Chapter 21 - Whispers in the Harbor
The salt spray of the harbor bit into my face as I stepped off the private launch onto Pier 42. Two weeks had passed since the night Morosco’s assault team turned my ancestral home into a shooting gallery, and the city’s underground was still vibrating with the aftershocks. In the criminal underworld, blood in the water always drew sharks, but this time, the sharks had learned a very hard lesson: Julian Hale wasn't just a name whispered in smoke-filled rooms anymore; he was a reckoning.
Marcus flanked my left side, his hand resting comfortably inside his overcoat near the butt of his suppressed Glock. Behind us, six blacked-out SUVs idled, their engines rumbling with a low, predatory hum against the industrial drone of the shipping yards.
"The dock master is waiting in the container office, Boss," Marcus said, his voice clipped over the sound of a roaring gantry crane lifting a forty-foot container onto a cargo ship fifty yards away. "He says the shipment from Marseille cleared customs this morning, but there was an extra pallet flagged by automated tracking that wasn't on our original manifest."
I pulled my heavy wool coat tighter against the offshore wind, my eyes scanning the labyrinth of stacked shipping containers that stretched out toward the horizon. "An extra pallet? Who authorized it?"
"That's the problem," Marcus replied, pulling a folded manifest sheet from his pocket and handing it to me. "The digital signature matches a clearance code that hasn’t been active since Vincent went down. Someone inside the port authority is still trying to play both sides of the fence."
I glanced down at the paper. The ink was crisp, but the seal was an old, secondary corporate stamp used during the height of my brother’s clandestine operations. Vincent might have been rotting in a Vladivostok hold or feeding fish in the freezing depths of the Pacific by now, but the ghost of his conspiracy was still breathing.
"Let's go pay our respects to the dock master," I said coldly, walking toward the corrugated metal office building at the end of the pier.
May you like
The door creaked open as Marcus pushed it forward. Inside, an old man named Henderson, who had managed the East Coast shipping logistics for two decades, sat trembling behind a scarred wooden desk, a half-empty mug of coffee shaking violently in his grip.
When he saw me fill the doorway, his face turned the color of stale parchment. He stood up so fast his chair crashed backward onto the concrete floor.
