Chapter 6 - The Iron Door
The old laundry on Racine Street hadn't washed a shirt since the Carter administration. The sign hanging over the rusted iron gate still read Moretti & Sons Steam Laundry, though the neon tubes had shattered back when the neighborhood was still half-empty brickyards and Polish butcher shops. Now it was surrounded by trendy lofts and coffee shops that charged six bucks for a cup of chicory, but this specific block of the street had been forgotten by the developers—mostly because the title was tied up in federal receivership.
I parked the Lincoln right across the delivery bay, ignoring the No Parking sign and the orange cone some hipster had set out.
"Stay in the car," I told Lily, handing her my heavy leather gloves to keep her warm. "If anyone comes within twenty feet of this vehicle, honk the horn twice. Hard."
Sarah was breathing shallowly in the back, her eyes closed, her chest rising and falling in shallow, jagged hitches. I didn't have time to take her to a hospital—not with the syndicate's cleaners already tracking the debt books. Whatever my father had hidden in that basement was the only leverage we had left to buy our way out of the city.
I pulled the heavy iron padlock off the side cellar doors with a twenty-four-inch crowbar I kept in the trunk. The iron shrieked in protest, the metal rusting away like dry bread as the hasp snapped with a sharp twang.
A wave of damp, stagnant air rolled up from the darkness—the smell of old starch, wet lime, and thirty years of undisturbed dust.
I flicked on my flashlight, the bright LED beam cutting through the gloom to reveal rows of rusted copper pipes and abandoned folding tables covered in grease. At the far end of the cellar, behind a partition made of chicken wire and rotting plywood, sat the safe.
It wasn't a modern digital box. It was an old Diebold floor safe, the kind with a heavy brass dial and a cast-iron door three inches thick.
I dropped to my knees in the dirt, pulled the brass key from my pocket, and examined the small keyhole hidden beneath the dial's center cap.
"You found it, didn't you?" Sarah’s voice came from the top of the cellar stairs.
I looked up, startled. She was standing there, leaning against the wooden frame of the cellar doors, wrapped in the wool blanket like an old ghost who refused to stay in the ground.
"Sarah, what are you doing out of the car? You'll kill yourself—"
"I'm already dead, Nate," she said, coughing softly into her handkerchief, pulling it away stained with a bright, terrifying streak of red. "I just wanted to see the look on your face when you found out what your father really traded for Vincent's life."
She walked down the wooden steps, her boots clicking softly against the concrete until she stood beside me in the dim circle of the flashlight beam. She reached down, took the brass key from my fingers, and slid it into the hidden lock beneath the dial.
"He didn't trade my future to Marcone just for money," she whispered, her fingers turning the key with a smooth, practiced click. "He traded the ledger because the ledger wasn't about debts, Nate."
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"Then what was it?" I demanded, my hand dropping back to my empty holster before I remembered I'd left the Sig in the car.
"It was a list of names," Sarah said, her eyes reflecting the cold white light of the flashlight. "Every judge, every precinct captain, and every federal prosecutor who took a bribe from the Moretti family since nineteen-seventy-two. And your father didn't write it down—I did."
