Poor Waitress Shielded Mafia Boss’s Father From Vicious Dog — What He Did Next Made Everyone Cry

Chapter 4

About fifteen miles to the south, inside an unnumbered warehouse at the edge of Howerin Harbor, no one was cooking soup for anyone.

The warehouse was cold in the way only a building beside the water can be cold — the kind that seeps up through the concrete, through the soles of your shoes, and settles into your bones. A single lamp hung from the ceiling, casting a murky yellow circle onto the floor. Inside that circle sat a folding metal chair, and on that chair sat a man in a plaid shirt with both hands resting on his thighs.

His name was Freddy Barlo. He had worked as an accountant for Howerin Group for nine years. And three months earlier, he had begun selling shipping manifest data to a company in Milwaukee for four thousand dollars a month.

No one had tied him up. No one had touched him. The warehouse door remained open. Snow blew across the first meter of the floor, and Freddy Barlo remained seated — because there are rooms where an open door is more frightening than a locked one.

Then August Howerin walked in, and the two guards against the wall stepped back half a pace without realizing they had moved.

He was thirty-four, tall, broad-shouldered beneath an unbranded black wool coat. He didn’t look at Freddy once. He pulled out a second chair, sat down across from him, placed a still-warm paper takeout box on his lap, opened it, and began to eat.

No one said a word. He finished everything — one bite at a time, neither hurried nor slow, at exactly the pace of a man eating dinner in his own kitchen.

Freddy watched him eat for fifteen minutes he would remember for the rest of his life. Then August folded the lid closed, set the box on the floor, pulled out a napkin, wiped each finger one by one, and finally looked up.

“Your wife doesn’t know,” he said. His voice was ordinary, almost friendly. The voice of someone reminding a friend that rain was coming. “Your mother doesn’t know. Your brother — the man who lent you twenty-two thousand dollars for the down payment on your house in Berwin, the man you still haven’t repaid a single dollar — he doesn’t know either. The woman from HR who sometimes waits for you in the parking lot doesn’t know. The priest at the church where you sit in the fourth pew every Sunday doesn’t know.”

He paused. “I know.”

Freddy opened his mouth. August raised one finger — not a threat, only a stop. The way someone stops a plate rolling off a table.

“I haven’t asked you a single question. I don’t need an explanation. Four thousand a month is a very precise number. It tells me you aren’t greedy. You’re only afraid. Greedy men ask for more. Frightened men take just enough to let themselves sleep.”

He stood and brushed crumbs from his trouser leg. “Tomorrow you leave Illinois. Say you’re changing jobs. Say you want to live closer to the ocean. Say whatever you like. All those people will continue not knowing. That’s what I’m giving you — not money. I’m giving you the right to let them keep believing you’re the man they’ve believed you were all these years.”

When Freddy’s footsteps had disappeared into the snow, one of the guards stepped forward. “Boss. Do you want us to take care of him?”

August picked up the paper container from the floor, folded it neatly, and placed it inside his own coat pocket. “No. He isn’t worth getting my hands dirty. I need him alive, far away, and quiet.”

Then the phone in his pocket vibrated. He looked at the screen. Hollis Price. He already knew what Hollis was going to say — because Hollis had said the exact same words every night for the past thirteen days, and each night those words had grown a little heavier.

His adoptive father still hadn’t come home.