The Ferrante Strike
Niccolo
The call comes at 1:47 AM.
I'm awake. Reading. Augustine'sConfessions, which I've read four times because the man understood guilt the way engineers understand load-bearing walls. He knew where the cracks were. He knew which ones held.
My phone lights up on the nightstand. Enzo. My underboss doesn't call after midnight unless somethinghas stopped working.
"The Mergellina transfer," he says. No greeting. "Ferrantes hit it twenty minutes ago."
I close Augustine. Set him facedown on the mattress.
"How many?"
"Eight of theirs. We had five on site."
"Casualties?"
"Dario took two in the vest. He's breathing. Luca has a through-and-through in the left shoulder. The others are fine. Product is gone. All of it."
I'm already standing. Pants. Shoes. The shirt I wore to dinner twelve hours ago, still draped over the chair. I button it while holding the phone between my ear and shoulder.
"Where are you?"
"The warehouse on Via Tribunali. I pulled everyone in."
"Twenty minutes."
I hang up. Take the elevator to the garage. The Alfa Romeo is parked in the first spot, the black Giulia Quadrifoglio I drive myself when I don't want the armored car or the driver or theperformance of being Don Sorrentino arriving in a convoy. Tonight I need speed, not theater.
The streets of Naples at 2 AM are stripped of their noise. No motorini. No vendors. No tourists photographing their gelato. Just the road, the streetlights, the volcanic stone facades sliding past my windows like a film reel. I drive fast. Not reckless. Controlled. The way I do everything.
The Mergellina transfer was a weekly operation. Fifty kilos of product moving from a fishing vessel to a warehouse near the port, timed to coincide with the commercial fishing returns so our boat didn't look different from twenty others unloading catch. We ran it every Thursday at midnight. Same boat. Same crew. Same dock.
The Ferrantes knew the dock.
They knew the time.
They knew we'd have five men, not eight. Not twelve. Five. The exact number I assigned because five was sufficient for a routine transfer that had run without incident for fourteen months.
Someone told them.
The warehouse on Via Tribunali is a plastics distributor that moves legitimate product during the day and serves as a meeting point for the family after hours. The storefront is dark. The loading bay around back is lit, two men smoking by the roller door, both of them straightening when they see my car.
I park. Get out. The men nod. I walk past them without speaking.
Inside, the warehouse floor is cleared of pallets. Enzo has set up at a folding table under the fluorescent strips, papers spread, three phones in front of him. He's built like a cathedral column, thick through the shoulders, shaved head, a face that looks carved rather than born. He's been with the family since my father's rule. Loyal in the way that doesn't require conversation.
Around the table: four of my captains. Dario is sitting on a crate against the far wall, shirt off, two bruises blooming purple across his ribs where the ballistic vest caught the rounds. He's pale but steady. Luca is beside him, left arm in a makeshift sling, the shoulder wrapped in gauze that's already showing red at the center.
I look at Dario. "Can you breathe?"
"Hurts when I inhale."
"Then breathe shallow. You're not dying tonight."
He almost smiles. Almost.