Chapter 4: The Door

"Where is he?" I said.

"Alive," the lawyer said.

"He's in the kitchen, and he's refusing to leave it."

We were in the back of the second car, and the driver took the turns without slowing for the lights.

I had my father's name in my phone as Dad, and my thumb hovered over it.

The lawyer shook his head.

"Mr. Ferraro asked that you see him first."

My father's house sat at the end of a street of small brick houses on the south side of Syracuse.

I had grown up in it, and the porch swing was still where he'd hung it the summer I turned nine.

The front door now lay flat on the porch, and the frame was splintered at the lock.

Two of Dominic's men stood in the yard, and a third was sweeping glass off the steps.

I ran past all of them.

My father was sitting at the kitchen table with a cast iron pan in his lap.

He was sixty-eight, a retired bus mechanic with forearms, and his hands were steady on the handle.

"Dad."

"Pamela-bean," he said, and put the pan down.

I knelt and wrapped my arms around his neck, and he smelled like coffee and motor oil, the way he always had.

"Four men," he said into my hair.

"They came at four in the morning and asked where my daughter lived."

"What did you tell them?"

"That she lived in a nice place on Westcott with a legislator," he said.

"Then they laughed and told me I was out of date."

Behind him, at the counter, stood Dominic.

He was in the same charcoal suit, but he had a gun in his belt, and a long cut drying along the back of his hand.

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