The Lawless Man With A Thousand Chains

007 The Coffin

The room went so quiet that a champagne flute settling onto a saucer three rooms away came through the walls.

Then Marcus came off the fireplace shouting.

"Pregnant? Since when?"

"Since yesterday."

Damon said it like a man giving somebody the weather.

Vanessa's breath stopped somewhere in her throat.

Yesterday. They had known each other for eleven hours and they had never touched.

Most of those hours they had spent in front of a bored civil clerk.

The lie was enormous and he delivered it cheerfully. A laugh nearly got out of her before she caught it.

And now the words were in her grandfather's house and there was no taking them back.

Marcus knew a lie when he heard one. His fists curled.

"You lying son of a bitch."

CRACK.

Elias's walking stick came down on the marble like a gunshot, and forty voices died at once.

"How could you do this to us, Vanessa?"

Elias's voice had been hollowed out.

"You've thrown away everything I have protected for forty years. In a courthouse. On a whim."

His breath caught and he had to wait for it.

"The Quinn family may not survive this day, and I'll have earned it, for spoiling you."

Fear went over the great room like frost. Nobody moved.

The relatives could think what they liked about prophecies. Every one of them knew Elias Quinn had never been theatrical about money.

Elias stood there looking like a man watching his own funeral.

Then the doorbell rang.

It was such an ordinary sound, in that moment, that half the room flinched.

"Happy seventieth birthday, Mr. Quinn!"

The voice came in from the entrance hall. Rough, cheerful, and entirely wrong.

A broad man in a white suit walked into the great room. Behind him came a dozen enforcers in dark coats.

Behind them came four more, carrying a coffin between them at shoulder height.

Not a prop and not a joke. A full-size mortuary casket in black lacquer with brass fittings.

The four men crossed the whole length of the room at a slow ceremonial walk. Then they set it down on the marble in front of the birthday table.

The sound it made settling was small and final.

A caterer dropped a tray near the kitchen and nobody turned around.

Forty relatives stood holding their champagne and not one of them drank. Two of the aunts had started crying before a word was said.

Everybody in that room knew what a coffin on the floor meant.

Elias's mind went white, and then very cold.

He straightened his spine. Forty years of dread had at least taught him what it looked like when it arrived.

"Mr. Iceman."

He was proud that his voice held.

"I don't recall stepping on your toes. What is the meaning of this?"

"Getting old and forgetful, Elias. You hurt somebody who belongs to me, and I've come to collect."

"There has to be a mistake. I would never touch anyone under your protection."

"The Emerald Housing Project."

The Iceman let the name sit in the room.

"Your company knocked down a block of homes there last spring. One of my mistresses lived in them. She lost every single thing she owned and slept on her cousin's floor for two months."

He tilted his head.

"How do you intend to pay for that?"

Elias's eyes went across the room fast and landed on his son.

"Marcus. You ran Emerald. What happened?"

Marcus had gone bloodless.

"Lord Iceman, I swear on my life I didn't know anyone under your protection lived in that block.

"We'll apologize to her personally. A new home, wherever she wants it. Servants, an allowance, whatever she names, and the cost doesn't matter to us."

"Is that how the world works, Elias? You hurt somebody, then you apologize and pay for the repairs?"

The Iceman waved one hand at Marcus.

"Suppose I stab your son through the stomach. Then I apologize and I cover his hospital bills. Are we square?"

Ice went up Elias's spine. He had traded in this city for fifty years, and he knew what this man did to people over less.

"Mr. Iceman, please. There has to be a better solution than this."

"There are two."

The Iceman held up two thick fingers. He pointed the first at the black box on the floor.

"You lie down in that and we bury you in it. Alive. That's one."

He lowered the finger.

"Or you fill it. Six hundred million dollars, cash and paper, in that coffin, and we carry it out instead of you."

The number went through the room like a blade.

Elias Quinn had spent fifty years reading balance sheets. He understood in that second that there had never been a negotiation here at all.

Six hundred million was not compensation. It was not even extortion.

The demolished house was worth three hundred thousand dollars. The Iceman had asked for two thousand times what it cost.

It was more than the Quinn Group had in cash, more than they could raise by selling Emerald outright, and more than the banks would lend against every asset the family owned.

Somebody had done the arithmetic in advance and picked a number that came out one way only. There was no version of this where the Quinns still existed tomorrow.

Whichever finger they chose, the family died today.

By your seventieth birthday, Elias. Not one day later.

The old man's shoulders came down and forty years arrived on them all at once.

His granddaughter had married a penniless ex-convict this morning, and the shield had never come.

The thing Periander Fox promised would come back had walked through the front door carrying a casket, exactly on schedule.

"I've failed," Elias said.

He said it to his wife's portrait, and to the chair at the table nobody had filled in twelve years.

He reached for the edge of the coffin.

And a voice came from the back of the room. Cool, unimpressed, with no deference in it at all.

"It's the man's seventieth birthday. A festive day."

Damon Huntley stepped out of the crowd of frozen relatives.

"And you drag a coffin into his house. That's disrespectful."

He looked the Iceman up and down.

"And cheap."