Chapter 5 - The Ledger and the River
By four in the morning, the apartment smelled like surgical spirit, old leather, and copper.
Dante lay flat on his back on the settee, his chest bandaged in thick, clinical layers of gauze secured with medical tape he kept in the desk. The flattened lead slug sat in a small glass ashtray on the side table, beside the curved scalpel and three blood-soaked sponges.
Nora sat in the leather wingback chair opposite him, her flannel shirt stained dark at the cuffs, her knees pulled up to her chin. She was holding a heavy, leather-bound ledger she’d pulled from the bottom shelf—the kind with marbled paper covers and hand-written columns dating back to the late nineteen-seventies.
"You keep a ledger of who you’ve killed?" she asked, her voice flat with exhaustion.
"I keep a ledger of who I’ve owed," Dante replied from the couch. His voice was stronger now, though his face still had the color of wet lime. "In my business, people remember when you take something. They forget when you give it back. The ledger keeps the math honest."
Nora flipped a page, her eyes scanning the neat, fountain-pen entries—names, dates, docks, amounts. Pier 42: Fifty cases Scotch. Paid in full. / November '84: Jimmy 'The Crow' Marino. Settled.
"And Tony?" she asked, stopping on a page dated three years ago.
"Tony wants the future," Dante said, staring up at the plaster medallion in the center of the ceiling where a brass chandelier hung unlit. "He thinks the future belongs to algorithms and shell companies in the Caymans. He doesn't understand that a city isn't code. A city is concrete, grease, and people who need to know that if they give you their word, you won't throw them in the river when the contract gets hard."
"Like you threw the guy in the armored sedan?" Nora asked, her gaze lifting from the page.
Dante’s eyes flicked toward her, sharp and dark. "I didn't throw him. He drove himself into the river because he thought he could outrun a debt he’d been dodging since the Brooklyn bridge tolls went up." He paused, his heavy chest rising slowly. "Just like you thought you could outrun a hundred thousand dollars in student loans by sleeping under the GWB."
Nora stiffened. "That's different."
"Is it?" Dante turned his head on the bolster, wincing slightly as his side pulled against the stitches. "You were dying by inches in an alcove because a hospital wouldn't look at your mother without a credit card in the file. How is that different from a bullet in the ribs?"
Nora didn't answer. She closed the ledger with a heavy thud that raised a small cloud of dust from the wool carpet.
"What happens now?" she asked, staring at the ash in the grate. "Tony knows you're here. Or he will as soon as his boys check the salt sheds."
"Now," Dante said, his hand sliding slowly out from under the blanket to rest on the edge of the low oak table between them, "we wait for sunrise. And then we go pay a visit to the Harbor Commission."
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"The Harbor Commission? Are you insane? You just had a slug dug out of your latissimus dorsi with a kitchen knife by a homeless girl in a damp coat."
"Which means," Dante said, a grim, humorless shadow of a smile touching his lips, "they won't be expecting us until noon."
