“Bring Her to Me!” The Mafia Boss Shouted—Then the Door Opened and He Saw What They Had Done

Nora Mitchell could not see.

Her world had been reduced to the rough, scratchy weave of a burlap sack over her head and the metallic taste of copper on her tongue.

Her left cheekbone throbbed with a dull, sickening heat that pulsed in time with her heartbeat. Every time she tried to swallow, a sharp pain shot through her jaw. They had hit her when she bit the man with the sour coat—the one who had smelled of fried onions and stale tobacco. She had clamped down on his thumb until she felt bone, and then the world had exploded into white light and she had hit the concrete floor of the van.

Now, she was tied to a chair.

Her wrists were cinched behind her back with industrial zip-ties. They were too tight; her fingers had gone completely numb forty minutes ago, leaving only a cold, prickling sensation in her forearms. Her ankles were taped to the legs of a heavy wooden chair.

She was cold. Terribly, shakingly cold.

Her camel coat had been ripped from her shoulders when they dragged her from the vehicle. She was wearing only her thin wool sweater and her trousers. The air around her smelled of damp brick, rotting river weeds, and the heavy, sulfurous stench of industrial runoff.

*The canal,* she thought, her mind clinging to logic with desperate, frantic claws. *We didn't drive for more than fifteen minutes. There were two turns over bridge gratings—that loud, vibrating hum under the tires. The third street bridge? Union Street?*

She knew the Gowanus. She had walked its banks with Adrian on clear autumn evenings when the water was still and reflected the iron skeletons of the old coal bridges.

*Adrian.*

Tears welled in her eyes, hot and stinging against the raw skin of her cheek, wetting the burlap against her eyelids.

She had heard them speak his name.

Not with the polite deference of the architects who came to his offices, nor with the wary respect of the politicians who shook his hand on television.

They had spoken his name with an old, rancid hatred.

*"Vale’s boy thinks he’s an uptown prince now,"* the rough voice had said while they were setting up the tape recorder. *"Thinks because he wears eight-thousand-dollar coats people forget whose blood paid for those piers."*

*What did you do, Adrian?* she thought, a sob catching in her throat. *Who are you?*

She remembered his hands.

Adrian Vale had hands that were too large, too rough for a man who spent his days signing loan agreements. She had noticed the faint white lines across his palms—knives, she had guessed once, half-joking, and he had simply closed his fingers and changed the subject. She had loved his quietness. She had thought it was the reserve of a man who carried the responsibility of thousands of workers.

Now, sitting in the dark with her blood drying on her chin, she knew that silence was something else.

It was an iron door holding back an ocean of violence.

Footsteps echoed across the concrete. Heavy work boots. Slow. Deliberate.

A hand gripped the top of the burlap sack and ripped it upward.

The sudden glare of a single, bare sixty-watt bulb hanging from a yellow cord was blinding. Nora gasped, squinting through the tears, her eyes burning as she tried to focus on the shape before her.

A man stood three feet away.

He was in his late fifties, his face ruined by age and hard weather, his grey hair cut down to the scalp. A dark, jagged tattoo ran from behind his left ear into his greasy canvas collar—an anchor twisted through a shamrock. His left arm hung slightly limp at his side, the fingers swollen.

Beside him stood two younger men. Both wore black hooded sweatshirts, their faces covered with surgical masks, their eyes nervous, darting toward the darkness beyond the circle of light.

"Look at her," the older man said. He spat onto the concrete between her boots. The spit was brown with tobacco. "Adrian Vale’s taste has improved. His old man preferred blonde whores from the lounge on 4th Avenue."

Nora lifted her chin. It took every ounce of strength she possessed. Her lip was split, and her jaw felt as though it were held together by pins, but she stared directly into the man’s small, watery blue eyes.

"He will kill you," she said.

Her voice was barely a croak, but the words were distinct.

The two younger men shifted their feet. One of them looked back toward the shadow of an open corrugated steel door where the black water of the canal lapped against rotten wooden pilings.

The older man—Flaherty—stepped closer. He leaned down until Nora could smell the decay on his teeth.

"Your boyfriend is coming here to die, sweetheart," Flaherty whispered. "He thinks he’s bringing ten million in paper. He thinks we’re going to let him put you in the back of his car and drive back to his penthouse in Brooklyn Heights."

He reached out a rough, calloused finger and touched the dark bruise swelling along her jawline.

Nora jerked her head away, her teeth bared.

Flaherty laughed—a dry, rattling sound that ended in a cough.

"He took my boy’s life," Flaherty snarled, his face suddenly twisting into something grotesque and demonic. "Twenty years in Otisville. My boy didn't do nothing that Thomas Vale hadn't done fifty times over! Adrian gave the feds the ledgers to buy himself a clean permit for the terminal. He traded my blood for his concrete!"

"I don't... know what you’re talking about," Nora whispered, her breath trembling.

"You don't need to know," Flaherty said, straightening up and reaching behind his back. He pulled an old, nickel-plated revolver from his waistband and laid it on a rusted oil drum beside the hanging bulb. "All you need to do is stay right here. When he walks through that door with the bag, he’s going to watch what happens when you don't pay the old debts."

He turned to the two men behind him.

"Check the perimeter. He’s got forty minutes. If he brings a car down the slipway, you tell me the second the tires hit the gravel."

The two men nodded and melted into the shadows of the warehouse.

Nora looked down at her hands. The numbness was crawling past her elbows now. She couldn't feel her fingers at all.