Chapter 9 - The Settlement of the Account
By eight o'clock Saturday morning, the sun had broken through the gray clouds, turning the entire estate on Delaware Avenue into a brilliant, blinding sheet of white that looked like a fresh sheet of paper before the ink is dried.
The trucks from the North Side were gone, two of them left behind with their doors open and their tires resting on the bare rims where Rocco’s boys had shot the air out. The bodies had been cleared by nine, carried away in the back of three anonymous utility vans that vanished toward the lime pits before the first shift of the municipal police could finish their coffee.
Gabriel sat on the front steps of the main house, his dark wool sweater torn at the shoulder, his hands covered in a mixture of black gun oil and frozen red slush.
The door behind him opened, and Sadie walked out, carrying two thick porcelain mugs of black coffee. She had a clean piece of white gauze on her hand, her hair tied back into that same cheap plastic claw clip she had found in the drawer of the cottage.
She sat down beside him on the stone step, her small knees touching his long thigh as she set the mugs between them.
“Rocco says the North Side captain is dead, Gabriel,” she said softly, her hazel eyes fixed on the river past the gates. “He said the board in Center City called an emergency meeting at seven. They’re transferring the Sixth Street territory to your name before the noon bell.”
Gabriel didn't touch the coffee. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, blue-bound folder—the original deed to the brick house behind the convent near Girard Estate, the same house he had bought for his mother before his father died.
He set it down on her knee, his large, scarred hand pressing the paper flat against the flannel of her trousers.
“The deed is in your name, Sadie,” Gabriel said, his voice a low, gravelly wheeze that came from forty minutes of breathing the black smoke from the garage roof. “The taxes are paid for twenty years. The parish school has a spot for Leo until he’s fourteen. You can take the boy and go back to the East Side tomorrow morning. You don't have to watch my windows anymore.”
Sadie looked at the blue folder. She didn't touch it. She let out a long, slow breath that turned into a small cloud of white steam in the crisp winter air.
“You’re an idiot, Gabriel Finch,” she said, her voice dropping into that flat, tired register he had heard on the telephone at two in the morning.
Gabriel turned his head, his green eyes narrowing with a look of deep, structural confusion. “The house is worth three hundred grand, Sadie. It’s clear title. You don't owe me a dime.”
“I don't care about the three hundred grand, Gabriel,” she snapped softly, her eyes flashing with that old, beautiful fire that had kept his daughter alive on the tile. “And I don't care about the parish school. I care about the girl behind the stove.”
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She reached out, her fingers catching the edge of his torn sleeve, forcing him to look back toward the door where Chloe was standing in the hallway, her small hand holding onto Leo’s shoulder as the little boy showed her a new drawing of a green dinosaur with two heads.
“She didn't look at the pills once last night, Gabriel,” Sadie whispered, her voice cracking as a single, heavy tear spilled over her lashes, freezing instantly against her cheek. “She looked at you. She watched you go out into that snow with a twenty-round clip because she knew you were coming back for her. If I leave now, who’s going to tell her that her father is just a regular man who happens to carry an iron rod under his coat?”
