39. Kane
KANE
I come out of the shower with a towel around my waist.
Delilah’s gone.
Her clothes are still in the pile where she left them. My shirt is gone off the floor. I hear her voice downstairs. Then the front door.
I get dressed fast. Trousers and a sweater, no socks, shoving my feet into a pair of loafers. A feeling of wrongness is worming its way through me.
I race down the stairs and almost bowl over Niko, who’s standing at the bottom with a pale, stricken expression.
“She’s gone,” he says. “Stepan took her. She wanted to go to the bakery.”
“Why?”
“Her baker called. Their supplier dropped them. The whole account, with no warning and no reason given.”
I stop. Suppliers don’t fire their best-paying customers on a Friday night in February. Not without a phone call from somebody with a reason to make one.
“There’s more,” Niko says.
I glare at him. “Then spit it the fuck out.”
“She was in there with the map.” He takes a pull off the beer and then sets it down on the hall table. “She had enough time to find her lot.”
Finally, I stop moving.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
This is all fucking wrong.
“What did she say?”
“She asked what it was. I told her it was your property work. She said, That’s my street. I said, It’s a lot of streets. But she’s not stupid, man. She asked why it’s the only one that isn’t colored in.” He shrugs helplessly. “I told her to ask you.”
“That was your grand intervention? What the fuck do I pay you for?”
“What was I supposed to do, Kane? Lie to her face while she’s standing there in your shirt?” He scowls at me. “I told you, dude! Two months ago, I told you to tell her before somebody else does. Well, too late for that now.”
There’s no point in arguing with him. He was right then and he’s right now, but it doesn’t do anybody a damn bit of good.
There’s no point in hoping this all blows over, either. Lilah isn’t stupid or passive. She ruined her ex-husband’s life with dogged persistence, so she’s certain to keep digging until she finds a real answer, too.
“Get Yuri,” I say. “Have him meet me in Sunset Park.”
“What about Delilah?”
“I’m going to her myself.”
I take the Escalade. Stepan is already gone with her, but that’s fine, because I don’t want a driver tonight. I want the wheel in my hands so I have something to do with them.
The bakery lights are on, even though it’s midnight. The back door is propped with a milk crate. Josef stands in the alley with his hands in his coat. He straightens when he sees me.
“She came in fast, sir,” he explains. “Didn’t say a word to me. Everything alright?”
“Get back to your post and keep your eyes peeled,” I bark as I stride past him. “If anything strange happens, come right to me.”
Inside, Priya sits on a stool with her phone cradled in both hands and her eyes red. Delilah has a legal pad on the steel table and her laptop open beside it.
She’s changed into work clothes and tied her hair up. She looks up at me with a squint-eyed glare. “Do you know anything about this?” she demands.
“No.”
She nods once, then turns back to scribbling notes on her legal pad. That’s one thin silver lining of this catastrophe: She doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to question me about the map yet.
But when she finds out both topics are my fault, the story will change.
That’s for fucking sure.
“Okay,” she says aloud, sort of to me, sort of to Priya, but mostly to herself. “So. Hearth & Harvest bails without a reason, screws us over, and tells us not to call back.”
“Should we egg their offices?” Priya asks in a numb voice.
Delilah laughs miserably. “With what eggs? They’re the ones who sold us eggs, remember?”
“Oh. Yeah. Duh.” Her head slumps lower.
“Chin up, Pri. Here’s what we’re going to do,” Delilah announces.
“We’re going to split the order up and plug the gaps for the time being.
Bay Mill in Maspeth can do the flour and sugar, then we beg Corrado’s out on Long Island to rush-ship us butter, dairy, and chocolate.
The expedited fee is gonna suck, but we don’t have much of a choice. ”
“We could raise prices,” Priya suggests.
Delilah shakes her head. “Not a chance. I’m not screwing over our customers just because we got screwed over.”
“What do you need from me?” I interrupt.
She looks up properly. Whatever she was braced for, it wasn’t that. “That’s it? You’re not just seizing the wheel? No ‘let me handle it’?”
“You are handling it,” I remind her. “I’m merely asking how I can assist.”
She exhales noisily. “Security,” she says at last. “If somebody leaned on my supplier, then that somebody scares me a little bit. I don’t want my staff walking out to their cars alone.”
I nod. “Yuri’s on his way. He’ll guard the alley himself tonight and put a man on it after.”
“Not out front, though. Not standing over customers.”
“I’ll let him know.”
I recede into the background and let Delilah work. At two in the morning, she sends Priya home in a cab she pays for. By two-thirty, she has both orders confirmed by email and the delivery windows in writing.
She’s handling this, just like I knew she could.
I’m the one letting things spiral out of control.
Osip Vetrov.
That’s the name running through my head as I sit in the corner of the bakery.
A gray-haired, steely-eyed bastard. Old-school in every sense of the word.
He came over to the States in 1991 with nothing and he has spent thirty-five years turning “nothing” into one chop shop, then ten more, then enough laundered cash to fill a bank, routed through repair invoices and scrap metal and a title insurance outfit in Sheepshead Bay.
He is not a killer by preference. More of a death-by-paperwork man. He buys judges, politicians, zoning committees—all the insidious little levers that make society tick.
He has wanted the waterfront for a decade and change. But he was always a step behind me. He never thought to do things my way—which is to say, in secret, through holding companies and ghost fronts. He just tried walking in the front door.
It seems he’s learned his lesson.
Now, he’s turned to playing dirty.
Because these latest things can only lead to one conclusion: Osip has finally worked out that he doesn’t need to buy the entire block to hurt me.
He just needs to get one key piece of it.
I’ll gut him myself before I let that happen.
I keep an eye on things as the week progresses.
On Monday, both deliveries arrive. Bay Mill at seven, Corrado’s at ten past nine. Delilah stands in the alley in her apron with a clipboard and counts every pallet before she signs.
By noon, the case is full and the ovens are running. Delilah is happy, and I’m almost ready to start breathing easy again.
That fragile peace lasts until Tuesday morning.
The health inspector comes in without warning. This is a new hire, one nobody in the building has ever seen before. Certainly not one I’ve bribed in the past.
From what Niko can gather via frantic calls to everyone we own inside the NYC Health Department, an anonymous caller reported mice in the dry storage area, spoiled dairy in the walk-in, and sewage beneath the sinks.
Those allegations are bullshit. But it only takes one foul-tempered inspector to turn them into a suspension of Delilah’s license to operate while they investigate further.
I’m at the corner in the car when he goes in. I sit there for two hours with my hands on my knees doing nothing.
In the end, she passes.
But only because she’s that fucking good at what she does.
Yuri, seated inside, is texting me live reports as the inspection unfolds.
From what he tells me, Lilah handed the man a three-ring binder with twelve months of sanitation logs initialed daily, a printout of the walk-in and freezer temperature records off the digital logger, and the pest control contract with the last six service reports stapled behind it.
That doesn’t mean he goes easy on her. He swabs. He checks behind the mixer and climbs on a stool to peer at the top of the hood. He finds one mistake, a cracked gasket on the reach-in, and gives her ten days to fix it.
But the damage is minimal. She lives to fight another day.
She comes out to the sidewalk after he leaves. It’s not that cold out as February fades, but she’s shaking so hard she has to hold her own elbows.
“Anonymous complaint,” she spits. “What a load of crap. You know what he told me? He said they get maybe two of those a year on a place like mine. Two a year!”
“You passed, though.”
“Yeah, because I’m a psycho who initials a log sheet every night at close.” She laughs and shakes her head in disgust. “Kane, if he’d come in on a Saturday in December, when there’s nine hundred cookies on every surface in this building and Cameron’s crying in the alley—”
“He didn’t, though. You’re fine. Everything is going to be fine from now on.”
But I’m wrong about that.
The emails start that afternoon.
Somebody set up an address one character off from hers—an rn where the m goes, the oldest trick there is—and sent cancellations to two dozen booked customers.
We regret to inform you that, due to circumstances, we are unable to fulfill your order. Your deposit will be refunded.
Jolene only catches it because a woman calls in crying about her mother’s ruined ninetieth birthday.
Delilah pulls the order book. The physical one, not the software. Then she sits at the front counter with a landline handset against her ear for four straight hours and calls every single one of those customers, one at a time, and begs for their forgiveness.
“This is Delilah Dorsey, the owner. That email did not come from us. Your order is live. Read me your date and your name off your receipt and I’ll confirm it out loud.”
Most of them keep the order. Two are already angry at something else in their lives and want their money back. Delilah absorbs their rage, refunds them in full without arguing, and thanks them for their business.
Then she goes into the office and closes the door.
I let her have a few minutes to compose herself before I go in.
She’s sitting on the new steel cot with her hands over her face. “Somebody is doing this,” she says through her fingers. “Suppliers don’t quit the same week inspectors show up and emails start coming from a fake address. This is deliberate.”
“Yes.”
She drops her hands. “You agree with me?”
“I don’t see any other explanation.”
“Then who?”
“I’m finding out.”
She looks at me. I don’t know if she’s forgotten about the map entirely or simply set it aside for now. All I need is a little bit of time to make things right.
But Osip is proving to be elusive. Niko can’t find him. Neither can any of the dozen-plus men we have pounding the pavement, looking for signs of the Vetrov fuck who’s trying to ruin my woman’s life.
I just need time. Just a bit. Just a little.
I need Delilah to hold on for a little longer.
I shouldn’t have hoped, though.
The next day, a rented box truck backs into the loading area of the bakery and knocks out over ten feet of the concrete curb, the steel bollard by the roll gate, and a section of the brick apron where the delivery ramp meets the wall.
Then it pulls out, tires screeching, and disappears.
Josef gets the plate, but we can’t seem to find the owner. It’s either fake or stolen.
He also gets, on his phone, a ninety-second clip of two men creeping across the alley at four in the morning photographing the rear of the building, the gate, and the second-floor windows.
Delilah arrives, looks at the rubble, and for a moment, I’m sure she’s going to break down in tears.
Instead, she draws in a deep breath, then gets to work.
She calls her insurance broker, her contractor, and a debris removal company, and gets it all taken care of. She refuses to let me assist or offer so much as a penny to cover her losses.
Fine.
I’ll handle things my way.
By that afternoon, Yuri has located the kamikaze truck.
From what we can tell, it was rented from a lot in Ozone Park on a license belonging to a man named Bruno Perry.
When we track down Mr. Perry and pay him a visit, he shows us the cash he was paid by a known bookie associate of the Halyard Group.
We smash up his apartment and tell him not to take cash payments for hit-and-run assignments anymore, or else he’ll find himself involved in one on the receiving end.
Niko has the anonymous health complaint traced through a call center in Yonkers. That call center’s landlord? Halyard Group.
Anton finds Halyard’s counsel of record. Turns out the attorney shares a suite and a fax number with the title insurance company in Sheepshead Bay.
Niko lays it all on the map table Friday night and taps it. “It’s undeniable now,” he says. “Osip knows about the bakery, and he is causing as much trouble as he can.”
“I know,” I say.
Niko doesn’t move his hand off the map. “Then you know what comes next.” He straightens up.
“He’s not going to keep breaking her curb forever, Kane.
That’s the warm-up. At some point, he’s going to walk into that bakery, sit down at one of those little tables, order a coffee, and tell her everything you didn’t. ”
I look at the ninety green squares. Twenty years of my life in marker.
“Tell her first,” Niko says. “Tonight. Right now. Get in the car.”
“No.”
“Kane—”
“No.” I slap the table. “There’s no fucking point.”
“Telling her is the point, man! Better from you than from him!”
“I said no.” I shake my head. “She’d walk. And then she’d be out there alone with Osip Vetrov circling her, no men on her door, no one watching her staff, nothing.”
Niko looks at me with a sneer. “That’s a convenient excuse to be a coward.”
I get a fistful of his shirt in each hand and throw him on top of the table. One of the crystal ashtrays falls off the edge and cracks on the floor. The vodka bottle rolls and stops against the stapler.
“Question me again, motherfucker,” I spit in my brother’s face. “I fucking dare you.”
Even with my hands around his throat, he manages to shake his head. “Unbelievable. You’re really gonna hold onto this until Easter?”
“I’m going to burn the note in front of her, and then I’m going to tell her all of it. In that order. Like I planned.”
“And if he gets to her first?”
“Then find him,” I say. “That’s your job. Do it before he does.”
Then I let go of him and step back. My brother looks up at me, disgusted, rumpled, exhausted. Behind him, the map burns green, with a lone dot of white swimming in the midst of it.
Three weeks. Three more weeks of a little white lie.
After that, Lilah can choose what happens next.