Chapter 7: The Container

I got into his car on three conditions.

I would sit where I could reach the door, my phone would keep recording, and my cousin would get the license plate.

Raimondo Corvi agreed to all three without a word.

He had his driver read the plate out loud while I typed it.

The East River docks were dark by the time we got there, with cranes standing over the water.

Rows of containers stood in the floodlights, and men in grey coats stood between them.

Raimondo walked me down the third row and stopped in front of a steel box with a red tag on its door.

I read the tag.

It listed the consignee as N. Brancato, and it carried a signature that said, Signed for by D. Brancato, authorized.

"Open it," he said. "I'd like you to see it before I say a word."

Two of his men cut the seal and pulled the doors apart.

Wooden crates filled the container to the roof.

Each lid was burned with a small crest, and I had seen that crest on a pistol grip two nights ago.

"The missing shipment," I said.

"Fifty million dollars of Brancato guns, yes."

He said it flatly.

"The raid at the north warehouse took nothing. The police found an empty building. These crates left it the night before, in a truck with no plates."

I turned to him.

"Then who moved them?"

"Someone with the schedule, the keys and a driver." He looked at the crates. "And with your sister's signature."

"Delfina forged my name?"

"Delfina wrote her own initial on a form, and she wrote yours as the owner."

He nodded at the manifest in his man's hand.

"If you had signed today, you would have owned fifty million in stolen guns on a dock the police were about to search."

"And if I refused, the dock would have reported me as a thief who wouldn't claim her goods."

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