Chapter 8 - The Ledger of the Street
The room seemed to tilt on its axis.
Mara didn't move. She couldn't. The white apron around her waist felt like a lead apron, dragging her down into the floorboards. Around her, the gaze of every customer, every server, and every busboy converged upon her like spotlights on a condemned prisoner standing before a firing squad.
Chloe, standing twenty feet away by the service station, covered her mouth with both hands, letting out a stifled, terrified gasp. The five hundred dollars in cash still lay untouched on the corner of the mahogany bar rail, gleaming beneath the green pendant lamp like counterfeit script.
"What did they say, Frank?" Mara whispered, her voice barely an audible breath over the hum of the ice machine.
Frank didn't look at the phone. He looked at her with eyes that looked like they were already mourning her.
"Black sedan," Frank whispered, reading the words from his memory like a coroner reading an autopsy manifest. "Waiting at the loading dock on the alley side. You have three minutes to walk through the back exit. If you don't step through that door before the clock hits twelve-fifteen... two men are coming in through the front to carry you out."
Mara’s breath caught in her throat.
"Tell them no," she said, her voice rising in a sudden, wild spike of panic. "Frank, tell them I left! Tell them I went out the front! Tell them—"
"Mara," Frank interrupted, his voice dropping into a low, agonizing register of grandfatherly despair. "It's Adrian Moretti. You don't tell him no. If you run out the front, they pick you up at the corner of State Street. If you go to your apartment, they're already sitting on your stoop. And if you stay in this bar... they burn this place to the ground with sixty people inside just to prove they don't get stood up."
The truth was a blunt instrument that crushed the last remnant of her denial.
Mara looked down at her hands. They were still shaking, but beneath the trembling, that familiar, stubborn spark of defiance—the same pride that had kept her from crawling into a ball when her father died, the same anger that had driven her across the floor to kiss a crime boss—stirred in the cold ash of her fear.
She reached out.
May you like
With two fingers, she snatched the five hundred dollars in cash off the bar counter, shoved the folded bills deep into the pocket of her pink uniform, and looked Frank dead in the eyes.
"Give me my coat," Mara said.
