Chapter 61 - The Salt in the Blood
The wind off Lake Michigan tasted like iron and frozen salt. The laminated municipal badge felt burning hot against my bare fingers, even though the plastic was stiff and frosted over by the gale.
I stared down at the photograph. The lamination had started to peel at the corner, yellowed by years of machine oil and harbor humidity, but there was no mistaking the gray eyes, the crooked bridge of the nose broken in an old union brawl in ninety-four, or the faded blue work shirt my father still wore every Sunday morning while cleaning the boiler in our basement.
"Richard Cole," I whispered, reading the forged municipal alias printed beneath his picture. "City Inspector, Harbor Works. That’s not... this isn't possible, Gabriel. My father has had arthritis in his hands since David was twelve. He barely drives past the Calumet bridge. He spends his afternoons listening to the police scanner and building scale models of coal freighters in our garage."
"He was on the city dock roster for twenty-two years, Maya," Gabriel said, his voice entirely stripped of the arrogance that usually accompanied a Giammona order. His dark wool coat snapped violently against his thighs in the wind. "Look at the stamp in the lower right corner. That isn't a fake seal. It’s an authentic Port Authority municipal override clearance. Giancarlo Vance didn't just buy off harbor commissioners; he bought the men who maintained the lock gates, the drydock valves, and the maintenance hoists."
"David was his son," I said, my voice rising, raw and frantic against the crashing water below the seawall. "You’re standing here telling me my father helped Giancarlo lock his own son inside Slip Nine? While I was sitting in your family's dining room translating sign language for your mother, trying to hunt down the men who murdered my brother?"
"I’m telling you what Mother read off the ledger cards three hours ago," Gabriel said. He took half a step closer, but he didn't try to touch me. He knew better. "Agent Miller didn't find that badge in a landfill. It was filed inside Giancarlo’s personal lockbox under the heading *Insurance*. When Hector and the Greek took David down into the drydock basin, someone had already shut down the secondary emergency alarms from the pump room. The alarm system at Slip Nine isn't digital. It’s an old mechanical linkage that requires an engineer’s dog-leg key to disengage. Only four men in Cook County had that key. Three of them were dead before the snow melted last year."
My chest seized. Air wouldn't reach my lungs.
I remembered the night David disappeared eighteen months ago. It had been raining—a driving, merciless autumn rain that turned the asphalt along the docks into black glass. My father had come home at three in the morning, his work boots soaked through, smelling of diesel fuel and acetylene. He hadn't said a word to my mother or to me. He had gone straight to the basement sink, turned the water on scalding hot, and scrubbed his hands with powdered borax until the skin across his knuckles split open and bled onto the porcelain.
*He’s just worried about David,* my mother had told me back then, weeping softly at the kitchen table while the radio hummed with marine weather alerts. *Your father knows how dangerous those night shifts are. He feels helpless.*
Helpless.
"Where is he right now?" I demanded.
"Miller sent two plainclothes agents to watch your parents' house on Avenue L forty minutes ago," Gabriel answered. "They aren't arresting him yet. Miller doesn't have the warrant signed, and more importantly, Mother instructed him to hold off until you knew."
"Your mother instructed a federal agent?"
"Mother holds the Giammona Trust," Gabriel said flatly. "And Miller knows that if he touches your father before the chain of custody on Giancarlo’s maritime accounts is secured, Vance Marine’s offshore holding companies will liquidate before morning. But Maya... your father knows something happened tonight. When the fire at Slip Nine broke out, the scanner channels lit up across South Chicago. If he realizes the safe was breached, he won't stay in that house."
I didn't wait for Gabriel to offer a car. I turned on my heel and sprinted toward my sedan parked near the pier gate. The engine turned over with a rough, shuddering cough.
As I threw the gear into reverse, Gabriel appeared at the driver's side window. He tapped the glass with his signet ring, the silver flashing under the sodium arc lamps of the security booth. I rolled the window down two inches.
"Don't go in there thinking you’re speaking to the man who raised you," Gabriel warned, his eyes dark with an ancient, bitter familiarity with family betrayal. "When a man takes money from Giancarlo Vance, he stops being a father. He becomes an asset. David found that out at the bottom of a drydock."
"David didn't write his name down," I choked out, tears finally breaking hot over my freezing cheeks. "David knew, Gabriel. When he was writing that cipher in the bilge of the *Caledonia*, he had every corrupt inspector and deck boss listed. But he left that one line blank. He died protecting him."
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"Then don't let David die for a lie," Gabriel said softly. "I'll be twenty paces behind you. If your father tries to run, Miller takes him into federal custody. If you want the truth from his own mouth, you have until Miller’s sedan turns onto Avenue L."
I slammed my foot on the accelerator, tearing out of the harbor apron onto the expressway, the gray silhouette of the city skyline blurring into streaks of red taillights and falling sleet.
