I Have a Favor Too
“Does Tanner know about this?”
Rosenthal shook his head.
He had taken delivery of the goods stolen from the Newtown Creek warehouse and, purely by chance, stumbled upon the printing plates.
“There was this one cigar box that felt unusually heavy. I opened it up and found the plates under a false bottom.”
He had meant to tell Tanner—but decided against it, certain Tanner would simply destroy them. Unlike the rest of the merchandise, the moment those plates hit the market both the Sicilian and Neapolitan outfits would come hunting without mercy.
“And knowing that, you still wanted them?”
“…I was going to wait until the heat died down before I moved them. I planned to tell Tanner then.”
The problem was the booze.
Drinking with a colleague he trusted, he let the story of the plates slip without thinking. That colleague was Dominic Mileno—the same man who later pulled the trigger.
“Fuck… if I’d just drunk less that night… none of this would’ve happened.”
“Bullshit. Mileno was already handling Italian gang product—he was fishing for it.”
I drove my fingers into Rosenthal’s bandaged shoulder. He screamed and thrashed; I seized him by the hair and forced him straight in the chair. The clean bandage began to bloom red.
Hazel stood holding a fresh roll of gauze, watching the whole scene. Gunsmith was nowhere in sight—only the smell of cigarette smoke filling the room.
“Stop scheming and tell me the truth.”
Trembling, Rosenthal forced the words out.
“I disguised the plates’ origin through another channel. S-sure, people would still get suspicious, but I had my reasons.”
Mileno was an ambitious bastard.
Instead of handing the printing plates over to the Italian gangs, he meant to print the counterfeit bills himself. He wanted to become another Morello—another Sicilian-born boss. Ambition like that doesn’t settle for being a fence. Rosenthal’s take: Mileno intended to put himself at the center of power.
“So I offered him the plates for five thousand dollars. He took the deal without blinking—said he’d get the money together.”
The next night he showed up at the pawnshop with two gunmen and opened fire.
“Lucky I was alone. If Kate had been there, it would’ve been a nightmare.”
“Who’s Kate?”
“My girl.”
A faint smile touched Rosenthal’s lips.
Just thinking about her makes him smile?
My head was tilting when a long, bone-deep sigh drifted in from beyond the door—not contempt, but something ominous. Rosenthal twisted around, staring toward the hall with uneasy eyes.
“You really didn’t know… I’m sorry, Rosenthal. You’re never going to see Kate again.”
Gunsmith’s raspy voice.
The blood drained from Rosenthal’s face. He surged to his feet and bolted out the door.
“Wh-what happened to Kate?!”
“The day after you ran here, they found her body in the pawnshop.”
“Aaaagh!”
Rosenthal’s howl filled the house. He pounded the floor with his fists, shrieking, coming unglued. Hazel clenched the bandage in her hands, shaking with fury—she had known Kate too.
I sat in the chair, chin on my fist, and listened to the sobbing from outside.
The atmosphere dragged every dark thought through my head. Gunsmith hadn’t even told me about Kate’s death. From the way he broke it to Rosenthal just now, he had been trying to spare the man. The fact that he had pointed a shotgun at me earlier told me how close the two of them must have been.
A thought struck me.
Maybe the one who really asked for my help wasn’t Rosenthal—it was Gunsmith. He would have understood better than anyone how serious this mess was.
I was still turning it over when the weeping outside finally stopped. In the doorway stood Rosenthal, white as a sheet, staring at me. Then he crossed the room and dropped to his knees.
“Boss… please. Take Mileno out.”
The price:
“Everything I own—including the plates. Hell, the bastard’s fortune too. All of it. Just kill him!”
He had coveted what he should never have touched and trusted a man he should never have trusted. He had lost the woman he loved, and now something larger—rage and the hunger for revenge—had wrapped itself around him.
And then one more voice.
“As Rosenthal’s friend… I have a favor to ask as well.”
Gunsmith himself stepped forward and asked for my help.
Exhausted, Rosenthal finally slept. While Hazel changed his bandages, I sat on the living-room sofa and drank coffee with Gunsmith.
“…Rosenthal never took this seriously enough. Of course, if he’d known Kate was dead it would’ve been different.”
Guilt and fury would have driven him, wounded as he was, straight back out into the street.
“That’s why I told him myself to ask you for help.”
“You didn’t know about the printing plates?”
“Not a thing. Honestly, it threw me. He wasn’t the sort of friend who’d hide something like that from Tanner just because he wanted it.”
The reason was the dead girl. Where Mileno had fixated on the plates out of ambition, Rosenthal had fixated on them because he wanted a happy life with Kate.
“If I’m making excuses for him—he probably just wanted a solid nest egg from the sale.”
At that point I had to ask how Gunsmith and Rosenthal were connected.
The old story began with the flood of orphans that had always filled Manhattan. From the 1860s onward, every time America was hit by civil war or by epidemics of smallpox and cholera, the number of parentless children exploded. On top of that, wave after wave of immigrants reached New York only to find themselves too poor to feed their own families. Children were left to roam the streets. Many vanished. Many were taken. Government and religious groups built orphanages, but the kids kept coming faster than anyone could house them.
So the federal government came up with a radical cure: ship the orphans from the eastern cities out west.
“You’ve heard of the orphan trains.”
Exactly what it sounds like—trains full of children headed west. Overnight a New York kid could find himself fighting to survive in Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma.
“Even a seven-year-old knew that was crazy. He ran rather than get on the train.”
The little boy drifting through Hell’s Kitchen eventually made the alley where Gunsmith worked his home.
“Somehow the kid found my workshop door and started pounding on the iron. He was holding a pistol almost too big for his hands.”
He had been scavenging a murder scene, picked up the gun, and come looking for a buyer. That was the first meeting with Rosenthal.
“I thought about keeping him as a shop assistant, but he had no talent for the work. So I took him to a fence I did business with and told the man to put him to use.”
“He’s still standing after all these years—must have had a knack for fencing after all.”
“Fat lot of good it did him. He’s back in the gutter again.”
The words were cold, but the voice carried real regret. After more than twenty years of watching the boy try to make it, Gunsmith’s eyes had gone damp.
I found myself wondering whether Hazel had started out the same way.
“About the shotgun—I never meant to fire. You already know that, don’t you?”
A scattergun is packed with pellets that spread the instant they leave the barrel. In a room that tight, hitting only me while missing Rosenthal would have been nearly impossible.
“You also knew I wasn’t going to kill him.”
“Fifty-fifty. Who can ever predict what you’ll do? Still true now.”
Gunsmith’s eyes pressed me to accept both Rosenthal’s commission and his own. Either way, Dominic Mileno had to die if the plates were ever going to stay buried. Even if word had already leaked to the Italian gangs, the result wouldn’t change.
I was settling into that decision when Gunsmith pointed.
“We’ve got a telephone. Want me to call someone from the Marginals?”
“…Patrick would be best.”
—Find the fence Dominic Mileno.
Patrick put a fifty-dollar bounty on the man’s head among the Marginals. The money, of course, would come out of Rosenthal’s pocket—Rosenthal, who was half-mad with the need for revenge.
The Marginals were already back in their old turf of Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea. Rosenthal poured out every scrap of information he had—Mileno’s shops, the places he frequented. Locating the man took less than three days.
When the time came to move, I gathered a few necessities and returned to Gunsmith’s place.
—As an apology for pointing a gun at you, I’ll supply the weapons myself.
As if trying to patch the crack in our trust, Gunsmith opened a new secret room for me.
The door slid aside.
Roughly a six-by-six space. The walls were hung with everything from antique revolvers that predated the Civil War to modern pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Beneath them sat crates of ammunition sorted by type—even grenades, plus the silencers and smoke bombs I had designed myself.
“Like the room? I’m building you an identical one in your building.”
“I love it.”
“Take whatever you need.”
Two familiar Colt M1911s with silencers. Four spare magazines. Even if the three of them became thirty, it would be enough.
I left the armory and was moving toward another room when I met Hazel’s eyes. She hadn’t spoken since the day Gunsmith aimed a gun at me. Now she simply kept her mouth shut and waved—go safely.
A cold wind cut through the night.
I walked the bleak, shadowed stretch of Tenth Avenue through Hell’s Kitchen, crossed West Forty-seventh, and turned into an alley. Three or four grim figures waited—Cory and the others.
“Everyone’s downstairs, Boss.”
I followed them into the basement of the building. Once upon a time it had been the club Tanner Smith and Gopher Gang boss Oney Madden ran together; after it closed, the Marginals used it as a headquarters.
About fifty men waited. I gave the orders.
“We hit three places at once tonight. It’s going to be a long night—stay sharp.”
The three targets were the coordinates Rosenthal had marked: the warehouse where Mileno stored his goods, the pawnshop where he met buyers, and the jewelry shop. The bigger the client list, the more money a fence moves—and Mileno was one of the heavyweights. That kind of success had fed his ambition.
The men scattered. I took one crew and headed for the warehouse.
Clinton Cove near Fifty-fifth Street. Close enough to the Hudson that small boats could move contraband without drawing eyes.
“Lots of warehouses and workshops around here. Perfect for moving smuggled goods without anyone noticing.”
Hamilton, who had worked the docks only a few months earlier, stuck close and filled me in. He had scouted Mileno’s warehouse the last two days and now walked me through every approach, the layout, every thing to watch for.
“Plenty of places work nights. Gunfire will bring people running.”
We slipped past dockworkers moving between the yards and the warehouses and reached the target. The men already in position met us.
“Mileno and two others are out front. Looks like they’re waiting for someone—we should watch a little longer, Boss.”
On my signal the crew melted into the surroundings—some posing as workers, others vanishing between crates. Worst case, they looked like men goldbricking. I did the same. The chill made a scarf across the face look ordinary.
I walked openly toward the fishing boat moored at the pier with O’Neill painted on the hull and called River Grey’s name under my breath.
Before I could finish, a head popped up from the deck—a face I didn’t know.
“Customer’s here, Cap’n.”
A second head rose. River Grey.
“You’re here. This is the new hand I picked up.”
About my age, short, Black, with round eyes that made him look almost innocent.
“Carly Dustin, sir.”
River wouldn’t have signed him on unless he was solid. Wouldn’t have brought him here unless he trusted him.
I asked with a look. River smiled and whispered,
“Same side of the tracks as us. He’s fine.”
Apparently the kid had killed two gangsters in East Harlem up in Upper Manhattan and run.
“Still—lots of people around. You sure about this?”
“I don’t know. Tonight might turn out ridiculously easy.”
River gave me a look that said he didn’t follow. Thirty yards away I watched the target—Dominic Mileno and his men. The moment they stepped inside the warehouse, it would be over. Nothing more to it.
Then a new variable walked into my plan.
A group arrived and made contact with Mileno—fence meeting supplier. One of the faces was familiar. The man shaking Mileno’s hand with genuine warmth was Salvatore, who should have been nowhere but the Lower East Side.
They began transferring the smuggled goods straight into Mileno’s warehouse.