Chapter 16
LUCA
“When the council comes together next month, they will bring this up,” Victor warns as we cross the street from my car to the crime scene.
There’s another incident that requires my attention, because whoever is plotting my downfall is orchestrating something increasingly complex. The truck sits idly on the side of the road while patrol cops take notes to pass along at the station.
The driver is dead and slumped over the wheel.
Riddled with bullets.
Blood splashed all over the cab.
“As they should,” I tell Victor. “It points to a perceived weakness of mine, doesn’t it? My inability to keep my business together. My lack of suitability for that seat at the head of the table. It’s what the Camorra is all about.”
“They’re doing this on purpose,” he says. We reach the truck, and one of the two patrol officers, an Officer Dempsey, turns around to greet us. “Morning.”
“Victor,” Dempsey replies with a casual nod.
He’s one of ours, on Victor’s payroll, therefore, his loyalty is to the Petrucci family.
We have a few of them planted in the Chicago PD for obvious reasons.
Thankfully, Dempsey got to the scene first when the call came through from dispatch, which gives us a few minutes before the detectives come in to assess the scene for law enforcement.
“What are we looking at?” I ask him.
“As you can see, this is a pretty isolated part of Canaryville,” Dempsey says. “Mostly abandoned buildings and factories on this side. Was your driver supposed to be coming through here?”
Victor nods once. “It’s part of his usual route, yes.”
“It means someone either knows your patterns from following your people around, or you’ve got a mole in your organization,” Dempsey concludes with a stern frown.
I need a moment to think this through. The back of the truck is wide open, the doors hang from their hinges, making an occasional squeal as a gust of wind rushes through. It’s nearly empty. They left a few cardboard boxes behind, but the product is gone.
“Staged robbery?” Victor asks Dempsey.
“Looks like it,” Officer Doyle chimes in, as he walks over and turns the body cam off. “But the driver… It’s overkill, if you ask me.”
I follow his gaze to the front seat of the truck.
It looks gruesome enough from far away that I don’t want to get any closer.
I’ve seen worse. In fact, I’ve seen a lot worse in my line of business.
It doesn’t mean I’ve come to accept or enjoy the view in any way.
On the contrary, all this violence makes my stomach churn, making Valentina’s idea of a cleaner future sound less crazy than it used to, especially if I intend to raise Michael as my own.
“Any suspects?” I ask Doyle.
He scratches the back of his head and heaves a tired, heavy sigh. “Honestly, I don’t know. Are you having any issues with some of the newer up-and-comers?”
“Like whom?”
“Maybe the Dominican players?” Doyle asks.
Dempsey shakes his head. “The Dominicans prefer knives and machetes. And they never venture out to these parts. They know better than to risk crossing streams with the Irish.”
“Granted, we’ve got our deals in place with the Irish,” Victor mutters, “which is why we’re able to go through Canaryville without raising eyebrows.”
“We were able,” I correct him. “Clearly, that’s not the case anymore.”
The street is deserted. This attack was planned to be as discreet as possible by the looks of it.
“What’s the estimated loss?” I ask Victor in a low voice.
“About $2.4 million in street value,” he mutters.
It could be worse, but it’s not chump change either. I curse under my breath.
Dempsey watches us with curiosity. “We’re dusting for fingerprints and all that jazz. Doyle’s gonna go over any CCTV footage in a three-mile radius. Maybe we can connect the movements, or maybe we’ll at least see if anybody was following the truck.”
“Some canvassing might yield something, as well,” I suggest. “Most of these buildings may look abandoned, but some people still live in them.”
“Yeah, homeless guys mostly. They don’t want to deal with us, though. There could be dealers in the area, too, but we’ll have the same issue. The badge and the denizens of Canaryville’s darker streets don’t really mix.”
I check my watch. “Considering that I still have an hour before I’m due for a meeting, what do you say we hit the streets, Victor? Maybe they’ll talk to us.”
“Just like old times, eh?” Victor replies with a sad smile.
Old times. When I was barely twenty years old and eager to prove myself, my father would send me out in the streets with Victor and the rest of the Petrucci grunts to secure transports, chase down debtors, put the fear of God in our rivals, and generally stir things up.
It was raw, and it was violent, but it made me feel alive and useful.
“It’s where we all started,” I say, then give Dempsey and Doyle a polite nod. “Thank you, Officers. We’ll let you know if we find anything.”
Dempsey chuckles dryly. “Yeah, right. Just stay clear of the detectives.”
“We’ll be out before they get there,” Victor assures him. “Please, give your wife, Lindsay, my best regards. I hope your daughter is settling in nicely at that academy.”
Dempsey replies with a slight nod and a tight smile.
It’s the game crooked cops have to play while working for us.
They get financial perks and favors that open doors that would otherwise be closed to them.
In return, they keep us apprised of what’s going on and give us a heads-up whenever law enforcement tries to stick their noses into one of our businesses in the city.
It’s a simple but efficient deal.
We leave the patrol officers to do the rest of their jobs. Victor and I walk along the sidewalk, heading south, carefully checking the buildings along the way.
“Do you think we’ll find anyone?” he asks me in a low voice.
“The streets have eyes. We just need to pay attention,” I say, my gaze wandering over to a residential building wedged between two abandoned stores—one is a butcher shop and the other is a once-thriving bodega.
Some of the old signs are left in the grimy windows, but the front doors have long since been boarded up with plywood.
“Look up,” I tell Victor.
We both see him, staring at us from the first-floor window.
One of the street’s unknown residents has a great view of the crime scene from where he’s standing.
Victor stays by the building’s front door while I go in.
There’s no intercom. No lock either. Anybody could just waltz right in if they wanted.
The hallway is damp and dark, and my senses perk up. My ears twitch, registering every sound: the old pipes groaning in the walls, the rats skitter along the hall, and above me the rushed footsteps, accompanied by the creaking of an old floor.
“Gotcha,” I whisper and dash up the stairs.
He’s making a run for it, looking for a place to hide, but I catch him before he can disappear at the other end of the first-floor hallway, where there’s a fire escape. It leads down a set of exterior stairs. But I block his way, standing tall and dark and menacing.
He jumps back. He’s a kid, a sixteen-year-old boy, with a frightened face and big brown eyes.
He smells sour. I doubt he’s had a shower in a while.
The whole place stinks. The city must’ve cut off the building’s water supply a long time ago, but it still beats sleeping in the streets in the cold night air.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I tell the boy. “I just want to know what you saw.”
“You a cop?” he asks.
He’s got curly brown hair that looks dusty. Dirt is smudged across his slender face. I don’t see any traces of substance abuse at a glance, so I assume he’s merely homeless, perhaps a runaway. I shake my head slowly.
“Not a cop, kiddo, I swear. Here, allow me,” I say and reach for my jacket.
He takes a step back, ready to bolt in the opposite direction—though I’m not sure where he’s hoping it will take him. I’m blocking the main staircase and the way to the fire escape, too.
“Calm down,” I add and take out my wallet.
“I assume you wouldn’t mind spending a couple of nights at a motel or something, right?
Maybe get some warm food in your stomach?
Take a hot shower? Nab some snacks and a chocolate bar from the motel’s vending machine?
I know they’ve got some good stuff in there. ”
I’m just making conversation, using my most soothing voice to keep him anchored, to get him to relax long enough for me to give him a hundred dollars, just to establish the beginning of what I hope will be a fruitful conversation.
“No, I wouldn’t,” the boy says and snatches the hundred-dollar bill from my hand. “What do you wanna know?”
“Were you here earlier?” I ask.
He nods once. “You wanna know about the truck?”
“Yes. What did you see?”
“I put my head down the minute those guns came out,” he says.
“Tell me everything. Everything you saw, everything you heard.”
He looks around, increasingly nervous. “The cops are gonna come around asking questions and shit.”
“Not right now, they won’t. I got a head start.”
“Why?”
“I tend to get what I want. And right now, I want information,” I reply, noticing his intention to milk this situation for as much as he can.
Though I can’t blame him. Living in the streets is rough; it requires the ability to survive, so I give him another hundred-dollar bill.
“Let’s double that motel comfort, shall we? ”
He takes it and nods. “I was waking up. It was a cold night, especially close to sunrise. I couldn’t sleep anymore because of it.”
“So, early morning. At the break of dawn.”
“More or less, yeah. I heard the truck rolling. I was in my sleeping bag, right under the window facing the street. Gotta always have an eye out on the street, just in case,” the boy says.
“Smart.”
“Yeah. So I heard the truck rolling, right? I looked up, I saw the sky ain’t light yet, so definitely break of dawn. I was shivering, so I was thinking of starting a small fire on the floor, just to get me a little bit warm.”
I look around. “I assume the fire alarm system doesn’t work anymore.”
“Pretty sure they’re gonna tear this whole block down by the end of the year. Some rich Irish prick from Dublin is buying up the lots. Whatever. I heard the truck hitting the brakes real hard, real sudden.”
“Where?”
The boy glances back at the apartment he just came out of. “Over there, on that side. So, I got up and saw it. The truck. Right where you guys found it.”
“What happened?”
“Some guys came out of the woodwork. Looked like they were waiting for it. They had someone posted in the middle of the road. I think he’s the one who jumped out first and stopped the truck. Then the others joined him.”
My mind is already picking up a pattern, but I need more information. “How many men?”
“Uh, four, I think.”
“Including the first guy?”
“No. Five in total, including the first guy,” the boy says. “It was quick, I can tell you that much. I saw the guns, and that’s when I hid. The window’s half broken, though, so I could still hear them pretty well. The gunshots.
Pop-pop-pop-pop.
I mean, I think they emptied their clips in the driver. The guy didn’t stand a chance. He cried out around the first pop, but then nothing.”
My blood runs cold. The driver was one of ours. A hard worker, likely with a wife and children to go home to every night. Someone’s going to have to tell them he isn’t coming home tonight.
“Then they went for the truck. Another truck came in. I heard it. But I was too afraid to look. I was worried they’d see me,” the boy says.
“Alright. What did you hear?”
“Not much. They emptied the truck they hit and loaded the other one. Kept saying to hurry up, hurry up. Load it up.” The boy pauses, giving me a wide-eyed look. “I heard someone say Lanny. One of them was called Lanny.”
“Lanny,” I mutter.
“Does that mean anything to you?” the boy asks.
I shake my head slowly. “No. But it’s useful information. Did you get a look at their faces before you ducked?”
“Nah. they sounded white, though,” he says. “You live in the streets long enough, and something like that goes down, you learn to pay attention, to listen, to know who to avoid.”
“Thank you,” I tell the boy and give him another hundred. “Anything else?”
He thinks about it for a long second, by now eager to help, considering the remuneration he already received for what little he could provide. “Their truck didn’t go back this way. It didn’t get louder. It went south.”
“Okay, that’s good to know.”
I nod, a gesture of gratitude, and make my way back down the stairs while he scuttles back to the empty apartment, likely content that he doesn’t have to get out of there as fast as he thought.
Once I meet with Victor downstairs again, I give him something to work with.
“Five men. No tail. They knew the truck was coming through here,” I say as we walk farther down the road, hoping to find another eyewitness, another piece of the puzzle. “They killed our driver straight away. No warning, no order. Straight up murder.”
“Targeted,” Victor replies.
“One of them was named Lanny. It’s all I could get from the homeless kid. We might need more,” I say. “But in the meantime, maybe Lanny will pop up somewhere for the right price. Put a reward out.”
Victor’s gaze is troubled. “Are you sure about this? The people behind it will likely hear about it, too.”
“There’s a Camorra council happening at the worst possible time for us.
The last thing I need is to give anyone the impression that I’m not on top of this,” I reply.
“They need to know I can track anybody down, if that’s what it takes.
Make the reward a generous one. If it doesn’t get us Lanny directly, it might at least smoke him out. ”
Someone is gunning for my empire, my woman, and possibly my nephew. There are few of us left in a world that loves to eat its young, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let any of the ones I love go quietly into that dark and cold night.
I may not deserve it, yet this is my closest chance at a happy ending. So, I will rain fire and blood on anybody who gets in my way. Valentina is mine. The Petrucci syndicate is mine. And Michael deserves a brighter future.