Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 71

“That’s my street.”

“It’s a lot of streets.”

“That’s my building.” I point past his arm at the white square. But he doesn’t turn to look at it, which is how I know he already knows where it is. “It’s the only one that isn’t colored in.”

Niko exhales through his nose. He sets the beer down. “Ask him,” he says. “I’m just gonna mess up the answer.”

“I’m asking you.”

“I know. I just…” He rubs the back of his neck.

“Is it bad?”

He sighs. “Just ask him,” he says again. “It’s better that way.”

Before I can keep pushing, my phone starts to ring. I look down and see that Priya is calling me, which is really weird, given the late hour.

“Pri? Everything okay?”

“Are you sitting down?” she asks. “Because I’ve been on the phone for an hour and a half and you’re going to want to be.”

“What happened?”

“Hearth & Harvest canceled.”

My knees go a little loose. “Canceled what? Thursday’s order?”

“Everything. Thursday, next week, the standing order, the account. All of it.” Something rustles on her end. “I got an email when I was closing up shop. ‘Effective immediately, we are unable to continue servicing your account.’ No reason. I called the emergency line and got Jasper. Jasper’s known us for three years, but he wouldn’t explain a damn thing.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“He said, and I’m quoting him, ‘Priya, I can’t get into it, and I’m sorry. Please don’t call back.’ Then he hung up on me.” She takes a breath. “Delilah, they’ve got our flour. All of it. Our butter, our chocolate, the dairy. We have enough to get through next Wednesday and nothing after that.”

I look at the white square on the table.

Niko’s hand is still lying flat over the corner with the names on it.

I can’t shake the feeling that all of this is somehow connected.

“Don’t do anything,” I tell her. “Don’t call anybody else. I’m coming.”

I come out of the shower with a towel around my waist.

Delilah’s gone.

Her clothes are still in the pile where she left them. My shirt is gone off the floor. I hear her voice downstairs. Then the front door.

I get dressed fast. Trousers and a sweater, no socks, shoving my feet into a pair of loafers. A feeling of wrongness is worming its way through me.

I race down the stairs and almost bowl over Niko, who’s standing at the bottom with a pale, stricken expression.

“She’s gone,” he says. “Stepan took her. She wanted to go to the bakery.”

“Why?”

“Her baker called. Their supplier dropped them. The whole account, with no warning and no reason given.”

I stop. Suppliers don’t fire their best-paying customers on a Friday night in February. Not without a phone call from somebody with a reason to make one.

“There’s more,” Niko says.

I glare at him. “Then spit it the f**k out.”

“She was in there with the map.” He takes a pull off the beer and then sets it down on the hall table. “She had enough time to find her lot.”

Finally, I stop moving.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

This is all f*****g wrong.

“What did she say?”

“She asked what it was. I told her it was your property work. She said, That’s my street. I said, It’s a lot of streets. But she’s not stupid, man. She asked why it’s the only one that isn’t colored in.” He shrugs helplessly. “I told her to ask you.”

“That was your grand intervention? What the f**k do I pay you for?”

“What was I supposed to do, Kane? Lie to her face while she’s standing there in your shirt?” He scowls at me. “I told you, dude! Two months ago, I told you to tell her before somebody else does. Well, too late for that now.”

There’s no point in arguing with him. He was right then and he’s right now, but it doesn’t do anybody a damn bit of good.

There’s no point in hoping this all blows over, either. Lilah isn’t stupid or passive. She ruined her ex-husband’s life with dogged persistence, so she’s certain to keep digging until she finds a real answer, too.

“Get Yuri,” I say. “Have him meet me in Sunset Park.”

“What about Delilah?”

“I’m going to her myself.”

I take the Escalade. Stepan is already gone with her, but that’s fine, because I don’t want a driver tonight. I want the wheel in my hands so I have something to do with them.

The bakery lights are on, even though it’s midnight. The back door is propped with a milk crate. Josef stands in the alley with his hands in his coat. He straightens when he sees me.

“She came in fast, sir,” he explains. “Didn’t say a word to me. Everything alright?”

“Get back to your post and keep your eyes peeled,” I bark as I stride past him. “If anything strange happens, come right to me.”

Inside, Priya sits on a stool with her phone cradled in both hands and her eyes red. Delilah has a legal pad on the steel table and her laptop open beside it.

She’s changed into work clothes and tied her hair up. She looks up at me with a squint-eyed glare. “Do you know anything about this?” she demands.

“No.”

She nods once, then turns back to scribbling notes on her legal pad. That’s one thin silver lining of this catastrophe: She doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to question me about the map yet.

But when she finds out both topics are my fault, the story will change.

That’s for f*****g sure.

“Okay,” she says aloud, sort of to me, sort of to Priya, but mostly to herself. “So. Hearth & Harvest bails without a reason, screws us over, and tells us not to call back.”

“Should we egg their offices?” Priya asks in a numb voice.

Delilah laughs miserably. “With what eggs? They’re the ones who sold us eggs, remember?”

“Oh. Yeah. Duh.” Her head slumps lower.

“Chin up, Pri. Here’s what we’re going to do,” Delilah announces. “We’re going to split the order up and plug the gaps for the time being. Bay Mill in Maspeth can do the flour and sugar, then we beg Corrado’s out on Long Island to rush-ship us butter, dairy, and chocolate. The expedited fee is gonna suck, but we don’t have much of a choice.”

“We could raise prices,” Priya suggests.

Delilah shakes her head. “Not a chance. I’m not screwing over our customers just because we got screwed over.”

“What do you need from me?” I interrupt.

She looks up properly. Whatever she was braced for, it wasn’t that. “That’s it? You’re not just seizing the wheel? No ‘let me handle it’?”

“You are handling it,” I remind her. “I’m merely asking how I can assist.”

She exhales noisily. “Security,” she says at last. “If somebody leaned on my supplier, then that somebody scares me a little bit. I don’t want my staff walking out to their cars alone.”

I nod. “Yuri’s on his way. He’ll guard the alley himself tonight and put a man on it after.”

“Not out front, though. Not standing over customers.”

“I’ll let him know.”

I recede into the background and let Delilah work. At two in the morning, she sends Priya home in a cab she pays for. By two-thirty, she has both orders confirmed by email and the delivery windows in writing.

She’s handling this, just like I knew she could.

I’m the one letting things spiral out of control.

Osip Vetrov.

That’s the name running through my head as I sit in the corner of the bakery.

A gray-haired, steely-eyed bastard. Old-school in every sense of the word. He came over to the States in 1991 with nothing and he has spent thirty-five years turning “nothing” into one chop shop, then ten more, then enough laundered cash to fill a bank, routed through repair invoices and scrap metal and a title insurance outfit in Sheepshead Bay.

He is not a killer by preference. More of a death-by-paperwork man. He buys judges, politicians, zoning committees—all the insidious little levers that make society tick.

He has wanted the waterfront for a decade and change. But he was always a step behind me. He never thought to do things my way—which is to say, in secret, through holding companies and ghost fronts. He just tried walking in the front door.

It seems he’s learned his lesson.

Now, he’s turned to playing dirty.

Because these latest things can only lead to one conclusion: Osip has finally worked out that he doesn’t need to buy the entire block to hurt me.

He just needs to get one key piece of it.

I’ll gut him myself before I let that happen.

I keep an eye on things as the week progresses.

On Monday, both deliveries arrive. Bay Mill at seven, Corrado’s at ten past nine. Delilah stands in the alley in her apron with a clipboard and counts every pallet before she signs.

By noon, the case is full and the ovens are running. Delilah is happy, and I’m almost ready to start breathing easy again.

That fragile peace lasts until Tuesday morning.

The health inspector comes in without warning. This is a new hire, one nobody in the building has ever seen before. Certainly not one I’ve bribed in the past.