Chapter 63 - The Deal on the Pier
The silence in the garage became deafening. The ticking of the metal-cased clock above the tool pegboard sounded like a hammer striking an anvil.
"Don't lie to me," I said, my teeth clenched so tight my jaw ached. "Don't you dare hide behind me to justify what you did to your son."
"Look at the date on that badge, Maya," my father said, pointing a calloused finger at the plastic card. "Look at the issue date."
I didn't want to look, but my eyes darted down involuntarily.
*Issued: May 14, 2004.*
Twenty years ago.
"I didn't start working for Giancarlo Vance eighteen months ago," my father said, turning his body fully toward me now, resting his heavy palms on the edge of the workbench. "I started working for him when you were six years old and David was eight. Before Gabriel Giammona ever took over the family. Back when old man Giammona was running the south piers with an iron fist."
"You were a municipal machinist," I said, shaking my head in denial. "You worked the locks."
"The locks are where everything moves, Maya," he said, his voice dropping to a harsh, gravelly whisper. "Contraband, untaxed steel, chemical runoff from the mills in Gary. The city inspectors were paid six hundred dollars a week. Giancarlo was offering six thousand just to look the other way when a barge arrived after the midnight bell. Your brother had chronic asthma as a boy. We didn't have insurance that covered the specialists at Children’s Memorial. We were drowning in medical bills, our mortgage was three months delinquent, and Giancarlo showed up at my union hall with an envelope."
He walked over to the old steel tool chest against the far wall, pulled a small silver key from his pocket, and unlocked the bottom drawer. He reached beneath a pile of greasy socket wrenches and pulled out a battered, leather-bound municipal ledger, identical to the ones I had seen in Giancarlo's office, but far older.
He dropped it onto the bench. It fell with a heavy, hollow thud.
"I took the money," my father said bluntly. "I told myself it was just for one year. Just until the bills were paid and David’s lungs cleared up. But there is no one year with men like Vance and Giammona. Once your name is on their paper, they own your hands. For twenty years, I maintained their private slips. I kept the drainage pumps running off the books. I falsified the inspection seals on containers that held things that would make your skin crawl."
"And David?" I demanded, tears blurring my vision. "How did David end up at Slip Nine?"
"David was curious," my father said, his voice cracking for the first time. "He took a summer job at the port to pay for his maritime license. He thought he was following in my footsteps. But David wasn't corruptible. He was bright, sharp, and he had his mother’s stubborn sense of right and wrong. He started noticing the altered bill of ladings on the chemical transports. He didn't know I was the one clearing them."
My father pressed his fists against his eyes, his breathing ragged.
"The night he was taken," he continued, "David came to this very shop. He had that black notebook in his hand. He told me he was going to federal prosecutors the next morning. He told me he had found forty tons of illegal industrial cadmium marked for deep-lake dumping, and he was going to blow the lid off Vance Marine."
"And you didn't warn him?" I cried. "You didn't tell him to run?"
"I begged him on my knees!" my father shouted, his composure shattering as tears carved deep tracks through the dust on his cheeks. "I told him Giancarlo would kill him before he ever reached the courthouse! I told him who Giancarlo owned—the judges, the port directors, the marshals! But David looked at me with disgust. He realized, right then and there, that his own father had been clearing the docks for those monsters."
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"So David went anyway," I said, the horrifying realization settling like lead in my stomach.
"He went to Slip Nine to photograph the discharge pipes," my father whispered. "Giancarlo’s men caught him on the perimeter camera within five minutes. Hector called me from Giancarlo's private office. He put the phone on speaker. I could hear Giancarlo in the background. Hector said: *'Your boy is in the machine shop. We have two men outside your house on Avenue L watching Maya study in her bedroom. You bring the master dog-leg key to Slip Nine and shut down the precinct alarm, or we take both of them.'*"
