The Don's Deadliest Obsession novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Oven Room

"Oven," I said. "He said oven. Not bakery."

We were in Tadeo's study at one in the morning, with Gaspare's brown ledger open between us and the picture of the baker on Ines's phone.

Nobody else in the room knew what I meant.

Tadeo stood behind me with both hands on the back of my chair, and I could feel him not touching my shoulders.

"There are two ovens," I said. "The one in our bakery, and the one at the old commissary on Bruckner Boulevard."

"The commissary," said Ines. "I thought it closed."

"It closed the winter after my mother died. Papa never sold it." I turned a page. "He still pays the gas on it every month, from an account I keep. I always thought it was for the insurance."

I put my finger on the line.

"Nobody has baked a loaf there in fifteen years. The gas is forty dollars a month, just enough to keep the pilot lit."

I slid the page toward him.

"Last week it was four hundred."

"Which means someone lights it," Tadeo said.

"Someone lights it tonight."

He was already reaching for his coat.

"You're staying here," he said.

"I'm the only one who knows the back stairs."

"Serafina."

"He wants the tape," I said. "Let me bring it."

I took the old recorder out of the drawer, with a blank tape in it that Ines had pulled from the clinic, and held it up.

Tadeo looked at it, and then at me, for the length of one slow breath.

"Door," he said at last. "Front door only. You walk in, you give it to him, and you don't step past the first table. My men take the back."

"Agreed."

"If he touches you, I won't wait for the signal."

"I know," I said, and found that I was smiling.

The commissary was a square brick box under the elevated tracks, with its windows painted over.

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