Chapter 6 - DEBTS AND DEFIANCE
Fay did not die.
Dr. Mercer arrived in seven minutes, escorted by two police cruisers whose drivers had been paid fifty thousand dollars in cash to ignore city speed limits and run seventeen red lights. The basement infirmary—a sterile, tiled suite built during the height of the federal investigations to treat bullet wounds without hospital reporting—became an operating theater.
The bullet had cracked the third rib and grazed the apex of the left lung, but the high-velocity round had passed cleanly through the tissue without tumbling. Mercer worked for four hours under halogen surgical lamps while I sat outside the glass partition in my chair, refusing to wash the dried blood from my hands.
When he finally stepped out, stripping off his latex gloves with a snap that sounded like a whip in the silent corridor, his face was white with exhaustion.
“She’s stable,” Mercer said. “She has the constitution of an ox, Dominic. Any other girl with that body mass would have arrested on the table from hypovolemic shock. She’s resting. The chest tube is draining well.”
“Can I see her?”
“She’s unconscious. Morphine drip.”
“I didn't ask if she was awake,” I said. “I asked if I could see her.”
Mercer sighed, stepping aside. “Ten minutes. Don't touch the arterial lines.”
I wheeled myself into the small, cold room.
Fay looked tiny in the hospital bed, swallowed by white sheets and the rhythmic *beep-chuckle* of the cardiac monitor. A clear nasal cannula delivered oxygen to her nostrils, and her skin had the pale, translucent quality of skim milk. Her dark hair was spread across the pillow like spilled ink.
I reached out, my blood-crusted hand hesitating for a fraction of a second before I laid my fingers over hers. Her hand was cold, limp, the pulse beneath the skin slow and steady.
“You’re an idiot,” I whispered to the empty room. “Throwing yourself in front of a thirty-caliber round for a man who can't even stand up to walk to your funeral.”
Her fingers didn't move, but the rhythm of the heart monitor skipped once, ticking upward by four beats per minute.
I sat there for two hours, not ten minutes. Carmine did not dare come in to interrupt me.
---
Three days later, while Fay was still confined to the infirmary bed, the outside world made the fatal mistake of knocking on my gate.
It was not Lucian Valenti. Valenti was currently in hiding in a safehouse in northern New Jersey, terrified by the disappearance of his younger brother, who was currently sitting in our Long Island basement with two broken fingers and an eviction notice of his own.
This knock was smaller. Cheaper. The kind of vermin that crawls out from beneath the baseboards when they smell an empty house.
Carmine entered my third-floor study at two in the afternoon. I was back behind my desk, wearing a clean charcoal suit, though I had left the mechanical braces off. I was tired of pretending I was whole; the rage in my skull was enough to fill the empty space in my legs.
“Dominic,” Carmine said, a strange, sour look on his face. “There’s a man at the gate. Drove up in a rusted Chevy Impala with a dented quarter panel. The guards were about to run him off, but he’s waving a notarized legal document.”
I didn't look up from the manifest I was reading. “What kind of document?”
“A collection lien,” Carmine said. “On Miss Willis.”
I slowly raised my head. “Explain.”
“His name is Stanley Skaggs. He’s the brother-in-law of her former landlord. Apparently, when Miss Willis hit the landlord with that skillet three weeks ago, she fractured his hyoid bone. The landlord hired a bottom-feeder bail bondsman and debt consolidator to track her down. Skaggs bought the medical debt and the back rent for eight hundred bucks. He’s here with two private process servers to serve an asset attachment and take her into civil custody for assault.”
A cold, beautiful calm descended over my mind. It was the specific clarity that comes to a general when an enemy battalion marches directly into a natural choke point.
“Bring him up,” I said.
Carmine blinked. “Up here? To the master wing?”
“Bring him up, Carmine. And tell the guards to let him think he’s winning.”
Five minutes later, the double doors swung open.
Stanley Skaggs was forty-five years old, with the greasy, thinning comb-over of a small-time loan shark and the cheap synthetic leather jacket of a man who spent his afternoons in OTB parlors smelling of stale beer and menthol cigarettes. He walked into my study with the swagger of a coward who thought he was holding high cards, flanked by two burly men in cheap windbreakers with private security badges pinned to their pockets.
Skaggs looked around the room—taking in the floor-to-ceiling mahogany shelves, the Persian rugs, the oil paintings of Tuscan landscapes—and let out a low whistle.
“Nice place,” Skaggs sneered, his eyes finally landing on me behind the desk. He took in the wheelchair, the blanket folded over my knees, and the slight, deliberate slouch I had adopted. His confidence visibly doubled. “You Corso?”
I didn't answer. I leaned my chin on my steepled fingers, watching him with the flat, unblinking curiosity one reserves for a beetle crawling toward a shoe.
“I’m looking for Fay Willis,” Skaggs said, slapping a blue-backed legal folder against his thigh. “She owes my client eleven thousand four hundred dollars for medical damages, unpaid rent, and legal fees. I got a bench warrant from a municipal magistrate in the Lower Ward. If she ain't here, I’m filing an obstruction lien against this property.”
He took two steps closer to the desk, leaning his dirty palms against the polished leather edge.
“I know what kind of house this is,” Skaggs whispered, showing yellowed teeth. “You’re that mafia guy who got shot up in the papers. The one who can't walk. Word on the street is the Corso family is running out of teeth. You got girls hiding out here? You paying for their company? That’s cute. But Fay owes cash. And unless you want the city marshals tearing through this mansion with a warrant, you’re gonna write me a check for twelve grand. Five for the debt, seven for my trouble.”
Behind him, Carmine closed the heavy double doors.
The brass latch clicked with the finality of a guillotine blade dropping into its cradle.
I didn't move. I looked at Skaggs’s left hand—the nicotine-stained fingers resting on my antique mahogany.
“Carmine,” I said quietly.
“Yes, Dominic?”
“Take his fingers off the desk.”
Before Skaggs could process the sentence, Carmine moved.
He didn't draw a weapon. He stepped forward with the terrifying speed of an elite middleweight, grabbed Skaggs’s left wrist with both hands, twisted it outward until the joint screamed, and slammed the man’s palm flat against the timber.
With his free hand, Carmine drew an eight-inch steel bone-handled letter opener from my desk organizer and drove it straight through the meat of Skaggs’s hand, pinning it two inches deep into the solid mahogany.
*THWACK.*
Skaggs didn't scream immediately. His eyes went wide as saucers, staring down at the silver blade protruding from the back of his knuckles, blood welling out around the steel like oil from a punctured drum.
Then the sound came—a high-pitched, porcine squeal of absolute, brain-melting agony.
“MY HAND! JESUS CHRIST, MY HAND!”
The two process servers reached for their holsters.
They didn't finish the motion.
The two guards behind them stepped out of the shadows, cold Glock barrels pressed directly behind their right earlobes.
“Don't,” one of my men whispered gently. “It makes an awful mess on the woodwork.”
The process servers froze, their hands hovering in mid-air, their faces turning the color of wet dough.
I leaned forward in my chair, resting my forearms on the desk, inches from Skaggs’s sobbing, sweat-drenched face. The man was trembling so violently that the letter opener vibrated in the wood, making a faint, rhythmic *ping-ping-ping* sound.
“Stanley,” I said, my voice barely louder than the hum of the heating vent.
Skaggs choked back a sob, his eyes rolling toward me in terror. “P-please... I didn't know... the lawyer said—”
“Fay Willis is not an employee in this house,” I whispered, every word carved from glacial ice. “She is not a guest. She is the woman who holds the key to my bedroom door. If a fly lands on her arm without her permission, I find the fly’s family and I exterminate them.”
I reached out, my fingers wrapping around the handle of the letter opener. I twisted it a quarter of an inch to the right.
Skaggs shrieked, his knees buckling, his entire weight hanging from the impaled hand.
“You’re going to take that blue paper,” I said, “and you are going to eat it. You are going to chew every page until the ink is in your throat. Then Carmine is going to take you to your bank, where you will withdraw every dollar you have saved since your confirmation, and you will deposit it into an account for the Clara Willis Memorial Leukemia Foundation.”
I leaned in closer, until he could smell the tobacco and cedar on my breath.
“And if I ever see your rusted Impala within three miles of this gate again,” I finished, “I won't use a letter opener. I will take you to the docks, Stanley. And I will show you what Carmine does with five gallons of quicklime and an empty oil drum.”
I pulled the blade free with a single, sharp jerk.
Skaggs collapsed to the Persian rug, clutching his ruined hand against his stomach, weeping like an abandoned child.
“Get them out of my sight,” I said, wiping the steel blade with a silk handkerchief. “And Carmine? Use the industrial carpet cleaner. Fay gets upset when the wool stays stained.”
Carmine smiled—a cold, terrifying crescent of white teeth.
May you like
“Yes, Boss.”
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