Chapter 5 - Dead Load
The ground floor of the Magazine Street warehouse had once been a weighing room where three-hundred-pound bales of upland cotton were graded by men with brass hooks and iron balances. The floor was heart pine, scarred by decades of steel-rimmed hand trucks and stained with ancient cottonseed oil that no detergent could lift.
Julian Delacroix sat in an iron armchair that Cormac usually reserved for customs inspectors who needed to be reminded of their mortgages.
Julian was sixty, with silver hair clipped like a military hedge, skin tanned to the texture of a luxury saddle, and a double-breasted linen suit that smelled faintly of expensive lavender water and expensive tobacco. Behind him stood two men in identical dark poplin suits, their hands crossed over their belt buckles, their eyes scanning the dark corners of the rafters where the old block-and-tackle gear hung motionless.
To Julian’s right sat Deputy Director Marcus Vance—a sweating, thick-necked bureaucrat whose silk tie was pinned with a small gold Rotary pin.
“Cormac,” Julian said, smiling with teeth that had cost more than Wren Calloway’s four-year engineering degree. “You keep this place dark. It’s like a crypt. A man could lose his watch in here and never find it until the next flood.”
Cormac walked down the central iron staircase with slow, unhurried steps. He didn't have a weapon in his hand. He didn't need one; Teague was already behind the shipping desk with a twelve-gauge Remington propped against the ledger rack, out of sight but within three inches of his right thumb.
“The river likes the dark, Julian,” Cormac said, reaching the bottom landing and coming to a halt six feet from Delacroix’s chair. “What do you want?”
“A girl,” Julian said, flicking an invisible speck of lint from his lapel. “One of our junior inspectors from the municipal office. Wren Calloway. She’s had an episode. A nervous condition. She took some confidential internal audit documents from our site office on Wednesday night. Broke a padlock. Stole a proprietary drive.”
“Did she?” Cormac’s voice was as flat as a sheet of cold-rolled steel.
“We have security footage,” Marcus Vance chimed in, his voice slightly too high, the sweat on his forehead catching the yellow glare of the low-hanging bulb. “She’s not licensed to remove those files, Mr. Vale. It’s an official city matter. Grand larceny. We have an arrest warrant signed by Judge LeBlanc.”
Cormac turned his gaze onto Vance. The bureaucrat shrank back half an inch into his collar.
“Judge LeBlanc hasn't signed a warrant after five o’clock without six fingers of rye in his belly since 1998,” Cormac said mildly. “Don't talk to me about law, Marcus. You smell like an asphalt kickback.”
Julian’s smile did not vanish, but it tightened at the corners, the skin around his eyes hardening into dry, lizard-like folds. “Let’s not be crude, Cormac. We’ve shared this river for fifteen years. You run the tugs; I pour the docks. We don't interfere with each other's mixes. The Calloway girl is an amateur. She doesn't understand that certain projects require flexibility in the specifications.”
“Flexibility,” Cormac repeated. “Is that what you call twenty-thousand yards of slag aggregate sitting in the salt water at Fourchon?”
Julian’s eyes narrowed. The pretense of an audit vanished from the room, replaced by the sudden, sharp tension of a cable snapping under fifty tons of static load.
“She’s here,” Julian said softly.
“She is under my roof,” Cormac said. “And her sister’s marker is burned.”
“Her sister owes four hundred and twelve thousand dollars to my financing trust,” Julian hissed, leaning forward, his manicured hands gripping the carved arms of the chair. “You don't burn my paper, Vale.”
“I just did,” Cormac said. “And if you send another three men to shoot at women in the alleys behind Magazine Street, I won’t just burn your paper, Julian. I’ll send the core samples from Pier Seven to the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the federal prosecutor in the Eastern District. Let’s see how many of your state senators answer your calls when the first crane topples into the channel.”
Silence fell over the weighing room. High above, in the roof vents, the river wind made an iron baffle clatter with a dry, rhythmic sound like a spade hitting clay.
Julian rose slowly. He was six inches shorter than Cormac, but he carried the arrogant weight of three generations of political graft. “You think you’re an empire, Cormac. You’re just a stevedore with an expensive tailor. This city was built on our concrete.”
“And it’s falling down because of it,” Cormac said.
Julian turned toward the door, his two bodyguards falling in beside him like hounds. At the threshold, he stopped and looked back over his shoulder.
May you like
“Tell the girl she shouldn’t have looked at the mix logs,” Julian said. “Concrete doesn't forget, Cormac. It just waits for the load to get heavy enough.”
***
