Chapter 2 - The Blood in the LedgerBy Thursday noon, the Han Circle was bleeding from three different arteries.
In Chinatown, two of Marcus’s import terminals had been raided by federal agents operating on an anonymous tip that smelled suspiciously like the Chicago Field Division's internal playbook. In Cicero, the Outfit—the old-school Italian syndicate that had shared the city with Marcus since the days of the stockyards—sent an envoy named Frankie "The Tooth" Scalia to demand a thirty-percent tax on the North Shore logistics lanes.
Marcus sat in his reinforced study, watching the security feeds on four separate monitors. His face was gray. Not from age, but from the realization that his perimeter was porous.
"The Italians are moving fast," Leo said, setting a encrypted tablet on the mahogany desk. "Scalia’s boys took the dock in Gary this morning. They didn't burn it; they just parked three semi-trucks across the gates and told our drivers we were out of business."
Marcus didn't look at the tablet. He was looking at the corner of his desk, where a small, folded piece of lined paper sat under a glass paperweight.
A-
"Where is the girl?" Marcus asked.
"She’s at the gate, boss. It's three o'clock. Her school let out early because of the ice."
"Let her in."
When Amara entered the study, she wasn't wearing the rabbit backpack. She was carrying a blue plastic grocery bag from Aldi with something heavy at the bottom. She marched straight to Marcus’s desk, climbed into the high-backed leather chair beside him without being asked, and dropped the bag onto his leather blotter.
It made a wet, heavy thud.
"What's in the bag, Amara?" Marcus asked, his voice low.
"Potatoes," she said, pulling out a five-pound sack of Russets. "My mom got them on sale. But that's not why I'm here."
She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a greasy, folded printout from a receipt printer. It was covered in blue ink annotations in a shaky, blocky six-year-old handwriting.
"Your books are wrong," she said, pointing a grubby finger at line twelve of the printout.
Leo stepped forward, his hand hovering near his holster. "Kid, you don't know what you're looking at. That’s multi-tiered shell corporate accounting for maritime freight."
Amara looked up at Leo with the absolute, terrifying detachment of a surgeon looking at a resident.
"You have twenty-four crates of lithium batteries listed under 'Dry Produce' from a warehouse in Cicero," she said, her voice completely level. "If you put batteries in the same shed as the wet lettuce, the salt air from Lake Michigan gets into the boxes. My uncle tried that with his boat batteries. They didn't blow up, but they lost three volts each. You're losing twelve thousand dollars every time a ship leaves for Milwaukee."
Marcus stared at the printout.
It wasn't a guess. It was an inventory audit of his most secure secondary holding—a facility managed by a man named Victor Vance, whom Marcus had suspected of skimming for six months but hadn't been able to prove because the paper trail was buried under three layers of offshore LLCs.
A six-year-old girl in a Target coat had found the discrepancy by reading the weight distribution columns like a grocery bill.
"Who told you about the lithium?" Marcus’s voice dropped an octave.
"Nobody," Amara said, swinging her legs. "Batteries are heavy. Lettuce is light. If the truck weighs six tons when the manifest says four, somebody is stealing your carrots or your copper."
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Marcus looked at Leo. The big bodyguard’s mouth was slightly open.
"Get Victor Vance on the secure line," Marcus said, his fingers tightening on his armrests until the leather groaned. "Tell him to bring his passport and the keys to the Cicero yard. If he’s not in this room in forty minutes, tell him I’m sending the girl to audit his mother’s nursing home."
