Chapter 1 - The Silver-Haired Judge
The glass of the front door did not rattle when Vincent Castellano pushed it open; it simply gave way, as if the physical world itself knew better than to resist him. The rain outside was sheeting down across South Philadelphia, but the silver-haired man’s coat was dry, his shoes unspotted, his expression entirely devoid of the mild surprise one might expect upon walking into a room where a woman lay bleeding on the tile.
Derek Lawson stood over Amelia’s crumpled form with his shoulders back, his chest puffed out like a bantam rooster that had just kicked a sparrow. He was twenty-eight years old, possessed of a chin that looked like it had been chiseled out of surplus granite by an incompetent mason, and firmly convinced that the Moretti family’s distant cousinhood on his mother’s side made him immune to the basic laws of gravity and geometry.
"Vincent," Derek said, his voice dropping an octave to hit what he imagined was the masculine register of a lieutenant. "Good thing you're here. This little waitress didn't know how to talk to people. Had to teach her a lesson about Castellano hospitality."
Vincent did not look at Derek. He did not look at the trucker who had frozen halfway out of his red vinyl booth, nor at Angela, whose silver hoop earrings were trembling as she pressed a dirty bar towel against Amelia's split temple. Vincent walked past Derek with the slow, deliberate rhythm of an old man inspecting fruit at a market—testing the weight of the air, the density of the silence, the precise angle at which the red blood had begun to soak into the black-and-white checkerboard floor.
He stopped three feet from Amelia’s head. He looked down at the pale thread of the old scar across her left eyebrow—the one she had tried to hide under three years of diner lights and greasy aprons.
"Derek," Vincent said. His voice was like two dry cedar shingles rubbing together in a high wind. Not loud. Not angry. Just terribly, impossibly old.
"Yeah, Vince?" Derek grinned, glancing back at Nikki, who had already backed away until his spine was pressed flat against the cigarette machine. "Look, we'll cover the glass. Tony was getting mouthy anyway—"
Vincent reached out. His hand was not large, but the skin across the knuckles was knotted with blue veins and old bone, the hand of a man who had broken thirty men and never once raised his voice to explain why. He caught Derek by the silk lapel of his expensive, stupid jacket—the one with the gold buttons.
"You hit her," Vincent said.
"She was out of line—"
The sound that followed was not a punch. It was a wet, heavy thud, like a side of beef dropped from a truck onto a loading dock. Vincent had not used his fist; he had used the flat of his heavy brass-handled walking cane, driving it upward with a torque that started in the balls of his old Italian shoes and traveled straight through his hip. Derek’s legs folded underneath him like cheap lawn furniture. He hit the floor two feet from Amelia’s outstretched hand, his mouth open, a string of gray spittle and a single bicuspid landing on the linoleum between them.
"Tony," Vincent said, without turning around.
"Boss?" Tony came out of the kitchen pass-through, the meat mallet still dangling from his thick, hairy fingers.
"Pick up the girl. Take her to the back. Get the good ice, the clean linen, and call Dr. Morelli. Tell him if he isn't here in ten minutes, I'll send his nephews to collect his teeth in a paper bag."
"Boss, wait," Derek wheezed from the floor, his nose twisted at an angle that suggested a total collapse of the cartilage. "My uncle... Jimmy Moretti... you can't—"
May you like
Vincent turned his head slowly, like an owl on a post. He looked down at Derek the way a man looks at a slug crawling across his porch steps after a heavy rain.
"Jimmy Moretti," Vincent murmured, "is currently in a nursing home in Chester eating his oatmeal through a straw because he forgot whose whiskey he was drinking in nineteen-ninety-four. You are not Jimmy Moretti, Derek. You are an odor."
