Who Dragged Me Back In
Sometimes action persuades more powerfully than words ever could.
Thwip!
With me and my men looking on, the instant Noh pulled the trigger, my maternal uncle became a full accomplice. What further persuasion could possibly be required?
Uncle Noh had now joined the new conspiracy I was orchestrating.
Before I disposed of Franklin, I had forced him to draw up a contract under threat. It was a bill of sale transferring ten trucks to Rosenthal’s distribution company, SCL, for seventeen thousand dollars. The contract date was set three days earlier, and payment was due today—so that when Franklin took the money and “ran,” he would have a ready-made reason for vanishing.
The next morning at Eastern Trucking Company, Noh stopped by and surveyed the ten trucks parked on the lot out front. Vehicles that ought to have been rolling hard sat idle in lazy rows. It was a perfect picture of a company not yet a year old sliding toward ruin.
Eastern Trucking had fifteen employees in all—ten of them drivers, the rest mechanics and loaders. The only woman on staff handled the schedules and the payroll. When Noh stepped into the office, only the clerk, Sarah, was there. No one else had even bothered to clock in. Fair enough. Why show up at a dying company when there was no work left to do?
Noh managed his face into a show of anger.
“Nobody else came in?”
“What for? There’s nothing to do.”
“Where’s Franklin?”
“Not yet. But whether he shows or not—does it even matter anymore?”
A month without pay had left Sarah’s face bleak and her tone sharp. Noh poured oil on that fire.
“That bastard Franklin sold the trucks out from under us. Not to the company that was supposed to get them as compensation—somewhere else.”
“What?!”
Sarah’s eyes went wide with shock. Whatever Franklin was up to now, it scared her cold.
“The people who wanted those trucks as payback aren’t going to sit quiet. They’re a gang, you know.”
“Looks like I’ll have to go see them myself. Before that—”
He stepped into Franklin’s office and took out the safe key he had lifted from the man the night before. Inside were only the ordinary ledgers and client contracts. Noh slipped in the materials he had brought from Franklin’s house—records thick with criminal evidence.
At dawn one of our people will hit Franklin’s place. If there’s a safe, empty it. If there’s a secret ledger, secure it. A rat like that never trusts anyone. And if there’s nothing—well, nothing we can do about that.
Kieran’s meticulous planning and sheer audacity were enough to make a man shake his head. And yet, among the things the crew had actually pulled from Franklin’s house were ledgers and records of the crimes. They detailed, with clinical precision, the staged hijackings—crates filled with rocks dressed up as precious cargo, trucks “ambushed” at set places and times. There was even a plan to siphon assets for a deliberate bankruptcy filing and dump part of the debt onto Noh.
Reading it had sent a chill down his spine. One bullet almost felt like too little; rage had set his teeth on edge.
He left the incriminating papers in the safe, pocketed the key again. Kieran meant to use all of this as the trigger that would reel in Franklin’s co-conspirators. The more Noh saw, the more he realized his nephew was cunning—and a natural at conspiracy.
How the hell did they raise that kid…
Noh allowed himself a bitter smile as he left the president’s office and spoke to Sarah.
“I’m going to look for Franklin. If any of the others show up, tell them to wait till I get back.”
Sarah called after him.
“You should’ve just taken the company yourself, Noh. What even is this mess…”
He didn’t answer. He simply walked out of the bleak, dying office.
There was no point going to Franklin’s house; he wouldn’t find the man there. By now Franklin was in heaven—or more likely hell. Still, he had to go through the motions of searching if he wanted to keep suspicion off himself. Following Kieran’s instructions, Noh knocked on the door, asked the neighbors, and built himself an alibi.
He spent the hours pretending to hunt for Franklin and only returned to the company in the afternoon.
Click.
When he opened the office door, far more of the staff were gathered than that morning. For days now the pattern had been the same—trickle in late, check the state of the company, leave disappointed, and drown their complaints in drinks at night. A few were already thinking about jumping to other outfits.
They swarmed Noh the moment he appeared.
“Is what Sarah said true?”
“Did Franklin finally abandon the company for good?”
The news that the trucks had been sold off set them off. Like Sarah, none of them had been paid.
“I couldn’t find Franklin. Not at home, not at any of the places he might be. No word at all.”
“Shit—you think he skipped town?”
“Even when he came in late, he never just vanished like this.”
A president who had already lost their trust earned nothing but suspicion. No one was worried about Franklin. That suited Noh just fine.
“I think we ought to file a police report. What do you all say?”
“He might’ve run. That’s the better move. I’m for it.”
“Me too. We can’t just lose the trucks. And we still need our back wages!”
They wanted the cops in as soon as possible, wanted Franklin’s shady behavior dragged into the light.
“But Noh—are you sure? Once the police dig in, the illegal hauls could come out.”
“The president is Franklin. Sure, as his partner I’ve got some exposure of my own… but that’s a risk we have to take.”
The employees mistook Noh’s resolve for self-sacrifice. In truth, they already followed him more than the man who had wrecked the company.
All but one.
“It’s only been a day. Will the police even take a missing-person report? We might have to wait a few more days.”
The cautious objection came from a driver named Charles, a man who had always been close to President Franklin. The looks Noh and the others gave him were not kind, and they had their reasons. The trucks had been hit twice already—and both times Charles had been the driver. Wasn’t that worth a second glance? Odds were he would report everything said in this meeting straight to Franklin’s partners.
Noh kept his expression under control.
“Look at the state of the company, Charles. At a time like this, is it normal for the boss to go dark without a word?”
“There could be some reason…”
“Whatever that reason is, it won’t be for our sake.”
Heads nodded in agreement. Cornered by the room, Charles muttered a weak defense.
“I only meant—will the cops even open a missing-person case over one day of no contact…”
“That’s not your problem to worry about.”
Noh shut him down and left the office the moment the meeting ended.
To file the report he went not to the East Village station but all the way up to Harlem. In a saloon there he shared beers with his younger brother Ted, a captain in the NYPD.
“Noh, what’s got into you all of a sudden, tracking me down?”
“Listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you.”
He laid the whole thing out—every scrap of Franklin’s fraud, right down to the kidnapping and the gunshot.
Clack.
Ted dropped the peanut he had been about to eat and stared at Noh as if he had lost his mind.
“Have you gone crazy, Noh? And how the hell did you even manage to snatch Franklin? You join a gang behind my back? I thought you washed your hands of that life.”
Startled questions tumbled out of him one after another. Noh drained his beer in silence before he answered.
“I washed my hands a long time ago.”
“But?”
“Someone dragged me back in.”
“Who?”
Noh glanced at the ceiling for a moment. Then he looked at Ted again and spoke.
“Our nephew.”
“……?”
28th Precinct—Eighth Avenue station. It covered the heart of Harlem, a place thick with petty gangs and even thicker with crooked cops.
The morning after drinks with his eldest brother Noh, Ted clocked in and started combing the NYPD contact lists. Part of his mind kept circling Noh’s bombshell.
Our nephew isn’t as clean as we thought. From what I can tell, he’s pretty high up in a gang.
Which gang?
……The Union.
Shit—the Union?!
Bombings. The assassinations of Itsuki and the enforcers. The outfit that had toppled the Five Points Gang after nearly twenty years of rule over the LES—that was the Union. It had been big enough news to make every Manhattan cop sit up. You couldn’t claim to know the streets and not know the Union; people would call you a spy.
And Kieran was an officer in that outfit?
The more Ted turned it over, the more unreal it felt. He clicked his tongue and found the roster for East Village. Spotting the name of a particularly close colleague, he dialed the station phone at once.
Through the switchboard a familiar voice finally came on the line.
“Yo, Peter. It’s Ted. How you been? My brother Noh’s gonna drop by today—look after him for me, will you? Dinner? Since you mention it, let’s do tonight. East Eighth, number 187—Colin’s Bar, seven o’clock. Okay.”
He had barely hung up when someone tapped his arm. A colleague who worked the same beat.
“Ted. You already put in the order to cut loose the kid I collared yesterday?”
“Why, is there a problem?”
“You know she was dealing, Ted.”
“I know, but we’ve got no evidence.”
“A Black girl selling something in a dark alley—that’s the evidence. This is the third time.”
Ted patted the man’s shoulder with a look of pure annoyance.
“Catch her ten times if you want. What we need is solid proof.”
With a bored expression he headed for the holding cells. The moment she saw him, a Black woman in her twenties surged up against the bars.
“How can you just grab people with no evidence? All I did was hand over something somebody needed. It was bread so they wouldn’t go hungry!”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. Now shut your mouth.”
Ted read the name at the top of the booking sheet.
“Stephanie Claire. No charges. That good enough for you?”
Once she was out from behind the bars, Claire fixed the officer standing beside Officer Ted with a look of pure grievance.
“What are you looking at?”
The kind of rude, rough white cop who treated a body search like a free feel and locked up Black people first and asked questions later. Claire bit her lip instead of answering and left the station with her head down. Ted watched her go and sighed.
“Who gives a damn when you haul in trash like that? It doesn’t pad the stats—it digs a hole. Ease up.”
More precisely, it didn’t make money. Whether some woman from Harlem’s slums sold dope or sold herself, collaring her without proof only piled on the paperwork.
Outside the station, Stephanie Claire’s eyes burned with poison. A sneer tugged at her mouth as she pictured the cop who had grabbed her and looked at her with contempt.
We’ll see who comes out on top.
Thanks to Ted’s half-hearted approach, the future queen who would one day rule the streets of Harlem was quietly building her empire—dealing dope, fencing stolen goods, running loansharking, piece by piece.
Houston Street, on the border between the East Village and the LES. A man walked into a distribution firm called Metropolitan Transport & Supply. It was Charles, the Eastern Trucking driver. He found the men who had conspired with Franklin and repeated everything Noh had said.
Bang!
“Franklin sold the trucks?! That crazy son of a bitch!”
Old Nicky—a fence in his fifties posing as a businessman—slammed the table in fury. Beside him, a hard-faced middle-aged man named Candy Phil twisted his features into a scowl.
“We already had a contract for him to hand those trucks over to us. Double-dealing?”
“Y-yeah, looks that way.”
“Franklin’s lost his damn mind. Balls the size of church bells. So who’s the other outfit?”
“Silver Chain Logistics—SCL. Some new distribution company, apparently.”
Candy Phil rubbed his temple.
“Where’d Noh hear about this?”
“I don’t know. He’s been bouncing between banks because of the cash crunch. Maybe he picked it up by chance there.”
If it was true, Franklin had quietly sold the trucks and bolted with the seventeen-thousand-dollar payment. No other reading made sense.
“So what’s that bastard Noh planning to do?”
“He decided to file a missing-person report on Franklin with the police.”
“What, and his little brother is gonna find the guy for him?”
Candy Phil snorted. He was a former member of Humpty Jackson’s gang. The knife scar on his face had come from a fight with the rival Crazy Butch Gang—and the men who had given him that scar were the three O’Connell brothers: Noh, Larry, and Ted. More than twenty years had passed, and Candy Phil had never forgotten.
“Goddamn O’Connells.”
The original plan with Franklin—to swallow the bank loans and the trucks—had nothing to do with revenge. Then Noh had gotten involved by chance, and Candy Phil had decided to use the chance to grind the man into the dirt.
He turned to Old Nicky.
“No need to overthink it. Double contract or not, we still have priority.”
“And if the other side files some annoying lawsuit? We could waste months bogged down.”
“Then we smash the company. Once they’ve had a taste of business interference, they’ll change their minds.”
“True enough. A newborn outfit won’t have shit.”
Candy Phil clapped Charles on the shoulder.
“When’s that company supposed to take delivery of the trucks?”
“I heard next week.”
“Then we hit them before that and take them back. Consider it decided.”
“Understood.”
Outside, Charles exhaled a long breath. No one was angrier at Franklin’s betrayal than he was—a truck driver who had hauled boxes stuffed with rocks and junk, who had even staged the gang ambushes, only to be sold out in the end.
“Son of a bitch. He even played me.”
Charles ground his teeth and started for home.
And behind him, shadows followed.
Members of the Union.