The Enforcer's Claim

The body has been in the water long enough that the crabs got to it first. Jules Callahan was walking to the Crab Fest pier to file a piece on the Dungeness weigh-in when the sirens pulled her sideways, and now she is pressed against a splintered railing with her Nikon up, shooting past a young cop who wants her behind the tape. She zooms in on the dead man's hand. Not a tattoo. A mark cut into the flesh, a circle bisected by a jagged line, like a cracked coin. She has traced that shape a hundred times, off the photographs her father kept in the false bottom of his desk drawer, the ones the FBI asked about politely at first. The man watching from the edge of the tape has no phone, no coffee, no rain gear. Dante Rinaldi has been sent to handle a problem at the pier with no details and no questions allowed, and the problem is Marco Vasquez, six months out of Snake River, with his employer's mark carved into his hand as a message. Jules photographs him before he can look away. What Dante retrieves is a ledger kept by a dead inmate who wanted leverage. Names, dates, amounts. Cavallo's accountant, his lawyer, his lieutenants. Enzo Bianchi, the other enforcer, the one who has been competing with Dante for the top spot for years, skimming for two years. And an entry that stops him cold: his sister Angela's name, and an address, which means someone inside sold her location. Dante has one phone with one contact in it. Nadia Torres has spent months trying to get him to flip and testify, and her price for help is information on Cavallo's next shipment. Jules has a source of her own, a frightened man named Samir who orders water in a bar that has been sinking into the mud flats since 1973 and tells her exactly whose face is in her photograph. What they build between them is a trade neither side is running honestly: a copy of the ledger, pages 1 through 13, clean and complete and useless for prosecution, while the pages that name Angela ride taped inside the lining of Jules's jacket. Dante's argument for it is simple. He shows up with nothing, he kills them both. This is a mafia romance set in a fog-bound Pacific fishing town, about an enforcer who has already made a deal with the wrong side of the law, a reporter finishing her father's story, and a ledger that both of them are willing to die over. The heat is closed-door.