They Made Me Run On a Broken Leg. Don Had My Back novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The House in Bay Ridge
Luca cleans Moira's frame, Damiano sets terms, and she learns the Hourigans' thefts carry her login.
The SUV was cold inside, and I started shaking the second the door shut.
Luca sat beside me with my leg across his knees.
Damiano sat in the front passenger seat and watched the road.
The driver didn't look at me once.
"Drink this," Luca said, and put a bottle of water in my hand.
It was the first thing anyone had handed me all day that I didn't have to wonder about.
I drank half of it and typed to Eamon with my thumbs clumsy.
Where are you?
His answer came at once.
Babe I'm so sorry. We got boxed in. Mom thinks they'll leave you alone. Just stay where you are.
I looked at the words until Luca leaned over and read them too.
"That's a man with a good lie," he said.
"It's a man who's been practicing," Damiano said, without turning his head.
I turned the phone face down on my thigh.
My throat hurt.
I did not cry in front of them.
The house was in Bay Ridge, on a quiet street of brick houses with shade trees, and it had a porch and a flag in the window.
It looked like a place where a retired fireman lived.
Damiano carried me up the steps himself, though I told him twice that I had crutches.
He didn't answer either time.
He set me down on a kitchen chair, and Luca laid out saline, gauze and a roll of tape on the table.
"This will sting," Luca said.
"Everything stings."
"Good. That means you still have nerves."
He cleaned the four pin sites one at a time, and the saline ran pink down my shin into a towel.
I gripped the edge of the table and watched Damiano lean in the doorway with his arms folded.
The scar on his left wrist was a shiny patch of old burn, pale against his cuff.
He caught me looking and I looked away.
"You're going to ask why my people were on Fulton Street," he said.
"I'm going to ask what you want with me."
"Nothing."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the true one." He came in and sat across from me. "You're not what I was looking for. The Hourigans were."
"Why?"
"Hourigan Freight hauls for my family. Six years. They've been shorting every container that comes through the Brooklyn docks and selling what's missing."
"Selling it where?"
"Everywhere. This year alone it's nine hundred thousand dollars."
I laughed, because it was so far from anything I knew.
"I do the books for Hourigan Freight," I said. "I'd have seen that."
Damiano and Luca looked at each other.
It was a short look and I hated it.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing yet," Damiano said. "You'll stay here."
"Excuse me?"
"Until the frame's off. Nine days." He said it plainly, and I remembered I had not told him. "You can't climb a flight of stairs without help, your fiancé's family just put you in a road, and there are men who'd like to ask you the questions I've been asking."
"That isn't a choice."
"Then make it one. My terms are three."
He held up one finger.
"You stay in this house until the frame comes off."
A second finger.
"I don't come into your room unless you ask me to."
A third.
"And you don't leave without telling me where you're going. Not because I'll stop you. Because I'd like to know where to find you if it goes wrong."
Luca snorted. "That's the most romantic thing he's ever said to a woman."
"Luca," Damiano said.
"I'm taping, I'm taping."
I looked at Damiano for a long moment.
I thought about my apartment in Astoria, which was Eamon's apartment, and my father's lunch pail on the closet shelf, and the Buick pulling away.
"Why would you do this?" I asked.
"Because I saw your leg," he said.
That was all.
It was not an answer, and somehow it was enough.
"Fine," I said. "Until the frame's off."
"Good."
"But I want to see the books."
"Which books?"
"Whatever you think I'd have seen. If my name is on a theft I want to read it first."
He stood up and left the room.
When he came back he had a laptop under one arm and a single printed page in his hand.
He put the page on the table in front of me and turned it so I could read it.
It was a bank transfer record, dated six weeks earlier.
The amount was ninety thousand dollars.
At the bottom, where it said who authorized it, there was one line.
Authorized by: N. Keane.
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