Chapter 7 - A Scent of Sulfur and Bitter CoffeeI stepped off the raised platform, walking slowly down the ramp until the toe of my leather boot rested against Julian’s ribs.
“Where is she, Julian?” I asked softly.
The room fell so silent that the hiss of the sleet against the corrugated tin overhead sounded like steam escaping a boiler.
“The... the south intake canal,” Julian sobbed, pressing his forehead into the freezing mud of the floor. “Under the concrete foundation of Pier 12. We... we didn't burn her, Lorenzo. She was locked inside the steel vault beneath the pumphouse. Her casket is intact. I swear on my mother’s soul, her casket is untouched!”
My jaw locked into forged steel.
Six years.
My sister had been sitting thirty feet beneath the cold waters of the Calumet shipping canal, resting in the dark while the man who put her there drank sixty-year-old cognac in my library.
I turned toward Frank Moretti.
“Bring the commercial dredging cranes to Pier 12 tonight, Frank. Bring the harbor divers. We bring my sister home before the sun clears the lake.”
“Right away, Don Lorenzo,” Frank barked, already keying his radio.
I looked down at Julian one final time.
“Take him to the federal building on Dearborn Street,” I commanded, my baritone level and cold. “Deliver him to Assistant United States Attorney Marcus Vance alongside these ledgers. Let him spend the next forty years in a concrete cell at ADX Florence, remembering what happens when you steal from the Foundry King.”
Julian shrieked, clawing at the concrete as two armed longshoremen dragged him backward down the ramp, his pathetic, echoing cries fading into the roar of the diesel generators until the heavy steel doors slammed shut.
Silence returned to Goose Island.
Pure, clean, and vast.
I turned back to the seventy-five syndicate commanders standing along the steel beam.
“From this day forward,” I announced, my voice echoing across the rafters, “the Moretti Syndicate does not deal in stolen gold, unvetted chemicals, or backroom poison. We build the rail lines. We move the freight. We protect the men and women who sweat on our docks.”
I looked down at Clara, who sat watching me with those quiet, wise eyes.
“And anyone who touches an innocent child under my flag will answer directly to my iron.”
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Marcus Falcone raised his heavy fist into the air, his gravelly voice leading the assembly in a thunderous, room-shaking roar that rattled the corrugated walls:
“To Don Lorenzo! To the Foundry King! Long live the house of Moretti!”
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