The Mob Boss Said My Father Owed Him a Life, So He Took Mine to Keep novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Last Boat
On the 9:15 ferry, Rocco Ferrante tells Grace in front of her crew that her father's theft killed his brother; she hands in her badge and gets into his car on her own feet.
Two men stepped off the gangway ahead of the last passengers, and one of them said my name.
"Grace Delmonico."
I was standing at the foot of the ramp on the 9:15 boat from Jamestown with my ticket punch in my hand.
I had said "Watch your step" to about four hundred people that day.
I looked up, and the man in the dark overcoat was already looking at me.
He was tall and broad through the shoulders, with a close black beard and a scar that cut through his left eyebrow.
Under the sodium lights on the dock his eyes were the flat gray of the water behind him.
I knew who he was before he said another word.
Everybody who grew up on Federal Hill knew the face of the man who sat in the chair at the head of the Ferrante family.
"That's me," I said.
"Anything wrong with your ticket?"
The deckhand beside me, who is twenty and eats his lunch on the rail, laughed once and stopped.
The man didn't laugh.
At the foot of the dock a long black sedan was parked with its engine running and its back door shut.
"My name is Rocco Ferrante," he said.
"Eight months ago your father walked out of my house with the family's second set of books."
The six passengers still coming down the ramp slowed.
A woman with a rolling suitcase stopped dead.
"The week after he went," Rocco said, "my brother Dario was found on the Cranston road with his throat cut."
He said it in an even voice, the voice of a man reading a bill.
"He was thirty-one."
My mouth had gone dry.
"I'm sorry about your brother," I said.
"I haven't spoken to my father since March."
"I know," Rocco said.
"Then you know I can't help you."
"You can't."
He took one step closer, and the two men at his back didn't move.
"But you're what's left of him in Providence," he said.
"Your father is a coward who ran.
"A man died because he ran."
His eyes stayed on me.
"Somebody is going to answer for that, and it won't be him, because I can't find him."
"So it's me," I said.
"So it's you," Rocco said.
I looked past him at the deckhands standing along the rail.
I looked at the walk-ons holding their phones low and pretending they weren't filming.
I looked at the wheelhouse window, where the captain stood with a mug in his hand.
I have worked on that boat six years.
He was the one who hired me when I was twenty and told my mother he'd look after me.
"Captain," I called.
"Tell him I work here."
He looked down at the deck.
He took a long time looking at the deck.
Then he turned around and went back into the wheelhouse, and the door clicked shut.
The deckhand beside me made a small noise in his throat.
"Grace," he whispered.
"Do something."
I was standing on a steel dock in my work boots, in a navy fleece with a punch in my hand, in front of a man everyone in the state was afraid of.
I buried my mother four years ago and paid for the casket in cash, out of tips.
I had never in my life begged a man for anything.
I wasn't going to start on the Bay dock.
I put the punch in the pocket of my fleece.
I lifted the lanyard over my head and walked up the ramp to the wheelhouse door.
I knocked on it twice and pushed it open.
The captain sat at the chart table with his back to me.
I laid the laminated badge in his hand, folded his fingers over it, and said, "Keep it warm for me."
He didn't turn around.
I went back down the ramp.
The deckhand had his hand over his mouth.
Rocco hadn't moved.
His eyes were on my face, and I realized he had been waiting to see whether I would run.
"I'm not going to fight you in front of these people," I said.
"I'd rather you didn't film my face," I told the walk-ons.
Rocco didn't answer.
"I don't know where my father is," I said to him.
"I don't know what's in those books.
"If you take me, you take a girl who knows nothing, and you still won't have him."
"Then you'll be a long time answering," he said.
His voice didn't change at all.
I walked past him toward the black car.
The man at the wheel looked straight ahead.
A walk-on passenger was crying quietly into her scarf, and I didn't know her.
I stopped at the back door and turned around.
"If I'm going to be your hostage," I said, loud enough for every phone on the dock, "then I'll walk to it myself."
Something moved in his face and was gone.
He came around the front of the car.
He was close enough that I could smell wool and cold air and some dark, clean soap.
I braced for his hand on my arm.
It didn't come.
He opened the back door himself and stood beside it with his hands at his sides, a full foot of air between his sleeve and mine.
I noticed that.
God help me, I noticed it before I noticed anything else.
I got in on my own feet.
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