I didn't sleep a single minute that night. Until four in the morning, Arthur, Frank, and I sat under the fluorescent lights of our DUMBO war room, mapping out every fraudulent LLC, forged signature, and offshore routing number Chad and Brooke had used to dissect my ninety-million-dollar empire. They hadn't just tried to bankrupt me; Chad had paid a dying addict to ram forty tons of steel into my driver’s side door at seventy miles an hour, and when I survived, Brooke had hired a corrupt surgeon to keep me crippled while they picked my bones clean.
"Let me call the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District right now," Arthur urged, rubbing his stitched forehead. "With the toll-booth photo and the toxicology report, the feds will have Chad and Brooke in handcuffs before noon."
"No," I said coldly, pinning Chad’s Wharton photo to the corkboard. "If the feds arrest them today, a high-priced defense attorney will claim the toll photo is too blurry to prove murder-for-hire, Voss will shred the hospital compounding logs and flee to a non-extradition country, and the fourteen million dollars they stole from our employee payroll tax fund will stay locked in the Cayman Islands for ten years of civil litigation. Next Saturday night is the groundbreaking gala for the Midtown Hudson Tower—the hundred-million-dollar syndicate deal Chad stole using my forged voting shares. He has to personally sign the personal guarantee and wire the offshore funds back into a domestic Chase escrow account on Friday at 4:00 P.M. to close the syndicated loan. We let him bring every stolen dime back onto American soil—and then we bury all four of them alive."
At eight o'clock on Sunday morning, I traded my ruined Brioni tuxedo for a faded Carhartt work jacket, jeans, New Balance sneakers, and a low-pulled Mets baseball cap. I told Frank to drop me two blocks away from 31st Street in Astoria, Queens.
My lower back still throbbed with a dull ache as I walked—a permanent souvenir of the titanium screws holding my L4 vertebra together—so I leaned lightly on a simple black walking cane as I pushed open the glass door of Elena’s Corner Diner.
The smell of sizzling bacon, strong coffee, and toasted rye bread hit me immediately, but nobody was eating. All six customers in the vinyl booths were staring toward the cash register, where Isabella stood in a grease-stained diner apron with her arms crossed protectively in front of an older woman with gray hair who was sobbing into a dish towel.
Standing on the other side of the counter were two men in cheap leather jackets and a slick, sneering guy in a pinstriped suit holding a yellow legal clipboard.
"Look, lady, I don't care if your husband built this grill in 1988," the guy in the suit barked, slapping a pink three-day commercial lockout notice directly onto the glass pie display case. "Your Triple-Net commercial lease has a municipal tax-escalation clause. Since the building was acquired on Friday by our client’s investment group, your monthly rent plus common-area maintenance just jumped from four thousand two hundred dollars to eleven thousand eight hundred, retroactive to the first of the month. Pay the twenty-two-thousand-dollar arrears plus legal fees by five P.M. Tuesday, or the City Marshal pads the doors and auctions off your kitchen equipment!"
"That’s illegal!" Isabella shouted, slamming her hand down on the laminate counter. "My aunt has four years left on a fixed commercial lease! You can't triple the rent overnight just because a new corporate landlord bought the deed!"
"Read Paragraph 19B regarding capital improvement assessments, sweetheart," the lawyer smirked. "Our client is converting this whole block into boutique luxury retail. Waitresses who get fired for stealing from VIPs at the Vanderbuilt Ballroom don't get to lecture me on New York real estate law."
Isabella froze, the color draining from her face. "How do you know about the Vanderbuilt Ballroom?"
The lawyer chuckled, stepping back as the diner door chimed behind me. I slipped quietly into the back corner booth behind a tall potted ficus plant and pulled my cap lower just as Marcus—the slimy banquet manager who had ripped Isabella’s shirt off her collar twelve hours ago—strolled into the diner holding an iced latte and wearing a brand-new Rolex Submariner on his wrist.
"Morning, Rodriguez," Marcus grinned nastily, leaning an elbow on the counter. "When I told Mr. Chad Sterling and Miss Brooke how mouthy you got defending that broke cripple last night, Mr. Sterling was so impressed with my loyalty he made me Property Operations Manager for his newest Queens acquisition—which just happens to be this dump. Unless you want your Aunt Elena living in a homeless shelter by Wednesday, you’re going to sign a sworn affidavit stating you heard Ethan Vance admit to embezzling fourteen million dollars from his own company."
