The Mob Boss Said My Father Owed Him a Life, So He Took Mine to Keep novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The Life-Ring Locker
The wheelhouse key hung on a nail inside the engine-room door, where the old engineer had shown me it was kept the day I started.
I had known that for six years, and I didn't tell Rocco I was using it.
I told him to wait at the gangway, and I went up alone.
It was after midnight, and the ferry rocked gently against her fenders, black and silent, with a single work light burning over the car deck.
Rocco came up behind me anyway.
He stood in the wheelhouse door with the overcoat open and his hand near his hip.
"There's no one here," he said.
"I know that," I said.
"Then why are you whispering?" he asked.
"Because it's where he taught me," I said.
The wheelhouse was small and warm with old coffee and diesel.
A chart table stood under the forward windows, and a brass clock, and the big wheel.
Behind the door, bolted to the wall, was a locker the size of a footlocker, painted red, with a stenciled sign: LIFE RINGS. CLEAR ACCESS.
A new brass padlock hung on the hasp.
It was the only new thing in the room.
I had walked past it every night for eight months.
"Your father bought that," Rocco said.
"In the spring.
"The captain said it was a present."
"A present I'd know when I needed," I said.
"What's the combination?" Rocco asked.
I stared at the dial.
Four numbers.
My father wasn't a man who took risks with other people's property, and he would not have chosen a number he thought I might not know.
I thought about everything he had ever taught me.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Mob Boss Said My Father Owed Him a Life, So He Took Mine to Keep are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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