Chapter 7 - Sabotage on Fort Street
The conversation with Dominic Marcone had lasted less than four minutes, but it had left an oily taste in Frankie’s mouth that lingered long after Gabriel’s driver dropped her back at the garage at one in the morning.
Marcone was seventy, with skin like yellow parchment and eyes that had been dead since the nineteen-seventies. He had looked at Frankie’s dress, looked at Gabriel’s hand resting lightly on the small of her back, and smiled with his yellow teeth.
"Aldo’s daughter," Marcone had wheezed, his fingers rattling against his champagne glass. "Your father was a pig-headed peasant, Francesca. He died broke, and he left you an empty lot on a dead canal. You should have taken my two hundred grand. A girl like you shouldn't be wearing silk that belongs to a Costa."
Gabriel hadn't raised his voice. He had simply leaned across the small cocktail table, his eyes darkening to the color of wet asphalt, and said four words:
"The rail line's closed, Dominic."
Marcone’s yellow teeth had snapped shut. The old man had turned on his heel without another word, his two bodyguards falling in behind him like shadows disappearing into a crypt.
Now, at three in the morning, the silence inside Moretti Auto was different.
Frankie had stripped off the blue silk gown, hanging it carefully inside the metal wardrobe in her office, and pulled on her gray thermal shirt, her stained Carhartts, and her heavy boots. She couldn't sleep. The adrenaline from the gala was still buzzing in her forearms like an electric current.
She sat at the workbench, rebuilding the carburetor from Mr. Henderson’s Dodge Ram, her fingers moving through the tiny brass jets and needle valves with mechanical, rhythmic precision.
Then the smell hit her.
It wasn't motor oil. It wasn't the sweet, sharp scent of carb cleaner.
It was gasoline. Fresh, unburned, eighty-seven octane regular, mixed with the pungent reek of raw kerosene.
Frankie froze. The small brass screwdriver stayed suspended in her fingers.
Through the crack between the bottom of the roll-up door and the concrete apron, a thin, dark liquid was pooling across the floor, creeping toward the pilot light of the natural-gas space heater mounted to the south wall.
A shadow crossed the frosted glass.
Then the glass shattered.
A heavy beer bottle wrapped in a burning rag crashed through the upper pane of bay two, landing with a violent WHOOSH on the wooden workbench three feet from where she stood.
Flames, orange and greasy with soot, erupted across the paper shop towels, licking toward the five-gallon solvent tank beneath the parts washer.
Frankie didn't scream. Her training—the instinct hammered into her by twenty years of working around open fuel lines and electrical arcs—took over before her brain could register fear.
She lunged to her right, snatched the heavy ten-pound dry-chemical fire extinguisher from its wall bracket, pulled the safety pin with a violent jerk of her thumb, and squeezed the lever.
A roaring cloud of white monoammonium phosphate smothered the workbench, choking the flames in a blinding, powdery fog that filled her eyes and throat with sulfur.
Outside, the screech of tires sounded on Dragoon Street.
A second bottle hit the corrugated steel of the main door, exploding in a sheet of fire across the exterior apron.
Frankie dropped the empty extinguisher, grabbed her eighteen-inch steel breaker bar from the rolling cart, and kicked the side access door open into the freezing night.
Two men in dark hoodies were standing near the rear bumper of a rusted Chevy Impala, holding three more glass bottles with rags stuffed into their necks. One of them had a disposable lighter clicking frantically in his gloved fingers.
"Hey!" Frankie roared.
The man with the lighter looked up, startled by the grease-stained banshee charging out of the smoke with eighteen inches of chrome-vanadium steel raised above her head.
He dropped the bottle. The glass shattered on the ice, but the wick didn't catch.
"Get her!" the second one yelled, reaching into his pocket.
Frankie didn't give him the chance to clear the leather. She closed the six feet of distance with the explosive speed of an athlete who spent her days wrestling six-hundred-pound engine blocks. She swung the breaker bar with a flat, horizontal snap of her wrists, catching the first man across the side of his left knee.
The sound was a sickening, hollow CRACK like a baseball bat hitting an oak tree.
The man screamed, his leg buckling inward at an unnatural angle, his body collapsing into the slush with a wet thud.
The second man pulled a snub-nosed revolver from his coat, his eyes wide with panic. "Back off, you crazy bitch—"
The sharp, high-velocity crack of a rifle shot echoed down Dragoon Street.
The driver’s side window of the Impala exploded into a thousand glittering pebbles of safety glass.
The man with the gun flinched, his head snapping toward the corner of the brick warehouse across the street.
Before he could bring his weapon up, the black Escalade rounded the intersection at fifty miles an hour, its tires throwing sheets of gray slush into the air as it jumped the curb, slamming its reinforced steel bumper into the front quarter-panel of the Impala with the force of an artillery shell.
The metal groaned, steel tearing like paper as the Chevy was shoved six feet sideways into the chain-link fence.
Gabriel Costa stepped out of the Escalade before the vehicle had even come to a complete stop.
He wasn't wearing his tuxedo. He wore his heavy shearling coat, but his right hand held a matte-black automatic with an extended magazine, his face set in an expression of pure, unadulterated annihilation.
Behind him, Dante leaped from the passenger side, carrying a pump shotgun, his eyes sweeping the rooftops before pinning the man with the revolver against the dented door of the Chevy.
"Drop it," Dante barked.
The man dropped the gun. It fell into the snow with a dull plop.
Gabriel didn't look at the two men on the ground. He didn't look at the smoke pouring from the broken window of bay two.
He walked straight toward Frankie.
He stopped two inches away, his breathing harsh, his eyes scanning her from her face down to her boots, checking for blood, checking for burns, checking for the holes that bullets leave in flesh.
"Are you hit?" he demanded, his voice shaking with a fury so violent his fingers were white around the grip of the pistol.
"I'm fine," Frankie panted, her breaker bar still held at the ready, her face covered in white chemical powder and black soot. "The bench caught, but I put it out before it reached the solvent tank."
Gabriel reached out, his hand catching her jaw, his fingers pressing so hard into her bone she could feel the cold metal of his signet ring.
"I told you," Gabriel whispered, his voice dropping into that dark, terrifying gravel, "that this property was under Vanguard protection."
"They weren't Vanguard men, Costa," she said, looking past his shoulder at the man clutching his shattered knee on the asphalt. "That’s Marcone’s crew from the river docks. I know the car. It belongs to Jimmy 'The Weasel' Spada."
Gabriel turned his head slowly toward the man on the ground.
"Dante," Gabriel said.
"Yeah, boss?"
"Put them in the back of the Escalade. Take them down to the salt silos on the river. Tell Sal to bring the blowtorch and the heavy chains."
"No," Frankie said.
Gabriel froze. He turned his head back, his hazel eyes narrowing until they looked like twin rifle bores.
"What did you say?"
"I said no," Frankie repeated, stepping forward until her chest hit the heavy wool of his shearling coat. "You don't do this behind my shop. You don't bring your mob executions to my father's curb."
"They tried to burn you alive, Francesca," Gabriel growled, his face inches from hers. "They tried to turn this garage into a cinder while you were inside it."
"And I broke his knee with a breaker bar!" she shouted back, her dark eyes blazing with an ancient, stubborn fire that refused to yield an inch of ground. "This is my shop! My street! You want to handle Marcone? You handle him on the river. You handle him where his freighters dock. But you don't turn my father’s slab into a slaughterhouse. You give them to the police."
Gabriel stared at her.
For five seconds, the only sound was the hiss of the snow hitting the hot radiator of the Escalade and the groaning of the man with the broken leg in the slush.
Dante stood by the truck, holding his shotgun, looking at his boss with an expression of complete, bewildered disbelief. No one spoke to Gabriel Costa like that. No one told him where he could kill, when he could kill, or who he could hand over to the authorities.
Then, Gabriel let out a long, ragged exhalation through his teeth.
The tension in his shoulders didn't disappear, but it shifted, folding inward into something cold, surgical, and permanent.
"Sal," Gabriel called out without looking back.
"Boss?"
"Call the precinct captain at the Third District. Tell him we have two arsonists caught in the act on Dragoon Street. Tell him if his detectives aren't here in eight minutes, I'll have their pension files delivered to the federal prosecutor’s office by noon."
He turned back to Frankie.
He reached up with his left hand, his thumb catching a smear of white chemical powder beneath her left eye, wiping it away with a touch that was astonishingly, impossibly gentle.
"You're an insane woman, Francesca Moretti," he whispered.
"I'm a mechanic from Delray, Costa," she said, her breathing finally beginning to slow against the cold air. "We don't burn easily."
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Gabriel’s lips curved into that slow, familiar grin, but his eyes were dark with an emotion she had never seen in a man of his blood before.
"No," Gabriel said softly. "You don't. Dante, get the plywood from the truck. We have a window to board up before the snow gets into the bays."
