He Thought She Was Dead—Then the Mafia Boss Saw Her Seven Months Pregnant

Midnight came to Skidaway Island with five inches of salt water over the main road.

The Holloway family estate—the old house, the one built in 1890 with forty rooms of Georgia heart-pine and marble mantels imported from Carrara—sat three feet above the surge on its high brick foundation. The wind was still screaming through the tops of the cabbage palms, but the eye of the storm was passing; through the breaks in the clouds, a cold, washed-out moon showed through, turning the flooded lawn into a sheet of silver tin.

Desmond Holloway sat in the library on the ground floor.

He was still wearing his cream-colored linen trousers, but he had changed into a dark velvet smoking jacket against the damp chill. On the mahogany sideboard sat a bottle of forty-year-old Armagnac and two crystal tumblers. Beside them lay his passport, three bundles of hundred-dollar bills wrapped in brown paper, and a small, nickel-plated .32 automatic with mother-of-pearl grips.

The double doors leading to the veranda were open to the wet wind.

The water on the drive was four inches deep; he could hear the steady, splashing walk of a man coming up the steps without a lantern.

Desmond didn't reach for the gun. He reached for the Armagnac, poured two fingers into the glass, and sat back in his leather wing chair, his hands resting on the carved lion-head armrests.

Grant walked in.

He was alone. His boots were clean—he had washed the marsh mud off with a hose at the hospital gate—and he was wearing a clean gray wool coat that belonged to the winter before. His face was gray with forty-eight hours of sleeplessness, but the welt on his cheek had stopped bleeding; it had scabbed into a thin, dark line that made his jaw look longer, more predatory than it had been in the morning.

He didn't take off his coat. He walked to the sideboard, looked at the small .32 automatic, picked it up by the barrel, smelled the chamber, and tossed it into the cold brick hearth behind the grate.

The metal made a sharp, clattering sound against the iron fire-dogs.

"A boy," Desmond said softly.

He didn't look up at his nephew. He looked into his glass, turning the amber liquor against the crystal.

"A boy," Grant agreed.

"Is she dead?"

"No."

Desmond took a small, careful sip of the brandy. "She will be. Chen is a butcher with a needle. A girl from the canal can't take that much iron out of her blood."

"She’s sitting up," Grant said. His voice was very quiet, very low, like the sound of the tide turning under the wharf timbers. "She’s drinking broth from a cup. The child is three pounds, nine ounces. Ramos says he has the Holloway shoulders."

Desmond closed his eyes.

For the first time that night, the old man looked sixty-two. The skin under his chin was loose, trembling slightly in the draft from the veranda.

"Julian is gone," Desmond murmured. "He took the launch from Isle of Hope at ten. He’s heading for the Bahamas before the Coast Guard opens the cutter stations."

"Julian won't make the Bahamas," Grant said. "Miller had three tugs waiting outside the sound. They took his fuel lines off two miles past the lightship. The Coast Guard has him now. And Trent gave the Federal Attorney the duplicate manifests from the dock safe forty minutes ago."

Desmond nodded once. Slowly.

"And me?"

"You," Grant said, "are leaving Savannah."

Desmond’s eyes opened. A faint, bitter flicker of the old vanity returned to his mouth. "You’re banishing me, Grant? Like an old duke in a play? You think I can't live in London? You think I don't have eighty thousand pounds in the Royal Bank of Scotland?"

Grant stepped closer to the chair.

He didn't pull a gun. He didn't raise his hand. He simply looked down at the silver-haired man who had held his shoulder when his father was laid into the lime pit thirty years before.

"You don't have eighty thousand pounds, Uncle," Grant said.

He pulled three sheets of paper from his coat pocket and laid them on Desmond’s lap.

"The board met at eleven," Grant said. "The real board. The men who own the five-percent shares—the stevedores' union, the pilots' association, the dry dock foremen. They revoked the 2021 proxy. They audited the terminal expansion accounts. Every penny you took from Julian Langford’s shell companies has been seized by the state under the Organized Crime Control Act."

Desmond looked down at the papers. His fingers didn't touch them.

"You gave them the books," the old man whispered. "You gave the government the family books."

"I gave them your books," Grant corrected. "My books are clean. My books are signed by Jolene Tab. She’s the head auditor for the Holloway Organization. She has been since yesterday noon."

He reached down, took the glass of Armagnac from Desmond’s hand, set it on the table, and pulled the old man up by his velvet lapels until Desmond was standing on his heels, his breath smelling of bitter almonds and sour wine against Grant’s throat.

"You have twenty minutes," Grant said into his teeth. "There’s a commercial skiff at the south creek. Trent is in it. He has an envelope with two thousand dollars in small bills and a bus ticket to Saint Louis."

"Saint Louis?" Desmond choked out, his eyes wide with an old man’s sudden, helpless horror. "I don't know anyone in Saint Louis—"

"That’s why you’re going there," Grant said.

He let go of the velvet. Desmond fell back into the wing chair, his breath coming in dry, rattling gasps that sounded like dead palmetto leaves in the wind.

"If I see your face south of the Virginia line after tomorrow noon," Grant said from the library door, "I won't call the federal marshals, Desmond. I’ll tell the boys from the river run that you were the one who gave the names of their cousins to Vance."

He didn't look back.