Page 2 of Merciless Daddy

“This vehicle,” I said, tapping the number, “was destroyed twenty-six months ago. You are attempting to repossess a truck that has been a soup can longer than you’ve had that jacket.”

The foreman’s face did an interesting thing. Not surprise. Recalculation. He’d known. Or he’d been paid enough not to ask.

I handed the clipboard to Tonio, who photographed every page with the enthusiasm of a man at his daughter’s recital, and then I walked to the winch.

“Hey—” one of the crew started.

Pietro shifted his weight. The man stopped starting.

The cable was under tension. There is a way to release a loaded winch hook without losing fingers, and it is not complicated if your hands know work, and mine do, whatever the suit suggests. I braced the hook, tripped the release, and walked the cable back to their truck with the slack coiled over my arm. I laid it on their flatbed. Gently. The way you return something to a neighbor.

“Here is what happened this morning,” I said. “You were given forged documents and sent to steal from people you were not told enough about. That was done to you as much as to us. So.” I looked at each of them in turn, long enough that each of them found somewhere else to look. “You will get in your truck, and you will leave, and this will remain a bad morning instead of the worst one of your lives.”

“Sal.” Pietro’s voice, low, at my shoulder. “The one who put the old man down. Give me five minutes. He won’t be able to sign anything with either hand. For a while.”

“Tempting,” I said, and meant it, and let them see that I meant it. “No.”

“You’re getting soft.”

“I’m getting evidence.” I plucked the top sheets off the clipboard before handing the rest back to the foreman. “These I keep. Consider it the towing fee.”

They loaded up fast, fearful. The flatbed coughed out of the lot and turned north, and Tonio lowered his phone and exhaled.

“You know what I love about you, Sal? Other bosses shout. You just make everyone want to go home and call their mothers.”

“Efficiency.” I was reading the papers in my hand. The lien had been issued through a finance shell, and the shell’s registered agent was printed at the bottom in eight-point type, and the name sat there like a hair in the food.

Northbridge Freight.

I knew that name. All of us who’d been taking Enzo Valenti’s former empire apart knew that name. Enzo was gone, his companies supposedly gutted—and here was one of them, alive and forging court documents on our doorstep.

Dead men’s companies don’t file liens. Someone was wearing the corpse.

“Something?” Pietro asked, watching my face.

“Something.” I folded the pages into my coat, then went back and helped Marco Bellini to his feet myself, and let him keep the handkerchief. “Breakfast first. Then we go look at the wall.”

The office above Mezza Notte smelled of espresso and old paper. Since Tonio had opened the place, we’d taken up residence above. He ran the restaurant as a kind of hobby—few covers, simple menu. It was a good place to work—central, and there was the benefit of endless cannoli from his girlfriend’s bakery, next door.

I stared at the desk.

Shipping manifests. Incorporation filings from three countries. Photographs of men getting out of cars. A paper trail of my own records from Palermo, the irregularities I had been quietly collecting on my cousin Gianni since long before he murdered his father and made the collecting urgent.

I pinned the forged lien in the empty space I had been saving without knowing I was saving it. It fit. That was the sick beauty of the thing—everything fit.

Tonio came up the back stairs with a tray. Coffee, three cups, and a white box with FILOXENIA written on it, already translucent with grease at the corners.

“Cannoli,” he announced, “because if I’m going to look at this crap again, I refuse to do it on an empty stomach. I’ve said this before and I’ll die saying it: criminal conspiracies should begin after breakfast. It’s in the Bible.”

“It’s not in the Bible,” Pietro said. “That’s blasphemy.”

“It’s in the spirit of the Bible.” Tonio set the tray down and pointed a cannolo at me like a small pastry firearm. “Loaves. Fishes. Our Lord understood the importance of nutrition.”

Pietro took his coffee, ignored the box, and stood still. I could see him considering.

“We should answer it,” he said. “This morning wasn’t business. It was a message. You don’t reply to a message with a filing cabinet, Sal. Gianni owns things. Warehouses. Trucks. Things that burn.”

“Poetic,” Tonio said, mouth full. “Concise. I vote for the arson caucus.”