Chapter 4 - THE NAME HE STOPPED USING
Dad came back to the hospital that afternoon.
No entourage.
No black phone.
Just coffee for Rebecca and a paper bag containing the cheese rolls I liked from a bakery in Queens.
I asked him directly.
“Who were you before the garage?”
He sat near the window.
“A stupid young man.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the one you need.”
“No. Silas knew enough about you to be scared when those accounts froze.”
“He was scared because the bank notices were real.”
“And the men with you?”
“Security.”
“From where?”
Dad looked toward Rebecca.
She did not rescue him.
Finally, he said, “When I was nineteen, I worked freight at the waterfront. By twenty-four, I was arranging cargo for men who didn’t put everything on invoices.”
“Smuggling?”
“Sometimes.”
“Drugs?”
His answer came quickly.
“No.”
I believed the speed more than the word.
He admitted involvement in stolen cargo, illegal gambling collections, cash businesses, and shipping routes controlled by criminal crews in Brooklyn and Queens during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
He became valuable because he understood engines, manifests, and which dock supervisors could be paid.
Eventually people stopped calling him Marcus Reyes.
They called him M.
Not a mafia boss.
Not officially.
Something more useful.
A broker between people who did not trust one another.
Then my mother became pregnant.
Dad began leaving.
He opened the garage.
He moved legitimate profits into freight and warehouse investments.
Over twenty years, those investments became a quiet fortune.
“What about the criminal people?”
“Some died. Some went away. Some became legitimate. Some never changed.”
“And the call?”
He rubbed his thumb against his coffee cup.
“Someone from that life heard Silas was moving money through companies I once used.”
“Why would Silas know those companies?”
Dad looked at me.
“That is what worries me.”
May you like
Silas had not stumbled onto my father’s hidden wealth by accident.
Someone had shown him where the old doors were.
Related Stories
