Merciless Daddy (Chicago Dons #6)

Chapter 1

Salvatore

Ifelt it before it happened.

The call came at six-forty, before the morning’s first coffee. Tonio took it, listened for ten seconds, and said a word in Sicilian our mother would have slapped him for. That was how I knew the day was already ruined.

“Tried,” Pietro repeated, already at the door. Pietro could put a paragraph into one word.

I drove. Tonio complained the whole way, which was his way. “Dawn, Sal. Dawn. Even the federal government waits until nine. I have respect for a man who commits crimes at a civilized hour. This—” he waved at the gray morning coming up over Back of the Yards, “—this is barbarism.”

“Write them a letter,” Pietro said from the back seat.

“I might. Dear thieves. Consider brunch.”

I said nothing. Three incidents in two months since Don Arturo went into the ground. A fire inspection nobody ordered. A health citation for a kitchen that could have performed surgery. Now a tow truck at dawn. Someone was testing the fence line, seeing which posts wobbled.

The warehouse sat on the corner of 47th, a refrigerated block with CARUSO PRODUCE & IMPORTS in green letters that had needed repainting since well before I arrived in Chicago.

The tow truck was backed up to one of our delivery lorries, winch cable already hooked to the frame.

Four men in matching grey jackets stood around it like they had every right in the world.

And Marco Bellini sat on the wet asphalt with blood on his chin.

He was sixty-eight years old. By all accounts, he had been driving for this company since before Dante Caruso could shave, and one of these men had put him on the ground.

Something in my chest went very quiet.

“Pietro. The truck doesn’t move. Tonio, faces and paper. Everything.”

Pietro walked around the tow truck and simply stood in front of it, hands folded.

Tonio pulled out his phone and started shooting—the crew, the plates, the clipboard in the foreman’s hand—narrating cheerfully as he went.

“Smile, gentlemen. You, with the neck. Beautiful. Very photogenic. Your mother will want copies.”

I went to Marco.

He tried to get up when he saw me coming, and I put a hand on his shoulder to keep him down. His lip was split, and he’d landed hard on his hip. His hands were shaking. He was still holding the truck keys in his fist like they were the family silver.

“Salvatore, I told them no. I told them, this truck goes nowhere without—”

“I know.” I took the handkerchief from my breast pocket, shook it out, and pressed it to his mouth. He looked at the white linen like I’d handed him something sacred, and that made the quiet in my chest quieter still. “Hold it there. Press.”

“The truck—”

“Is just a truck.” I crouched so we were level.

Wet asphalt, dawn cold coming through the knees of my trousers.

It didn’t matter. “Marco. Look at me. It’s just metal.

We can replace it. You, though, we cannot.

The next time a man wants to take a truck, you give him the keys and my phone number, in that order. Understood?”

His eyes went wet at the corners. Old men are like that when someone tells them they matter. It costs nothing to say, and men in my position almost never say it, and I have never understood why.

“Understood,” he said, through the handkerchief.

I stood, straightened my cuffs, and walked to the foreman—a broad man with a lanyard and the particular confidence of someone holding official-looking paper.

“You’re interfering with a lawful repossession,” he said. “This vehicle is subject to a lien—“

“Show me.”

He hesitated, then handed over the clipboard.

It was good work, I’ll admit. Letterhead, notarization block, a lien filed against Caruso Produce & Imports through a finance company. Court stamp in the corner. To most men it would have looked like the end of the argument.

But I have run shipping for my family since I was eighteen years old.

I know every vehicle on every manifest the way a priest knows his parish.

And the identification number on that lien belonged to a 2009 box truck with a cracked frame that we sold for scrap two years ago.

I stood in the yard in Palermo and watched them crush it.

It exists now as razor blades and rebar.

“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.”

“You vote for whoever fed you last.”

“It’s true, you can’t cook without a flame. Fire is versatile.”

I let them run. They needed it, the way an engine needs to idle, and I needed the minute to look at the wall and let the new piece talk to the old ones.

“Northbridge Freight,” I said, and the room settled.

It does that when I speak. I have never decided whether to be proud of it.

“It was one of Enzo Valenti’s companies—trucking on paper, laundering in practice.

When Enzo fell,as we know, Gianni swooped in.

” I tapped the manifest cluster on the left of the wall, the ones with my handwriting in the margins going back years. “Look at the routing.”

I walked them through it, document by document, the way my father taught me.

“Gianni inherited Enzo’s laundering routes,” I said. “The machine was offered to him, or he took it, but either way it’s his money moving through those trucks now.”

“He couldn’t run a bath,” Pietro said.