Chapter 3 - The Blood On The Check
The neon sign of the Queens pharmacy flickered intermittently against the wet asphalt of Roosevelt Avenue.
Gianna clutched the paper bag containing her mother’s three-month supply of specialized immunosuppressant medication.
For the first time in five months, the pharmacist had smiled at her instead of shaking his head with sympathetic embarrassment.
The remaining funds from the Bianchi bank draft were already wired directly to the Queens General billing department, securing Maria’s private room for forty-five days.
Yet, the relief Gianna expected to feel was choked by a heavy, suffocating dread.
She walked down the cracked concrete steps toward the basement apartment on 34th Street, where the rusted iron gate hung off its hinges.
Standing on the small concrete porch was Theodore Watts, chewing on an unlit cigar and holding a clipboard.
He was a stocky man in his late fifties, his cheap polyester jacket smelling permanently of stale grease and sour beer.
When he heard Gianna’s footsteps, he turned around with a smug, sneering grin that showed yellowed teeth.
“You’re five hours past the deadline, Falcone,” Watts barked, tapping the eviction padlock chained across the doorway.
“The locks are changed, and the moving crew is scheduled for tomorrow at sunrise.”
“Take the padlock off, Watts,” Gianna said, her voice dropping into a dangerous, icy register she didn’t know she possessed.
She pulled an official bank receipt from her coat pocket and shoved it against his chest.
Watts glanced down at the paper, his smirk instantly freezing when his eyes caught the issuing institution name: Bianchi Commercial Trust.
His face drained of color, his fleshy jowls trembling as he looked from the receipt to Gianna’s calm, unblinking face.
“Where did you get this?” Watts whispered, his voice suddenly stripped of all its previous bravado.
“That is thirty-five hundred dollars covering past rent and the next three months in advance,” Gianna replied, stepping closer until Watts stepped back.
“You take the chain off my door, or I call the office listed on that header right now.”
Watts swallowed hard, fumbling through his deep pockets with shaking hands until he produced a heavy brass key.
He unlocked the padlock, his breath rattling in his throat as the iron chain clattered to the dirty concrete floor.
“You think you’re smart playing with those people, don’t you, little girl?” Watts muttered, his eyes darting nervously toward the empty street.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gianna said, grabbing the door handle.
Watts leaned in, his voice dropping to a harsh, trembling whisper that made her blood run cold.
“Your old man thought he was untouchable too when he ran the docks for Sergio’s father twenty years ago,” Watts sneered.
“And look where that got Vincent Falcone—six feet of concrete under the Verrazzano Bridge.”
Gianna’s world stopped spinning as Watts turned on his heel and scurried up the street into the pouring rain.
She stood paralyzed in the doorway of her damp apartment, her mind reeling from the name Watts had just uttered.
Her father, Vincent Falcone, had supposedly abandoned their family and vanished to South America when Gianna was only two years old.
May you like
That was the lie her mother had repeated every night while weeping over unpaid utility bills.
Now, the landlord had connected her father’s death directly to the father of the man who had just bought her silence.
