Chapter 7 - The Audit of the Docks
At eight o'clock the following morning, the industrial shipping terminals along the Calumet River were frozen beneath three inches of black river ice.
Don Carmine Bellini sat inside the heated office of the dockmaster’s shanty, wearing a beaver-fur coat, sipping black coffee, waiting for the news of Lorenzo Rossy’s sudden, tragic heart attack to break across the morning news tickers.
The double doors of the shanty were kicked off their hinges with a concussive, deafening crash.
Mateo and six tactical operatives from the Rossy vanguard swarmed the room, their suppressed submachine guns trained on the four guards sitting around the kerosene heater, disarming them before they could drop their playing cards.
And walking through the shattered doorway, wearing his dark wool overcoat and leather gloves, came Lorenzo Rossy.
Beside him walked Chloe.
She wore heavy winter boots, a warm wool coat, and carried a reinforced leather binder containing the complete, unredacted corporate registries of the Calumet Maritime Terminal.
Carmine dropped his coffee mug. It shattered on the plywood floor, hot liquid splashing across his boots.
"Lorenzo...?" Carmine wheezed, his jaw slacking, his eyes bulging in pure, unadulterated terror. "You're... you're alive?!"
"The amaro was vintage nineteen-eighty-two, Carmine," Lorenzo said, his voice cold as the river ice outside. "A magnificent vintage. Unfortunately, Miss Bennett prefers peppermint tea."
Chloe stepped forward, unzipping her binder and pulling out three sheets of heavy legal paper, slapping them onto the dockmaster’s desk with a sharp thwack.
"Under Section Fourteen of the Illinois Port Authority Maritime Act," Chloe announced, her voice ringing clear and authoritative across the silent shanty, "operating an unlicensed deep-water fuel depot constitutes a Class One felony carrying immediate administrative asset seizure."
She pointed to column four with her signature pink gel pen.
"You've been siphoning thirty thousand gallons of untaxed marine diesel every Tuesday through a dummy holding company registered to your brother-in-law in Gary, Indiana. Every barrel has been logged by the satellite surveillance package I authorized forty-eight hours ago."
Carmine looked at the papers, then looked at Lorenzo, his hands shaking so violently he had to grip the desk to keep from falling.
"Lorenzo... please," Carmine begged, his arrogance completely reduced to ash. "We can settle this within the Commission! Name your percentage! Fifty percent! Seventy percent!"
Lorenzo walked to the edge of the desk, leaning down until his scarred face was inches from Carmine’s.
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"I don't want your percentage, Carmine," Lorenzo whispered, his flint-gray eyes carrying the final, unappealable sentence of the underworld.
"Miss Bennett has already liquidated your operating accounts. You are broke. You are stripped of your territory. And as of nine o'clock this morning... you are officially evicted from my city."
