Page 26 of Merciless Daddy

“No,” I said. “You’re right. I apologize.”

She looked at me for a long moment, and I understood that she saw all of it—the still frame, the three days, the thing under my ribs that had come loose and was still swinging.

“Sit down,” she said. “All of you. We have fifteen hours and we’re going to think.”

I sat.

By nine in the morning the room smelled like desperation, and we had nothing.

We tried everything. An injunction—no court in New York would touch a shareholder proxy on a Tuesday afternoon with no standing and no plaintiff. A federal tip—Angela laughed, once, without any humor in it, and explained how long the Bureau had taken to move on Halberd while she sat in a motel with the chain on the door. A call to Brighton Beach, honest and direct, Scordato to Sokolov: cousin against cousin, and Lev would hear it as the weaker Italian begging.

Tonio made eggs nobody ate. Pietro drew a fourth column on the whiteboard and then wiped it off with his sleeve. Serafina took two calls in Sicilian, went out to the landing for the third, and came back with her mouth set in a line I hadn’t seen since the funeral.

“Palermo wants a decision by noon,” she said. “I’m going to Marco’s. I need a room with a door and forty minutes.” She picked up her coat. At the top of the stairs she stopped and looked back at me. “Nothing happens while I’m gone.”

“Nothing happens,” I said.

She went. I heard the alley door.

Angela sat back and pressed her thumbs into her eye sockets. “Okay. First principles. We’ve been reading their paper. What do we have that they don’t know we have?”

Nobody answered.

Then I put my hand in my jacket pocket, and my fingers found the little black box that had been riding around Chicago with my keys for four days, telling somebody a story I’d written for it.

I set it on the table.

Angela looked at it. Then she looked at it properly, and something happened in her face—the thing that happens in Pietro’s face when a lock turns.

“Give me that,” she said.

“It’s a magnetic asset tracker. Cellular. It’s been feeding them a lie about my dry cleaner since Friday.”

“It’s a unit.” She had it in her hands, turning it, her thumbnail already at the seam. “These don’t get sold one at a time, Sal, they get sold in fleets. Fifty, a hundred. Logistics companies buy them by the case and register them to a commercial account with the manufacturer, and the account is where you go to see all your dots on one map.” She got the back cover off and held it up to the desk lamp. “Serial. Read it to me.”

I read it to her. She typed. Pietro came around behind her chair.

“Manufacturer’s portal,” she said. “Consumer login’s a dead end, but there’s a fleet dashboard, and fleet dashboards are built for dispatchers, and dispatchers are dumb.” Keys. Silence. More keys. “Password reset goes to the account admin’s email. Which is—” she stopped. “Oh.”

“What.”

“The admin email is on a domain I’ve seen before.” She turned the screen a fraction toward me. “Northbridge Freight. Sal, this is the same tenant that owned the Halberd offshore vehicles. Same registrar, same everything. They never rebuilt the back end. Gianni inherited Enzo’s infrastructure and he never changed the locks.”

“Can you get in.”

“I’m already in.”

The map came up.

Sixty-odd dots across the eastern seaboard, greyed out, dormant—trucks in yards, containers in Newark, a cluster around a warehouse in Elizabeth. And in the corner of the screen, a folder created eleven hours ago, live, with a little green pulse beside it.

BRIDAL ONE.

Angela clicked it and the room went very quiet.

Three vehicles. Two SUVs and an armored sedan, all three registered against the Northbridge account, all three currently sitting in a garage off Coney Island Avenue with their beacons warm. Attached to the folder was a movement order, typed by somebody who had learned logistics from a manual and formality from television.

Angela read it out.