Chapter 8 - The Price of Loyalty
By January tenth, Moretti Auto had been transformed into an armed perimeter.
The broken window in bay two had been replaced not with standard glass, but with three-quarter-inch polycarbonate ballistic panels framed in welded angle iron. Two black Vanguard security vans were parked permanently across the street, their engines idling through the twenty-degree nights, while Dante’s men rotated shifts with heavy coats and thermal thermoses.
The debt ledger on Frankie’s desk had shrunk to an astonishing number:
$42,000.
She had rebuilt three heavy transmissions, swapped five steering assemblies, and fabricated a custom armored belly-pan for Gabriel’s personal transport that could withstand an anti-tank mine. Every hour was accounted for; every penny of Leo’s fraud was being ground into dust beneath her steel-toed boots.
At four in the afternoon, the side door opened.
It wasn't a Vanguard driver.
It was Leo.
He was wearing an old, threadbare winter coat with two missing buttons, his face pale, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He had lost fifteen pounds in three weeks; his cheeks were sunken, his dark eyes hollowed out with the greasy, twitching panic of a man who hadn't slept in an unbolted room since the night at the pool hall.
Frankie was at the hydraulic press, pressing a new bearing onto an axle shaft. The rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the pump was the only sound in the bay.
She didn't stop pumping until the gauge hit twelve tons.
"What do you want, Leo?" she asked, not looking at him.
Leo stood three feet from the threshold, his boots leaving wet, gray tracks on her freshly swept slab.
"Frankie," he croaked. "You have to help me. Just this once. Just fifty dollars for the bus ticket to St. Louis. My cousin on Mom's side said I could stay in his basement until things blow over."
Frankie released the valve on the press. The hydraulic ram retracted with a long, wheezing sigh of fluid.
She picked up the axle shaft, carried it to the workbench, and laid it down on the wood.
"Marcone’s people are looking for you, aren't they?" she said.
Leo flinched. He looked toward the bay doors as if he expected Dominic Marcone to step through the sheet metal.
"They said... they said I took their advance," Leo stammered, tears welling up in his eyes, pathetic and small. "They gave me ten grand in November to get the deed from you. I spent it, Frankie. I spent it at the track in Windsor. Now that Gabriel has the forty percent, Marcone says I owe him twenty grand with the vig, or he’s going to have his guys at the rail yard put me in an empty container bound for Mexico."
Frankie turned around. She wiped her hands on her apron, her face completely empty of emotion.
"You took ten thousand dollars from Dominic Marcone to steal my father's garage."
"I was going to pay it back!" he cried, his voice hitting that shrill, whining frequency she had heard her whole life. "I thought I’d hit the trifecta on the Thanksgiving races! If I hit, I was going to buy the forty percent back from you and we’d be clear! I did it for us, Frankie!"
"Don't you dare," she said, her voice dropping so low it felt like a cold draft along the floorboards, "use my name to justify your rot."
She walked to the desk, pulled her yellow legal pad from the drawer, and set it before him.
"Look at that number, Leo."
He looked down. "Forty-two thousand?"
"That’s what’s left," she said. "I have worked seventy hours a week for thirty days. I haven't slept more than four hours a night. My hands are cracked to the bone, and every time a car slows down on Dragoon Street, I have to reach for a breaker bar to make sure nobody throws fire through my father's roof."
She pointed a calloused finger at his chest.
"You took ten grand from Marcone. You took three hundred grand from Costa. And you walked in here asking for fifty dollars for a bus ticket so you can go ruin Mom’s family in Missouri."
"Frankie... please. I’m your brother."
"My brother died the night you told Vinnie Renzetti that I was Gabriel Costa’s whore," she said.
The door to the back office opened.
Gabriel stepped out. He was wearing an olive-drab tactical sweater over his dress shirt, his shoulder holster black against the wool, a thick manila folder in his left hand.
Leo backed up until his spine hit the brick wall, his knees shaking so violently his trousers fluttered against his shins.
"Mr. Costa... please... I didn't come for trouble, I was just leaving—"
Gabriel didn't look at Leo. He looked at Frankie.
"Marcone’s freight arrives at the rail siding behind the salt docks at midnight," Gabriel said, his voice flat, businesslike, completely ignoring the trembling man against the brick. "Two boxcars. Supposed to be automotive transmissions from the Cleveland plant. It’s not transmissions. It’s ninety cases of high-grade Mexican brown heroin, routed through the rail interchange in Toledo."
Frankie’s eyes narrowed. "Heroin?"
"Marcone doesn't use the trucks anymore," Gabriel said, setting the folder on the workbench. "The state police have his haulers flagged at the weigh stations. He uses the rail cars because he owns the yard master in Delray. That’s why he wanted this block, Francesca. Moretti Auto has the only private siding switch between the junction and the river."
He turned his head slowly, his hazel eyes locking onto Leo like two crosshairs settling on a target.
"And your brother," Gabriel said, "was supposed to leave the switch unlocked tonight so the Cleveland crew could shunt the boxcars onto the dead track behind your back wall."
Frankie turned on Leo, her jaw dropping in absolute, horrifying comprehension.
The property didn't just sit adjacent to the rail spur.
Aldo Moretti had purchased the old private rail right-of-way behind the garage in nineteen-seventy-six to unload scrap iron directly from the train cars. The manual track switch sat fifty feet behind bay three, hidden beneath forty years of blackberry brambles and rusted engine blocks.
Leo had promised Marcone the switch.
If the boxcars were shunted onto Moretti’s private line, the federal raid—when it came—would come down on Francesca Moretti’s roof. She would have been arrested as the title holder of the parcel, the garage would have been seized under federal civil asset forfeiture laws, and Marcone’s lawyers would have bought the entire property from the government auction for ten cents on the dollar while she sat in a federal detention center in Milan, Michigan.
Frankie walked toward her brother.
She didn't shout. She didn't cry.
She reached out, caught the front of his nylon jacket in her left hand, hauled him off the wall, and threw him into the metal chair beside the desk with a violence that made the casters screech against the concrete.
"Gabriel," Frankie said, not taking her eyes off Leo’s white, sweating face.
"Yes, Francesca?"
"What happens to the train tonight?"
Gabriel walked over, his broad frame standing beside hers, his hand resting on the butt of his automatic.
"Tonight," Gabriel said, his voice dropping into that dark, lethal rhythm, "Vanguard takes the siding. The state police take the boxcars. And Dominic Marcone finds out what happens when you try to use an Italian girl from Delray as your patsy."
May you like
He looked at Leo.
"And Mr. Moretti," Gabriel added, "is going to make the phone call that sets the trap."
