park were dark beneath a heavy blanket of fresh powder. Inside, three hundred people moved across the parquet floor like a school of well-fed sharks: city commissioners, federal judges, maritime logistics executives, and the handful of men who actually decided which ships unloaded at the Wayne County docks.
Gabriel Costa stood at the center of the mezzanine landing.
He wore a bespoke midnight-black tuxedo with a satin shawl collar, his white dress shirt pressed with military precision, his gold signet ring catching the light of the crystal chandeliers. He wasn't drinking. He held a glass of mineral water with a slice of lemon, listening to a city councilman talk about dredging permits with that polite, dead-eyed focus that meant he was already calculating the man’s replacement.
Then his eyes moved to the entrance.
Frankie was walking through the brass doors, checking her coat with the attendant.
Gabriel stopped listening to the councilman. The glass in his hand remained frozen three inches from his mouth.
She didn't walk like the women who usually attended the DAC galas. She didn't glide with that soft, pampered drift of someone who had spent her life on tennis courts and country club verandas. She walked with her weight centered, her chin up, her shoulders back, moving through the sea of tuxedos and diamond necklaces with the quiet, dangerous balance of an ironworker crossing an open beam eighty floors above the street.
Gabriel excused himself without looking at the councilman, walked down the wide marble staircase, and stopped at the bottom step as Frankie reached the landing.
He looked at her for three seconds—from the tips of the suede shoes she was clearly uncomfortable wearing, up the column of midnight-blue silk, to the fierce, dark eyes that challenged him before he could say a word.
"The shoes are too narrow," Frankie said, her voice dry.
Gabriel’s lips parted into that slow, devastating grin.
"You look," he whispered, stepping forward until the scent of him—bay rum and dry tobacco—enveloped her, "like you’re about to set fire to the building, Francesca."
"Don't give me ideas, Costa," she replied, though she felt the skin along her collarbone grow warm under his gaze. "Where is Marcone?"
Gabriel offered his left arm. The wool of his tuxedo was smooth under her fingers.
"By the terrace doors," Gabriel said, leading her onto the floor. "He brought his nephew from Cleveland. He thinks he’s signing a tripartite rail agreement with the Port Authority tonight."
May you like
"And what is he actually doing?"
"He’s going to find out," Gabriel murmured, leaning down so his lips almost brushed her ear, "that Moretti Auto is no longer on the market."
