Savage Daddy (Chicago Dons #5)

Chapter 1

Tonio

The dog didn’t want to come, and boy did he let me know it.

Olimpo planted himself on the sidewalk two doors down from the corner, eighty pounds of wet wire and judgment, and gave me a look that said “Sorry Bub, it ain’t happening.”

I crouched and scratched the rough fur under his jaw.

“We’re working,” I told him. “You want cannoli for the wedding, somebody has to taste it first. You think Signora Rosa does her own scouting? No. She has me.” He grumbled.

He did not move. I waited him out, because that is the only way you ever win anything from a spinone, and after a while he heaved himself up like an injured man getting out of bed and we went on.

Five in the morning. The street was the color of old steel. My breath came out white and the dog’s came out whiter, and the only sound was our feet and the far-off complaint of a delivery truck a few blocks over. I had a coffee in one hand gone cold and the leash in the other.

It used to be Greek, this stretch of the town—so Dante said.

You could still smell what it had been—under the cold, under the diesel, something like oregano and bread.

A church two corners down with the candles going—incense from orthodoxy.

But the neighborhood was thinning. You could see where.

Three storefronts on the south side had new signage that all came from the same sign shop, the same font, the same flat corporate nothing, and behind the glass they were empty in that way that meant the owners didn’t want it open, only owned.

A dry cleaner with the steam pressers cold.

A shoe repair with the chairs stacked. A grocery still running but with a man behind the register I’d watched for three weeks now, and every week he had a little less in his shoulders, like somebody was letting the air out of him a cup at a time.

I knew the game plan. We all knew it—my people.

You buy the tired ones first because the tired ones are cheap and grateful to be done.

You lean on the stubborn ones in the middle until they get tired too.

And you keep going, store by store, until you’ve got a clean run of buildings from one end of the block to the other, contiguous, quiet, yours—and then you can move whatever you want through them and clean whatever you want inside them and nobody on the street has any neighbors left to talk to about it.

It was good work. That was the thing nobody liked to say out loud.

Patient, ugly, effective work. Somebody with a long view was eating this block one mouthful at a time, and I had a fairly unpleasant idea whose mouth it was, and that idea was the actual reason I was out here freezing my balls off at five in the morning pretending to care about pastry.

But—and here is where I’ll be honest—that was not the only reason.

There was a light.

Mid-block, north side, the one storefront on the whole street that glowed.

The ovens were going. You could see it through the steamed front window—gold, soft, alive—heat throwing up against the cold glass and a thin gilt haze of flour catching what little there was of it.

The sign over the door said FILOXENIA in worn green paint, and the place was awake, had been awake since three probably, while every other building on this street sat dark and cowed and for sale.

The holdout.

I’d clocked it a while ago. You couldn’t not.

A whole street getting quietly strangled, and there in the middle of it one stubborn bright window like somebody had refused to get the memo.

I’d told Sal it was a good place to watch the block from.

That was true. I’d told myself it was the cannoli. That was—let’s say partly true.

What was true and what I wasn’t saying to anyone was that I’d been here a lot more than the job needed. Mornings. Just mornings. I’d buy too much bread and over-tip and stand around like an idiot and watch her run the place.

Her. The baker. Flour to the elbows and hair coming down out of whatever she’d scraped it into, and a mouth on her that could take the skin off you, and forearms like she hauled sacks of grain for sport, which—I’d worked out—she basically did.

She ran the whole thing alone. I’d never once seen anyone help her.

In she’d go in the dark and out the bread would come, every single day, like the ovens were a debt she paid the world before it was even awake to collect.

I stood across the street with the dog and watched the light. Forte come un bue, I thought. Strong as an ox. How does she do it. Every day, alone. You’d have to be made of something. You’d have to want it bad.

Olimpo leaned his enormous head against my leg and sighed the sigh of the deeply put-upon.

“Yeah,” I said. “I hear you. I feel it too.”

There was a treat in my pocket. There’s always a treat in my pocket; I’m not a savage.

And for half a second I thought about it—walking across, ordering the cannoli for real, slipping the dog a koulouraki off the counter so she’d laugh at him, at the great drooling fool, at the way he’d put his head in her lap like he owned her.

She’d laugh. I knew she’d laugh, because I’d made her laugh exactly twice in three months and both times I’d thought about it for a week after.

I didn’t go.

Too early. Too eager. You walk in at five with a dog and a face full of feelings and you’ve shown your whole hand before the first card’s down. I knew better. I was the one who taught other people better. Don’t come on too strong, Tonio. Let it be light. Keep them wanting the next thing.

I drank my cold coffee and looked at the warm window a moment longer than I needed to. Then I tugged the leash, and the dog groaned, and we turned away from the only lit thing on the street to go do the rest of it.

So much work today, I thought. So much.

In the six months I’d been in this city, I had learned a lot. What the locals appreciated, what the men liked to talk about. The particular, earthy tone you took to make people speak. I’d slotted into the Caruso operation well, and I had even started to build up a network of my own.

The man who ran the bar on the next block over owed me, and the beautiful thing about a man who owes you is that he’s always glad to see you, right up until he remembers why.

I knocked on the glass while he was still flipping chairs down off the tables, and his whole face did the thing—up, then a flicker, then up again with effort. He came around and threw the bolt and let in me and the cold and the dog, in that order of enthusiasm.

“It’s five-thirty in the morning,” he said.

“It’s a beautiful day,” I said, “and I brought company.” Olimpo walked past him like he held the lease and went straight to the warm spot by the radiator, turned around twice, and lay down across the only clear path to the back room.

The man looked at the lump of dog blocking his floor and decided, wisely, to let it go.

He had a good face, this guy. Tired, broken-veined, the face of a man who’d been pouring other people’s drinks since before I was born and had a wife who wanted him home and a knee that didn’t like the early shift.

I liked him. That was the whole trick, if you want to know it, the one nobody can teach you—I actually liked him.

You can’t fake the thing that makes people talk.

You can only have it or not, and I had it, and God help me it was the most useful thing.

“Coffee,” I said, “and I’ll fix that other matter for you, the one with the slips.”

His shoulders came down an inch. “You’re serious.”

“I’m a generous man on a cold morning.” I slid onto a stool.

“The number you couldn’t cover from the weekend—forget it.

Gone. I’ll square it upstairs, it never happened.

” I watched him not quite believe it, then believe it, then get embarrassed at how much it meant, which is the exact face I’d come to see. “On one condition.”

“Here it is,” he said, but he was smiling now, pouring the coffee, easy.

“You talk to me while I drink this. That’s the whole condition. I’m lonely and you’re handsome.”

He laughed—a real one, surprised out of him—and that was the door open. From there it was nothing. From there it was just a man and a man and a dog and the smell of bleach and last night’s beer, two guys shooting the breeze before the world woke up.

I let it wander. That’s the part the impatient ones never learn.

You don’t go at the thing you want; you go all the way around it and let the thing you want come to you.

We talked about his knee. We talked about the Bears, who are, according to him, an ongoing tragedy.

We talked about his daughter’s husband, who he didn’t care for, and I agreed the son-in-law sounded like a stronzo, and he liked that, liked having an Italian agree with him about something, and somewhere in there I said, easy as breathing, that the street looked rough lately, all those shutters, and wasn’t it a shame.

“Tell me about it,” he said. And then he told me about it.

He told me about the two men in the good coats who’d come around in the fall, polite, very polite, with an offer on his lease that was insulting and a follow-up that wasn’t an offer anymore.

He told me about the dry cleaner, who’d held out until somebody put a brick through the back, and the grocer, who was holding out still but wouldn’t be by spring, you could see it on him.

He told me they all came with the same paper.

Same lawyer. Some company with a nothing name, sounded like a furniture catalogue, and the checks—here, this is the part, this is the part I’d walked half a mile in the cold for, and I didn’t lean in, I didn’t even slow down, I reached down and scratched the dog’s ear instead—the checks all cleared through the same outfit.

A logistics company. Trucks and a yard down by the freight line.

He knew because his nephew drove for them a while and didn’t like what got loaded.