Chapter 9 - THE DOCKS OF SOUTH BOSTON
Nine-thirty on a Friday night.
Boston Harbor was a frozen expanse of black water and drifting ice floes.
At Pier 4, towering cranes stood like iron monsters against the snowy sky.
The Northern Star, a three-hundred-foot commercial cargo vessel, sat tied to the heavy timber pilings.
Its deck was ablaze with yellow sodium floodlights.
Forty men in dark windbreakers moved crates from the rail yard to the ship’s cargo hold.
Submachine guns hung from tactical slings across their chests.
Standing near the gangway was Sal Moretti.
Seventy years old.
A massive man wrapped in a heavy sheared-beaver coat, smoking a thick cigar beneath an umbrella held by his bodyguard.
Beside him stood Councilman Thomas Gable, nervously checking his gold wristwatch under the glare of the lights.
“Where is Dominic?” Gable asked, his voice shaking with cold and panic.
“He was supposed to deliver the original title deeds an hour ago!”
Sal Moretti took a slow puff of his cigar, blowing blue smoke into the freezing rain.
“Dominic is tying up loose ends, Thomas.”
“Relax.”
“Matteo Rossi is at the bottom of an elevator shaft.”
“In two hours, the Coast Guard intercepts this ship in international waters.”
“The federal government seizes the Rossi shipping lines.”
“And our consortium buys the harbor for ten cents on the dollar at the federal auction next week.”
Gable swallowed hard, looking toward the dark perimeter fence.
“I don't like the silence on the avenue, Sal.”
“The union shift was supposed to change thirty minutes ago.”
“None of the dockworkers showed up.”
Sal Moretti frowned.
He pulled the cigar from his mouth.
He looked toward the main gate on Northern Avenue.
The streetlights outside the fence suddenly flickered and died.
Total darkness swallowed the perimeter.
Then, from the shadows of the rail yard, came a sound that made every guard on the pier freeze.
Not gunfire.
Not sirens.
The rhythmic, thunderous clattering of steel wrenches striking iron pipes.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
Dozens of them.
Then hundreds.
From behind the stacked shipping containers stepped three hundred longshoremen.
Men in heavy Carhartt jackets, steel-toed boots, and woolen caps.
They carried iron crowbars, pipe wrenches, and loading hooks.
Leading the crowd was Gus, the owner of the Glass Lantern Diner, holding a heavy twelve-gauge shotgun across his forearm.
And walking directly beside Gus was Matteo Rossi.
He wore his grandfather’s black wool overcoat, open at the chest, revealing the heavy gold signet ring on his hand.
Beside him walked me.
I wore a dark tactical parka, my right arm secure in its splint, the blue manifests clutched against my ribs in a waterproof case.
Sal Moretti’s cigar dropped from his lips onto the wet wood of the pier.
“Impossible,” Moretti stammered, backing toward the gangway.
“He’s dead!”
“Dominic dropped the car!”
Matteo walked forward alone.
His heavy boots sounded against the wet wooden timbers of Pier 4.
Each step was deliberate.
Measured.
Lethal.
The three hundred union workers fanned out behind him, cutting off every escape route to the street.
“Good evening, Sal,” Matteo’s voice boomed across the open water.
“You’re loading my ship with stolen freight.”
“And you forgot to pay the union dues.”
Councilman Gable turned pale as a bedsheet, scrambling up the metal stairs of the ship’s gangway.
“SHOOT HIM!” Gable screamed to the guards.
“KILL HIM NOW!”
The forty armed guards raised their submachine guns.
Before a single trigger could be pulled, high-intensity searchlights snapped on from the water behind the Northern Star.
Two eighty-foot harbor tugboats surged out of the fog, their diesel engines roaring.
Mounted on the bows of the tugs were four industrial water cannons used for fighting oil fires.
FWOOOOOOSH!
Six hundred pounds of pressurized freezing seawater blasted across the deck of the Northern Star.
The four-inch streams of water hit the armed guards like battering rams.
Men were swept off their feet, thrown across the wooden deck, their weapons flying into the freezing river.
Councilman Gable was blasted off the gangway, tumbling twenty feet into a pile of wet salt bags.
Sal Moretti scrambled behind a forklift, coughing, spitting saltwater, drawing a silver revolver with trembling fingers.
“ROSSI!” Moretti shrieked through the roaring water.
“YOU WON'T TAKE THIS PIER ALIVE!”
Matteo didn't take cover.
He drew his Kimber .45 from beneath his overcoat.
He walked straight through the freezing spray.
He raised his weapon.
BANG.
The round took Moretti’s revolver clean out of his hand, shattering the trigger guard into metal fragments.
Moretti collapsed onto his knees in the sludge, clutching his bloody fingers, weeping into his beaver coat.
The water cannons shut off.
Silence returned to Pier 4, broken only by the dripping of seawater from the ship’s cranes.
Three hundred longshoremen closed the circle, their iron hooks and wrenches resting on the dock timbers.
Matteo stood over Sal Moretti.
He looked down at the old mobster with cold, absolute disgust.
“You broke the arm of a woman who saved your son’s life two years ago, Sal.”
Moretti looked up, his face twisted in terror, his gaze flickering toward me.
“The... the doctor...?”
“Her name is Dr. Clara Vance,” Matteo said softly.
May you like
He racked the slide of his gun, ejecting a spent brass casing that clinked against the timber.
“And she is the new owner of this harbor.”
