Chapter 6 - The Chop Shop in Bridgeport
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The blood drained so fast from Valerie’s face under her contour makeup that she looked like a corpse standing in the snow.
"My brother’s garage?!" Valerie shrieked, grabbing Arthur’s arm with both hands as sheer terror overtook her greed. "Arthur—no! Tell me you didn't keep the two million in cash at Ricky’s garage—Ricky also had three kilos of the Albanians' uncut cocaine hidden in that floor safe that he was holding for Luan Krasniqi! If your son took everything in that safe this morning, Luan will think Ricky and I stole his shipment!"
Arthur spun on Valerie in the middle of the snowy driveway outside the pier gates, his eyes wide with fury. "Your idiot brother was holding three kilos of Albanian blow inside the safe I paid him ten grand a month to guard for my emergency cash reserve?!"
"Ricky needed extra cash to pay off his gambling markers at the riverboat!" Valerie sobbed hysterically, scrambling back toward the rented Lincoln town car. "We have to get to Bridgeport right now before Luan’s men show up at noon!"
Inside the iron fence of Pier 12, Damon didn't even bother watching their town car spin its tires in the slush as it raced back toward the expressway. He simply pulled out his encrypted phone and sent a two-word text message to his younger brother:
Heading south.
Twenty minutes later, the rented Lincoln skidded to a halt outside Vane Auto Body & Custom under the rusted steel trestles of the Stevenson Expressway in Bridgeport.
The heavy corrugated steel rolling door of the garage was standing wide open to the freezing December wind.
Arthur and Valerie rushed inside across the grease-stained concrete floor.
The four hydraulic car lifts were empty. In the back office behind the frosted glass partition, the heavy five-hundred-pound steel floor safe had been ripped straight out of the concrete slab with a tow-truck winch chain—and sitting in a wooden swivel chair in the center of the empty garage bay, with his ankles duct-taped to the chair legs and a bruised purple eye, was Valerie’s twenty-four-year-old brother, Ricky.
And leaning casually against the fender of a matte-black Dodge Charger Hellcat parked ten feet away, tossing a heavy silver Zippo lighter from hand to hand while six heavily armed South Side soldiers in black leather jackets stood around the perimeter with compact submachine guns slung under their arms, was twenty-five-year-old Lucas Sterling.
Lucas was the brother everyone in the Chicago underworld feared most in a dark alley. While Julian used lawyers and Damon used union iron, Lucas had his grandfather Lorenzo’s explosive, ice-cold killer instinct—and his mother Evelyn’s exact high cheekbones and piercing dark eyes.
"Ricky!" Valerie screamed, running toward her brother’s chair—until two of Lucas’s soldiers stepped into her path, forcing her back three steps without even touching her.
"Stay on the grease mat, Valerie," Lucas said softly, snapping the lid of his silver Zippo shut and walking slowly forward until he stood between his father and the woman in the white fur coat. "The floor over here was just mopped."
"Lucas," Arthur said, trying to summon the paternal authority that had worked when Lucas was fifteen years old. "Untie the kid and put my two million back on the seat of that car. You’ve made your point. Your mother is upset, and I’m going up to Lake Forest tonight to apologize to her in person and put this family back together."
Lucas stopped four feet from his father and tilted his head slightly, letting out a soft, humorless laugh that raised the hairs on the back of Valerie’s neck.
"Apologize to her?" Lucas repeated quietly. "Dad, when I was nine years old and a kid at St. Ignatius called Mom a gangster’s whore on the playground, you told me that if I ever came home without breaking the hand of anyone who disrespected my mother, I wasn't allowed to sit at your dinner table."
Lucas’s dark eyes shifted from his father’s pale face to Valerie’s trembling right hand.
"And last night," Lucas whispered, his voice dropping into a register so lethal that Ricky started whimpering behind his gag in the chair, "this gutter rat walked into our family’s anniversary dinner, slapped my mother across the face hard enough to leave a bruise... and you stood there for three seconds trying to decide whether you were going to leave Mom for her."
"It was a mistake!" Valerie cried, backing up against the cold metal side of the car lift as Lucas took a slow step toward her. "I was drunk! I had too much champagne before I came in! I didn't mean to hit her—I swear to God, Lucas, please!"
"Too much champagne," Lucas mused, nodding slowly. "See, that’s one problem. The second problem is that when my guys pulled Dad’s two-million-dollar cash box out of Ricky’s floor at six this morning—which, by the way, Dad, has already been donated to Mom’s charitable children’s hospital wing—we found three kilos of Luan Krasniqi’s cocaine sitting at the bottom of the hole, along with Ricky’s notebook."
Lucas pulled a spiral-bound ledger stained with motor oil from his jacket pocket and flipped it open.
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"Turns out Ricky and Valerie didn't just use your safe to hide Albanian blow, Dad," Lucas said, looking at his father with savage amusement. "For the last four months, every time you told Valerie where our cigarette and liquor trucks were routing through Indiana while you were pillow-talking at the Four Seasons... Valerie texted the route schedules to her brother Ricky, who sold them to Luan Krasniqi’s hijackers for twenty grand a truck!"
Arthur’s head snapped toward Valerie, his face turning purple with apoplectic fury as the truth hit him like a sledgehammer. "Those three hijacked trucks in Gary last month—that was you?! You were selling my routes to the Albanians?!"
