Read Chapter 31: The Debt Collectors

The knock came at five in the morning, three hard raps against the weathered door of the Red Hook safe house. Jack was awake before the second one landed, his hand already around the Colt on the nightstand. The wound in his side screamed as he swung his legs off the cot, a wet heat spreading through the bandage.

He moved through the dark room, stepping over Foley, who had insisted on sleeping by the door since the ambush. Foley stirred, hand going to his own pistol, but Jack shook his head. One man out there. Maybe two. No engine running.

Jack opened the door a crack. A thin man in a black wool coat stood on the stoop, hat pulled low. His face was pale, almost gray, and his eyes were the color of cold harbor water. Jack knew him. Knew his kind.

"O'Malley sends his regards," the man said. His voice was flat, like he was reading a ship manifest. "You're three weeks past due, Malloy. He wants to talk."

Jack kept the door at chest height, blocking the view of the room behind him. "He knows where to find me."

"He does. He also knows where your father sleeps." The man tilted his head. "And your brother. Though I hear the brother's been harder to pin down lately."

Jack's jaw tightened. "Give me twenty-four hours."

"You've had thirty days." The man reached into his coat. Jack tensed, but the hand came out empty, holding only a slip of paper. He pushed it through the crack. "The interest's gone up. Twenty-four hours, Malloy. Then we take the house."

The man turned and walked off into the gray dawn, his footsteps fading before Jack even looked at the paper.

The figure on it made his stomach drop. Not the loan amount—he'd been tracking that—but the interest. Usury dressed up in clean numbers. The O'Malleys knew he was wounded, knew his crew was shaken, knew he was fighting a war on two fronts. They were circling like gulls over a dead fish.

Foley appeared behind him, squinting at the paper. "That's robbery."

"That's business." Jack folded the paper and shoved it in his pocket. "The O'Malleys run the gambling halls from here to Boston. They don't care who wins between me and Frank. They just care that they get paid."

"How much you got?"

Jack didn't answer. He went to the iron stove in the corner, pried up a loose floorboard, and pulled out the cash box. He counted it twice, though he already knew the sum. The money from the last three shipments, the reserve he'd been holding for Chicago, the emergency fund he'd promised himself he'd never touch.

He was short. Short by almost eight hundred dollars.

"I need to make a call," he said.

---

An hour later, Jack stood in the back room of a Greenpoint haberdashery, a phone pressed to his ear. The shop smelled of wool and camphor, a cover that had served the syndicate well for two years. On the other end of the line, a voice crackled through static.

"Malloy. Voss told me you'd be calling." The man's accent was pure Chicago stockyards, all rough edges and steel.

"I need money, Coleman. Quick."

"You need a lot of things. The question is what I get."

Jack closed his eyes, picturing the map of Brooklyn in his head. Frank's warehouse on the river. The distribution points in Williamsburg. The network of half-truths and silent partners that had taken him five years to build. "Frank's territory. Once it's mine, you get the Fulton Street docks. Exclusive."

"That's a promise you can't keep if you're dead. And I hear you got a hole in your side." A pause. "I hear the O'Malleys are squeezing you dry."

Word traveled fast on the waterfront. Faster than bullets, sometimes.

"The O'Malleys get paid today," Jack said. "Then I'm clean. And Frank's running out of friends."

"You're asking me to float you through a war."

"I'm asking you to bet on a sure thing."

The line went quiet for a long moment. Jack could hear the man breathing, could hear the distant clatter of a typewriter in some Chicago office. Finally, Coleman spoke. "I'll wire you a thousand. It comes out of your first month's profits after Frank falls. And if you fall first, I'll find your brother and collect from him."

Jack's blood went cold. "You leave Patrick out of this."

"He's family. That makes him collateral." The line clicked dead.

Jack stood there with the receiver in his hand, the dial tone buzzing like a hornet. He wanted to throw the phone through the window, but he didn't. He set it down carefully, the way his father had taught him to handle church collection plates.

The money would arrive by noon. It would cover the O'Malleys, leave him a few hundred for operations, and nothing else. No reserves. No cushion. If the Chicago deal fell through, if Frank hit him again before the guns arrived, he was finished.

But if he took Frank down fast, if he moved before the rumor of his weakness could spread further, he could still win. He had to win. There was no other version of this story where everyone he loved walked away breathing.

---

At one o'clock, Jack met the O'Malley collector at the Emerald Dock, a ramshackle pier south of the Navy Yard where the harbor stank of fish and diesel. The gray man was there with two heavies, their hands resting on the butts of their pistols. Jack came alone, the cash in a canvas satchel.

He set it on the crate between them. "Count it."

The gray man didn't move. "I trust you, Malloy. That's a mistake on my part, but I trust you." He picked up the satchel and handed it to one of the heavies. "We're square. For now. But the next time you borrow, the terms will be worse."

"There won't be a next time."

The gray man almost smiled. "There's always a next time." He turned and walked away, the heavies falling in behind him.

Jack stood on the pier and watched them go, the wind off the harbor cutting through his coat. The wound in his side throbbed in time with his pulse. He'd paid the O'Malleys. He'd kept his father's house. But he'd drained himself dry to do it, and every man who knew it would be circling within the week.

He lit a cigarette and stared out at the water. The sky was low and gray, promising rain. Somewhere across the river, Frank was doing the same math, counting Jack's resources, waiting for the moment of weakness to strike.

But Frank didn't know about Chicago. Frank didn't know about the guns moving east. And Frank didn't know that Jack had finally stopped thinking of this as survival.

This was no longer about building an empire or escaping the waterfront's poverty. This was about eliminating a threat so completely that no one would ever come for his family again. The O'Malleys had seen weakness. Coleman had seen weakness. Frank had seen weakness.

Jack dropped the cigarette and ground it into the splintered wood. The money was gone. The reserves were gone. There was nothing left to protect him now except the war he'd been avoiding.

He walked off the pier with his hands in his pockets, a new clarity settling into his bones. The gentle approach had failed. The careful planning, the measured response, the hope that he could win without becoming what Patrick feared—all of it had left him bleeding money and bleeding trust.

Frank had to die. Not just be beaten. Not just be pushed out of the market. Dead, in the ground, with no chance of resurrection. And Jack would do it with his own hands if he had to, because that was the only future left. The only future where his brother could walk the streets without looking over his shoulder. The only future where his father's house stayed in the family.

He had made a promise to Patrick in that safe house, a promise to prove he wasn't a monster. But monsters were made by necessity, and right now, necessity was all Jack had left.

Walking into the gloom, he pulled the collar of his coat up against the wind and started planning. The O'Malleys were paid. The clock was ticking.

And somewhere in Brooklyn, Frank Malloy was still breathing.