Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 72

From what Niko can gather via frantic calls to everyone we own inside the NYC Health Department, an anonymous caller reported mice in the dry storage area, spoiled dairy in the walk-in, and sewage beneath the sinks.

Those allegations are bullshit. But it only takes one foul-tempered inspector to turn them into a suspension of Delilah’s license to operate while they investigate further.

I’m at the corner in the car when he goes in. I sit there for two hours with my hands on my knees doing nothing.

In the end, she passes.

But only because she’s that f*****g good at what she does.

Yuri, seated inside, is texting me live reports as the inspection unfolds. From what he tells me, Lilah handed the man a three-ring binder with twelve months of sanitation logs initialed daily, a printout of the walk-in and freezer temperature records off the digital logger, and the pest control contract with the last six service reports stapled behind it.

That doesn’t mean he goes easy on her. He swabs. He checks behind the mixer and climbs on a stool to peer at the top of the hood. He finds one mistake, a cracked gasket on the reach-in, and gives her ten days to fix it.

But the damage is minimal. She lives to fight another day.

She comes out to the sidewalk after he leaves. It’s not that cold out as February fades, but she’s shaking so hard she has to hold her own elbows.

“Anonymous complaint,” she spits. “What a load of crap. You know what he told me? He said they get maybe two of those a year on a place like mine. Two a year!”

“You passed, though.”

“Yeah, because I’m a psycho who initials a log sheet every night at close.” She laughs and shakes her head in disgust. “Kane, if he’d come in on a Saturday in December, when there’s nine hundred cookies on every surface in this building and Cameron’s crying in the alley⁠—”

“He didn’t, though. You’re fine. Everything is going to be fine from now on.”

But I’m wrong about that.

The emails start that afternoon.

Somebody set up an address one character off from hers—an rn where the m goes, the oldest trick there is—and sent cancellations to two dozen booked customers.

We regret to inform you that, due to circumstances, we are unable to fulfill your order. Your deposit will be refunded.

Jolene only catches it because a woman calls in crying about her mother’s ruined ninetieth birthday.

Delilah pulls the order book. The physical one, not the software. Then she sits at the front counter with a landline handset against her ear for four straight hours and calls every single one of those customers, one at a time, and begs for their forgiveness.

“This is Delilah Dorsey, the owner. That email did not come from us. Your order is live. Read me your date and your name off your receipt and I’ll confirm it out loud.”

Most of them keep the order. Two are already angry at something else in their lives and want their money back. Delilah absorbs their rage, refunds them in full without arguing, and thanks them for their business.

Then she goes into the office and closes the door.

I let her have a few minutes to compose herself before I go in.

She’s sitting on the new steel cot with her hands over her face. “Somebody is doing this,” she says through her fingers. “Suppliers don’t quit the same week inspectors show up and emails start coming from a fake address. This is deliberate.”

“Yes.”

She drops her hands. “You agree with me?”

“I don’t see any other explanation.”

“Then who?”

“I’m finding out.”

She looks at me. I don’t know if she’s forgotten about the map entirely or simply set it aside for now. All I need is a little bit of time to make things right.

But Osip is proving to be elusive. Niko can’t find him. Neither can any of the dozen-plus men we have pounding the pavement, looking for signs of the Vetrov f**k who’s trying to ruin my woman’s life.

I just need time. Just a bit. Just a little.

I need Delilah to hold on for a little longer.

I shouldn’t have hoped, though.

The next day, a rented box truck backs into the loading area of the bakery and knocks out over ten feet of the concrete curb, the steel bollard by the roll gate, and a section of the brick apron where the delivery ramp meets the wall.

Then it pulls out, tires screeching, and disappears.

Josef gets the plate, but we can’t seem to find the owner. It’s either fake or stolen.

He also gets, on his phone, a ninety-second clip of two men creeping across the alley at four in the morning photographing the rear of the building, the gate, and the second-floor windows.

Delilah arrives, looks at the rubble, and for a moment, I’m sure she’s going to break down in tears.

Instead, she draws in a deep breath, then gets to work.

She calls her insurance broker, her contractor, and a debris removal company, and gets it all taken care of. She refuses to let me assist or offer so much as a penny to cover her losses.

Fine.

I’ll handle things my way.

By that afternoon, Yuri has located the k******e truck. From what we can tell, it was rented from a lot in Ozone Park on a license belonging to a man named Bruno Perry. When we track down Mr. Perry and pay him a visit, he shows us the cash he was paid by a known bookie associate of the Halyard Group.

We smash up his apartment and tell him not to take cash payments for hit-and-run assignments anymore, or else he’ll find himself involved in one on the receiving end.

Niko has the anonymous health complaint traced through a call center in Yonkers. That call center’s landlord? Halyard Group.

Anton finds Halyard’s counsel of record. Turns out the attorney shares a suite and a fax number with the title insurance company in Sheepshead Bay.

Niko lays it all on the map table Friday night and taps it. “It’s undeniable now,” he says. “Osip knows about the bakery, and he is causing as much trouble as he can.”

“I know,” I say.

Niko doesn’t move his hand off the map. “Then you know what comes next.” He straightens up. “He’s not going to keep breaking her curb forever, Kane. That’s the warm-up. At some point, he’s going to walk into that bakery, sit down at one of those little tables, order a coffee, and tell her everything you didn’t.”

I look at the ninety green squares. Twenty years of my life in marker.

“Tell her first,” Niko says. “Tonight. Right now. Get in the car.”

“No.”

“Kane—”

“No.” I slap the table. “There’s no f*****g point.”

“Telling her is the point, man! Better from you than from him!”

“I said no.” I shake my head. “She’d walk. And then she’d be out there alone with Osip Vetrov circling her, no men on her door, no one watching her staff, nothing.”

Niko looks at me with a sneer. “That’s a convenient excuse to be a coward.”

I get a fistful of his shirt in each hand and throw him on top of the table. One of the crystal ashtrays falls off the edge and cracks on the floor. The vodka bottle rolls and stops against the stapler.

“Question me again, motherfucker,” I spit in my brother’s face. “I f*****g dare you.”

Even with my hands around his throat, he manages to shake his head. “Unbelievable. You’re really gonna hold onto this until Easter?”

“I’m going to burn the note in front of her, and then I’m going to tell her all of it. In that order. Like I planned.”

“And if he gets to her first?”

“Then find him,” I say. “That’s your job. Do it before he does.”

Then I let go of him and step back. My brother looks up at me, disgusted, rumpled, exhausted. Behind him, the map burns green, with a lone dot of white swimming in the midst of it.

Three weeks. Three more weeks of a little white lie.

After that, Lilah can choose what happens next.

The car turns onto Kane’s street a little after seven. I still don’t know where we’re going.

“Is it dinner?”

“There will be food.” Kane doesn’t look up from his phone. “You’ll eat. You’ll be fed until you complain about it, actually.”

It’s my birthday. The big 3-2, which as anyone knows is a milestone event in every culture on earth.

I spent the day doing what I do every other day. Priya made me stop at nine to eat a croissant and then sang at me while Cameron banged a sheet pan with a whisk.

She chased me out at four o’clock. It struck me as a little suspicious at the time, but I had other things to think about. The curb’s still half-fixed. There’s a temporary plywood ramp bolted where the brick apron used to be. The problems never end.

My birthday has never actually been my birthday. It falls in that stretch of March that runs up against Palm Sunday, and when I was a kid, my mother folded the two together every single year. One party. Palms on the table, ham in the oven, forty people from the parish, and a cake with my name on it near the back if I was lucky.