Stepmother Beats Poor Waitress For Feeding Stray Dog — The Mafia Boss Saw Her Scars & Takes Action

Chapter 4

Brennan’s Restaurant stood at the corner of Halsted and Thirty-First. By noon it was always full—so crowded that people had to wait outside the glass doors, coats draped over their arms, peering inside with the expressions of those who knew they’d be waiting for a long time.

Cassian Ror pushed open the door and walked in without looking at anyone.

The manager, who was writing in the ledger at the counter, glanced up. For less than the span of a heartbeat, his pen stopped moving. He didn’t offer a greeting. He didn’t step out from behind the counter. He merely inclined his head toward table number six at the back of the dining room, where six people were still halfway through their lunch.

No one approached the table to say anything to them. No one brought them the check.

But the man seated at the head of the table looked up toward the door, set down his napkin, and all six of them rose one after another, collected their coats, and left through the side entrance—abandoning plates still more than half full, and glasses in which the ice hadn’t yet melted.

Cassian sat down in the place they’d just vacated.

The server cleared the table in silence, replaced the tablecloth with a fresh one, and Cassian ordered black coffee. No one in that restaurant explained anything to anyone. Not a single word was spoken to clarify what had just happened.

That was how such things had always unfolded on this city’s south side—quietly, in perfect rhythm, without any need for raised voices. While everyone seated at the surrounding tables lowered their eyes to their plates with considerably more concentration than they’d shown only a few minutes earlier.

Wilder Ashgrove arrived afterward and took the chair across from him.

And the third man to arrive was Baird.

He came in with the gait of someone who’d been rehearsing that walk all the way from the parking lot to the door—the gait of a man trying to convince his own body that nothing serious was happening.

He sat down without being invited. He began talking about the weather. Then about a delayed shipment at Dock Number Seven. Then about how everyone was struggling this season.

Cassian let him talk. He drank his coffee. He didn’t interrupt even once.

And that, more than anything else, made Baird speak faster and with less coherence—until he stopped himself in the middle of a sentence and couldn’t find any way to continue.

Cassian set down his cup.

He said that the unloading manifests for three eastern shipping routes had reached the Merrick family before the ships had even docked. That the information could have come from only four computers. And that three of those computers were in Baird’s office.

He said it in the voice of a man reading aloud from an electricity bill.

Baird began insisting that it wasn’t true.

Cassian didn’t argue with him. He took out his phone, placed it on the tablecloth, and made the first call.

The first call lasted less than a minute. He spoke with the manager of the western storage yard at the docks, asked after the man’s mother, then said that Baird’s company wouldn’t have its lease renewed on the three adjoining warehouses after the end of the month—and that if anyone called to ask, he should simply say the property owner had changed his plans.

He ended the call.

Baird sat motionless.

The second call was to a woman at the Federal Transportation Licensing Office. Cassian said nothing except to remind her of something that had happened two years earlier involving understated weight declarations in the paperwork for two tractor trailers. He said that perhaps it was time for that file to be reviewed according to proper procedure.

He thanked her. He ended the call.

Baird placed both hands on the table and stared down at them.

The third call was the shortest. He called a man named Harlow at the bank on Wacker Street and asked whether Baird’s company mortgage of three hundred thousand dollars contained an early repayment clause.

When the voice at the other end said that it did, Cassian merely said thank you, ended the call, and slipped the phone back into his coat pocket.

In three minutes, Baird had entered that restaurant with three warehouses, two tractor trailers, a transportation license, and nineteen years of work behind him.

And he walked out carrying nothing but a coat over his arm.

He didn’t plead. He simply stood, lingering there for a moment, as though waiting for someone to tell him that the matter could still be discussed. And when no one said anything, he left.

Cassian didn’t watch him go.

Wilder stirred his coffee without drinking it. He said the quicker way would have been to send two men down to the docks to meet Baird and settle the matter once and for all.

Cassian shook his head.

“I don’t burn down anyone’s house,” he said. “Fire goes out, and then people rebuild. I take away every single thing that allowed that house to remain standing. Then I leave it there, by itself, in the same cold it’s always held inside.”

Wilder remained silent for a long time.

Then he said what he’d intended to say from the moment he walked in: that the matter with the dog was over. That Cassian had searched forty-three alleys and found it. That if it was still alive, it would remain somewhere in that neighborhood, and they’d catch it one morning. And that the laundry shop and the woman inside it were none of the Ror family’s concern.

Cassian didn’t answer any of it. He folded the napkin in half and placed it at the edge of his plate.

“Find out where she works,” he said.