Poor Waitress Shielded Mafia Boss’s Father From Vicious Dog — What He Did Next Made Everyone Cry
Chapter 9
He hadn’t yet had time to do anything with what he’d found beneath her fierce exterior when his phone rang, and the person on the other end said only one sentence.
Someone had just opened one of his containers in the south yard.
August drove there in thirty minutes, and he went alone, bringing no one. Because bringing men would mean admitting that something there was important enough to require them.
His car stopped about twenty meters from the yard gate. He stepped out, closed the door, and began walking.
There were twelve men in the yard. He counted them the instant his feet touched the ground, and the number didn’t make him stop. They stood scattered among steel containers stacked as high as three-story buildings, watching him enter, and not one of them moved.
A man holding an iron bar stood near the wide-open container door, and as August passed him, the man lowered the bar naturally, as though his arm had grown tired. Two men stood in his path and they moved apart before he came close enough to ask them.
No one spoke. No one cursed. No one reached inside his coat. There was only the sound of one man’s shoes crossing wet concrete — the only sound in a yard as large as three football fields, steady and unbroken — until he stopped in front of Callahan Driscoll.
Cal sat on the step of a truck, both hands tucked into the pockets of his leather jacket. Beside his feet lay a length of chain. The mastiff was curled on the ground and didn’t lift its head.
Cal smiled. He smiled because he had to — because he had twelve men and the other man had none, and because if he didn’t smile, those twelve men would see his hands.
“Howerin. Come alone.”
“You opened my container,” August said.
“I opened your brother’s container,” Cal said. “He owes me four point two million. He told me to wait. I’ve waited three months. I only took enough merchandise to cover part of it. Call it interest. You can count it again if you like.”
August looked at the open container. Then he looked at Cal.
“You took my merchandise,” he said.
“I don’t care. Merchandise can be replaced. Touch the old man, and I’ll care.”
And there was a moment — a very brief one, briefer even than the moment Margarite had gone still at the gate when she saw the key. Cal Driscoll tilted his head to one side. His smile didn’t disappear. It merely stopped, hanging on his face like something someone had forgotten to remove.
Then he asked, sincerely, in the voice of a man who had just heard a name he’d never heard before, “What old man?”
The yard went silent. Wind slipped through the gap between two rows of containers with a long, thin whistle.
August Howerin stood there, and inside his mind, everything locked into place at once — fast and cold, and impossible to take apart again.
Cal didn’t know. Cal had never known. The entire city believed Conrad Howerin had been lying somewhere beneath the snow for the past two weeks. And that belief was the only thing keeping the old man safe, because no one hunted a man who was already dead.
No one in that yard had any reason to search for him. Not until three seconds ago. Not until August himself — the man who hadn’t wasted a single word in ten years — had stood among twelve men belonging to a loan shark and revealed that there was an old man still alive whom he was willing to burn the entire harbor to protect.
He had just given Cal Driscoll the most valuable thing a man like Cal could ever hold in his hands. He had given him leverage.
August’s face didn’t change. It was the only thing he could still control. He looked at Cal for two more seconds, then turned and walked away at exactly the same pace he’d entered — and the twelve men parted once again to let him pass.
Behind him, Cal Driscoll remained seated on the truck step, and the smile on his face slowly changed into something entirely different.
The man who hadn’t made a single mistake in ten years had just made one. And he would pay for it with someone else’s blood.