A poor little girl was never supposed to enter the Moretti mansion, but when she found the Mafia boss struggling to breathe, she risked everything to save him—and her innocent question revealed a secret that made his most trusted lieutenant go pale.

The door to the shack didn't have a latch. It was held shut by a piece of copper wire twisted around an iron nail.

Lucas put his boot against the lock-rail and kicked it once.

The pine frame split with a crack that sounded like an oar breaking in the surf. The door flew inward, striking Victor squarely across his burned shoulder. Victor shrieked—a high, womanish sound that cut through the noise of the wind outside—and stumbled backward against the desk, knocking the kerosene lantern onto its side.

The lamp didn't explode; the oil simply ran across the ink-stained blotting paper, a long, lazy tongue of yellow fire licking at the edges of the shipping manifests.

Sal Castellano didn't drop the cigar.

His right hand went into his pocket with the smooth, practiced grease of an old stick-up man, but before his fingers could clear the wool, Lucas laid the heavy barrel of the Winchester across the bridge of Sal’s nose.

The bone didn't break; it crunched—a wet, muffled sound like a man stepping on an eggshell inside an overcoat.

Sal went down on his knees, both hands coming up to his face, blood spurting between his fat, ringed fingers in three distinct red jets that spattered the open ledger on the desk.

"Don't move, Sal," Lucas whispered.

His voice was almost gone. The run up the wooden stairs had emptied the last reservoir of air in his chest. His ribs felt as though they were being squeezed by an iron band that was cooling and shrinking with every tick of the clock on the wall. He could hear his own heart—not in his chest, but behind his ears, a frantic, irregular hammer that skipped every fourth beat.

"Lucas," Mary choked out from the crate. Her left eye was swollen shut, a deep purple welt running from her temple down into her hairline where someone had hit her with a revolver barrel. "Lucas, the girl—"

"Lily’s in the car," Lucas said, his eyes never leaving Victor. "Frankie has her."

Victor was on the floor, his back against the baseboard, his face gray with the terrible, sickening shock of third-degree burns. He was holding his right arm against his belly like a dead dog, his breath coming in short, dog-like pants that whistled through his teeth.

"You're dead, Luke," Victor whispered, though there was no blood left in his voice. "Look at you. You can't even stand up straight. Your lungs are full of water. You're gonna drown right here on the dry boards."

"Maybe," Lucas said.

He reached down with his left hand, picked up the small red ledger from the desk, and dropped it into his coat pocket beside Lily’s spare medicine.

"Sal," Lucas said.

The old man was still on his knees, his forehead pressed against the floorboards, his breath bubbling through the blood in his nostrils. "Lucas... please. It was Victor. Victor said you was out. He said the family was done. He told me the Jersey boys had the whole council—"

"You came to my house, Sal," Lucas said.

"I didn't touch the kid!" Sal wailed, his hands still covering his broken face. "I swear to Christ, I told 'em to leave the woman and the kid! Victor wanted the ledger! He said the Swiss numbers were in her sewing box!"

Lucas looked at Victor.

Victor didn't look down. Even with his arm burned to the grease and his shoulder split by the door, there was still that terrible, hungry insolence in his small eyes—the look of a man who had spent forty years being smaller than he wanted to be.

"She gave you the inhaler, didn't she?" Victor rasped, his lips pulling back from his yellow teeth. "The little mick bastard gave you the tube. If she’d stayed in the hall like her mother told her, you’d have been cold by two o'clock. We’d have had the paper signed before the coroner got through the gates."

"She didn't stay in the hall," Lucas said.

"She’s a nobody, Lucas!" Victor spat, a fleck of bloody foam landing on his camel-hair lapel. "Her old man died on a five-dollar day! Her mother cleans the toilets at the club! You’re throwing away twenty million dollars in union paper for a girl who’s gonna be selling cabbage out of a cart on Ninth Avenue when she’s twenty!"

Lucas lowered the shotgun.

For a second, Victor thought he had won. You could see it in the sudden, greedy flare of his eyes—the belief that the old rules still applied, that family and history and thirty years of shared bread would make Lucas hesitate, would make him look for a way out that didn't leave a body on the floor.

"You don't understand, Victor," Lucas said.

His chest seized. A spasm caught him so violently that his knees buckled six inches, his shoulder striking the pine frame of the window. He coughed—a hollow, rattling bark that brought up a dark, reddish phlegm onto his lips.

He wiped it with the back of his hand.

"She didn't ask me who I was," Lucas said, every word costing him a pint of blood from his heart. "She didn't care about the docks. She didn't care about the name. She just thought I was a man who couldn't breathe."

Lucas raised the Winchester again. Not at Victor’s head.

He turned the barrel toward the window behind Sal Castellano, which looked out over the black water of the pier slip, and fired three times through the sash.

The heavy twelve-gauge slugs blew the pine mullions and the glass out into the night in a shower of splintered wood and lead. The freezing harbor wind rushed into the small office, catching the burning kerosene on the desk and whipping it into a three-foot sheet of flame that caught the grease-stained wall charts behind the chair.

"Get up, Mary," Lucas said.

He didn't untie her hands. He took the hemp rope by the knot between her wrists and hauled her to her feet with one arm, his own body trembling with such violence that Mary had to lean her shoulder against his chest to keep them both from tumbling down the stairs.

Behind them, Sal Castellano was screaming on the floor as the burning kerosene reached the hem of his double-weight coat.

Victor scrambled toward the door on his hands and knees, dragging his dead arm behind him like an empty sack. "Lucas! Don't leave me in here! The whole pier’s timber! The whole goddamn thing’s soaked in creosote!"

Lucas didn't look back.

He led Mary down the three steps into the cavernous, freezing dark of the warehouse floor.

Above them, through the broken glass of the roof, the sleet had finally stopped. The clouds were tearing open under the gale, revealing a sky the color of zinc, with three pale, watery stars showing above the Jersey shore.

Lucas’s boots hit the salt-bags.

His breath was no longer a whistle; it was a dry, rasping scrape, like two pieces of slate being rubbed together in an empty cellar. He couldn't feel his feet. He could only feel Mary’s shoulder against his ribs, and the small, heavy book in his pocket that felt like five hundred pounds of lead.

"Lucas," Mary wept, her face wet with the freezing spray that blew through the north doors. "Lucas, you're falling."

"Keep walking, Mary," he muttered.

"Lucas, your hands are blue."

"Keep walking to the car."

They cleared the scale house.

Fifty yards off, the Buick sat where they had left it, its black roof coated in a thick, gray skin of harbor ice that reflected the pale dawn light beginning to rise behind the Brooklyn docks.

The driver’s side door opened.

Frankie stepped out, the Remington held low, but he wasn't looking at Lucas. He was looking past the car, down the narrow spit of gravel that led back to the railroad spur.