Chapter 14: Chapter 14 - The Albanian Pressure
Chapter 14 - The Albanian Pressure
The call came while Teo was collecting on Garrison.
He was standing in the third-floor hallway of a building two blocks from the Bruckner, waiting for a man named Cortés to come back with the rest of what he owed, when his phone lit up with the L and he stepped to the stairwell landing and answered.
Machete said: "Port Morris corner. Now."
That was all. The call was maybe eight seconds.
Teo went back to the apartment door and knocked once. Cortés opened it with an envelope in his hand, which meant he had been getting it together while Teo waited, which meant it was probably short. Teo took the envelope without counting it. "I'll be back Thursday." He was already moving toward the stairs.
"It's, there might be a little—"
"Thursday," Teo said, and went down.
The corner on Garrison and Bruckner was a block of industrial buildings and one bodega with a faded awning, the specific street-corner configuration the Reyes had been working for eighteen months. When Teo pulled up in the Honda, two of Machete's men were already on the block: Manny, and a soldier Teo knew as Pito, who ran the next corner east. An FDNY ambulance sat at the far end of the block with its lights off. That last part was the tell. An ambulance without lights meant someone had called it as a matter of form, not as crisis. Someone was hurt but moving.
Teo got out. The cold off the waterfront carried diesel and the salt that came from something other than ocean. The sky was overcast and low and the light was going flat already.
Javi sat on the stoop of the building behind the corner with his right arm across his lap and a strip of gray fabric, someone's shirt, knotted tight around his forearm below the elbow. His sleeve was pushed up. The fabric was dark from the arm inward but not dripping. Teo read it once. The cut was probably not deep, given how Javi was sitting. Color in his face was holding and his expression was steady. He was letting the math run.
Teo nodded at him. Javi nodded back.
Javi lifted the wrapped arm half an inch to mark it. "Glass."
"From the alley or the street?"
"Alley side. Had one on the street as the lookout. I didn't clock him." Javi stopped, ran the sequence again. "Not until the second one was already moving."
"How many?"
"Three. Maybe four. Gone in under two minutes."
Teo filed it and looked at the corner. The bodega's crates of water bottles had been knocked over, two of them split. A plastic chair lay on its side in the street, the laundromat's, he thought, from the color. Broken glass by the drain grate, brown bottle glass, not much of it. The corner was missing its usual activity. The standard presence was absent. A spot that had been operational an hour ago was not now.
Empty corners drew attention by being empty. This was the whole problem.
Machete's car pulled up behind the Honda.
Machete got out of the car without anything visible in the motion. He read the block slowly from the sidewalk, the same thing Teo had done when he arrived, then walked to where Javi was sitting and crouched to look at the arm.
"The ambulance guys check it?"
"Said they could take me to Lincoln. I said no."
"Déjame ver." Machete unwrapped the knotted shirt, looked at the cut, pressed the fabric back in place. "Cuatro o cinco puntos. Vas a Lincoln."
Javi opened his mouth.
"Javi." The word was level at a low volume. "Se infecta y te pierdo una semana. Hoy te necesito a todos en el tablero. Lincoln, mañana de vuelta. Okay?"
Javi said okay.
Machete stood and read the block again. He called Manny over and said something short in Spanish: reestablish, don't advertise, one man visible and one inside the building entrance, nobody out on the corner like they were waiting for something. Manny moved. Machete turned to Teo.
"You were on Garrison."
"Yeah. Got most of it. Cortés is short but he'll have it Thursday."
"Olvídate de Cortés." He looked at the split water crates and the overturned chair. "Take the south access. Waterfront side, where the lot meets the service road. Watch for anyone coming back. You'll have a view of both angles from there."
"For how long?"
"Cris is coming. He'll take the eastern block. An hour, maybe two, and we'll know if they're coming back today. I don't think they are. This was a message, not a second operation. But we're not assuming."
The waterfront end of the street ended at a chain-link fence and the river-adjacent lot beyond it. Good sightlines. From the stanchion the southern approach and the eastern block would both be readable, and from the block the lot would not be.
"Yeah," Teo said.
He went.
The lot was old poured concrete, cracked where the cold had been working it for years. Diesel, and something chemical from the processing plants across the water. The Hunts Point plants had their late-afternoon light on, the amber of industrial facilities that ran at all hours, bright enough to show against the overcast. Teo stood near the fence with his back to a concrete stanchion. From the stanchion the service road ran south in clear view, the block sat east in clear view, and the fence line itself was at his shoulder.
The corner was readable from here without being on it. Manny stood in the entrance of the building, inside the glass door. The bodega owner had not come out. He never came out when Reyes business was on his block.
Teo's hands were in his jacket pockets. The wind came off the water at an angle.
This kind of assignment was familiar work. Hold a position, watch, report. The early-weeks jobs had felt like exercises, Machete teaching him the trade. This was not an exercise. The Albanians had walked into a Reyes corner in daylight, done damage in under two minutes, and gone. Javi's arm was capability, not a loss of control.
A car came up the block behind him. The model was wrong and the plates were wrong. Teo went back to watching the service road.
Twenty minutes later, Cris showed up.
Cris came from the east, on foot, hands in his jacket and his cap down against the cold. He saw Teo at the fence and came over without announcing it by anything recognizable on the block. That was right.
"Machete fill you in?" Teo asked.
"Yeah. They hit Javi and bounced." Cris looked at the service road. "Three guys or four?"
"Javi said three, maybe four. One lookout he didn't clock early enough."
"Already a step ahead of him."
"Yeah."
Cris moved to stand alongside him at the fence. The same sightlines were available to both of them. He held a beat of quiet that was doing work and was not empty.
"This the first one in Port Morris?" Teo asked.
"First on this block." Cris paused. "Something happened on Leggett six weeks back. Didn't get flagged up as Albanian at the time."
"And now it is."
"Yeah."
The waterfront put its specific sound into the air between them. The low thrum of the processing plants ran underneath, with something metallic and far off coming through on top. A truck moved on the highway two lanes over. A gull called, which was wrong for November this far inland, but the gulls had been around lately.
"Javi's going to Lincoln," Teo said.
"Call it in himself?"
"Machete."
Cris nodded. His hands stayed in his pockets and his weight stayed on his back foot, which was the standard posture for the assignment. His eyes were on the hit corner. They stayed on it past the moment they needed to. The sweep that should have moved across the block and then on did not move. His gaze sat on the corner past the moment it needed to, and what it was checking against Teo did not know and did not try to guess.
He filed it flat and specific and put a date on it.
"These guys know what they're doing." Cris kept his eyes on the corner. The tone was the right tone for what he was saying. The placement was the wrong placement by half a second. "To hit the schedule that clean, that's not random."
"No."
"They've been watching. Probably a while."
"Probably."
Cris turned his head to the service road and held there. The corner was no longer in his line of sight. He breathed out once and was quiet.
Teo's eyes were on the fence line and the road and the concrete stanchion and the lot's cracked surface and the Hunts Point amber across the water. The corner was not where his eyes went. Cris was not where his eyes went.
The gull called again somewhere south and was gone.
Ninety minutes ran out at the fence. The service road stayed empty south, the fence line stayed empty east, and the block stayed readable without being seen from. Teo's mind ran on the Koci organization while his eyes ran on the road. Machete used the full name when precision mattered: el Albanés on the block, Koci in operational terms.
In nine weeks the name had come up three times. Once from Machete in the car, explaining how territory pressure worked: careful, patient, which is what we have to match. Once from Pito, half a sentence about Tremont. Once from Ricky in the office, Tremont mentioned as background to another conversation and immediately deprioritized, which was a way of not deprioritizing it.
The Reyes corners had been watched. The schedule. The Tuesday afternoon window had been consistent every Tuesday for as long as Teo had been riding it: same stops, same order, same general timing because reliability was the point. Today the Albanians had waited for a window and moved through it before Javi's arm finished bleeding.
The Albanians had information. The information had been used precisely.
Machete came to the fence.
At 5:30 Machete came to the fence and sent Cris east on a short instruction Teo did not catch the back end of. When Cris had moved off, Machete tilted his head toward his own car parked at the lot's edge.
"Vente."
Inside, the heater was on low. The windshield framed the chain-link and the river and the amber across the water and nothing on the service road. Machete shut his door and put both hands on the wheel like he was about to drive somewhere, and then did not drive.
"Anything from the south?"
"Clean. Two trucks on the service road, both wrong for it. One car. Nothing else."
"That's what I thought." Machete exhaled the slow way he exhaled when the breath was running an assessment and not a feeling. "They made their point. Nos van a dejar responder."
"What's the response?"
His eyes stayed on the water. "Thursday collections move to a different route. Nothing on the Port Morris blocks above Bruckner until we know more. The club gets another man on the door for the next two weeks. No movement on the Saturday layout without me knowing."
Teo listened.
"Everybody's on a shorter schedule. Nada raro. No new faces. No communication that goes through anything we don't control." Machete's eyes came across. "You understand why."
"Yeah."
"Dime."
"They knew when to move. The corner schedule, the timing. That's not from watching the block. That's from information."
Machete was quiet for one beat. "Yeah."
"Alguien habló."
"Alguien habló." Machete said it to the windshield. The sentence sat where it landed. "No necesariamente queriendo. No necesariamente sabiendo lo que daba. Da igual cómo. Pasó. Adjustamos."
The car was quiet around the sentence.
Teo's eyes stayed on the windshield. They did not go east. They did not go toward the block Cris was holding. Cris's weight on his back foot at the fence and the angle of Cris's attention on the hit corner sat in Teo's head where he had put them earlier, unconnected to anything, set down where they could be found again.
The heater ran. The water ran.
"Hiciste bien hoy. Being where you needed to be. Moving fast." Machete put a hand once on Teo's shoulder. "A casa. Come algo. Mañana otra vez."
"Yeah."
"Teo." Machete had reached for the door handle and stopped there. "Lo que tengas por ahí, keep it low. Especially the next couple weeks."
The sentence did not name what it was naming. Naming was not required.
Teo said yeah. Machete got out and walked back toward the corner at the deliberate pace he walked at.
The service road at nine o'clock was empty and cold and had the sodium-amber of the Hunts Point processing lights in the water to his left and the highway behind him and nothing in front except the service road running north toward the Bruckner overpass. Teo's Honda sat at the road's dead end, facing the fence. The engine was off. The cold built around him the slow way cold built inside a parked car. His phone was in his hand.
The tighter schedule ran in his head.
Two weeks of running the Tuesday collections, the expanded responsibility that came after Ricky's office, after the praise that had details in it Teo had not supplied. The collections were the first territory that was properly his. The route was no longer Machete's with Teo along; it was his own, with the authority of the organization behind him, and he had been good at it.
The pattern was changing now. The schedule was tightening and the routes were moving and the club was getting another man on the door. Machete had said nada raro and nothing that gives the Albanians more information than they already have, which meant the same thing applied inside the organization as it did outside. Everyone's movements were being watched, his own included.
Which meant Cami was more visible. The visibility was not aimed at her. It was the geometry of the contraction. The tighter the organization pulled, the closer Ricky's men sat to every part of the operation, and Cami was in the club, and the line between her and the operation ran through Teo. Ricky had filed it in his office two weeks ago.
The phone in his hand was waiting.
He called her prepaid.
It rang three times. She picked up.
"It's me."
"I know." Behind her, dembow muffled by dressing-room walls. A flat metal clang of a locker swinging shut, then the softer click of her closing it the rest of the way. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing. You at the club?"
A beat. "Yes."
"I'll be by later."
She was quiet on the other end. Considering, not empty. The dembow came through even from inside the dressing room. It went everywhere.
"I know you will."
The two words landed exactly where she had set them. Teo waited for warmth at the back of the line and none came. The sentence had been a sentence, not a comfort.
The line held a second and then her voice said, "Tengo que volver en cinco." It was true, and it was also a door closing by the correct amount.
"Yeah. I'll see you."
"Mm." She hung up.
Teo sat in the cold car a while after.
The processing plants across the water pushed their amber into the overcast and it came back diffused, the only light on the stretch of road he was parked on.
The Reyes were pulling tight. Machete had said keep it low without saying her name. There was no answer to that warning from inside a room a man could not leave.
Cris had been at the fence with the angle of his attention on the hit corner.
Machete had said alguien habló to the windshield.
The two facts sat in Teo's head where he had put them, side by side, not yet a sentence between them. A sentence between them required acting on it, and acting on it was not something he had room for tonight.
Ricky would know about the hit by now. Ricky knew everything that happened inside the operation, and if the operation was tightening, the tightening ran through all of it: the corners, the club, the men he had been watching for reasons he had not yet acted on.
The room was smaller than a week ago.
Teo put the car in drive. The service road ran empty all the way to the Bruckner overpass, the lights ahead of him strung in a line that gave him nowhere to turn off.