They Sent A Broke Waitress To Humiliate A Deaf Crime Boss — The Outcome Left The Entire Syndicate S...
Chapter 2
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"He moved." Yusuf loosened his collar button. "Tatum, there's a man in the private room who came in alone. No reservation, which he could afford to do because he owns about a third of this neighborhood. Briggs sent the man's usual associate away at the front door. Said it was a mix-up. Now he wants you to carry that bottle in."Tatum looked at the bottle of single malt sitting at the end of the prep counter: 30-year shelf stock, a glass that cost more than her weekly take-home."Why me?"Yusuf looked at the floor. "The man in that room is Declan Morrow."The name moved through the kitchen like a pressure change. Tatum felt it in her back teeth.Declan Morrow, head of the Morrow Collective. He'd taken it over eight years ago after the Western chapter dissolved in what articles carefully called a series of "unrelated incidents." He was methodical, invisible when he needed to be, and catastrophically effective. The stories that circulated through the city's underworld service industry were not stories Tatum repeated in public.He was also, by every account she'd ever heard, profoundly and completely deaf."Briggs wants to humiliate him," Tatum said. It wasn't a question."Briggs placed bets with his table on how the man responds when he can't communicate with the server." Yusuf picked up a cloth and wrung it between both hands. "There is no polite way to say this, Tatum: you are the bait. If Morrow gets frustrated, if anything goes wrong in that room, Briggs gets his spectacle. He's got people watching the door.""And I get the consequences.""Briggs put 2,000 on the bar for staff tips." Yusuf set the cloth down. "Cash, already counted."Tatum looked at the eviction notice in her apron pocket, its corner pressing slightly through the fabric. Her daughter, Maya, was seven. Maya had asthma; the medication was not cheap. The apartment they lived in had a leaky radiator that had been making everything worse since October, and the landlord had been promising to fix it since October. It was now deep into February, and nothing had changed.$2,000 split among the staff meant another month. It meant Maya's inhaler. It meant breathing room—which felt like a bitter, appropriate metaphor."I'll do it," Tatum said, and she was already reaching for the bottle.The private room at the back of Del Vecchio's was separated from the main floor by a heavy steel door dressed in mahogany veneer. Soundproofed; the service called it the vault. The kind of room where men said things that couldn't be unsaid and then went home to their families.Tatum balanced the bottle and both glasses on a small round tray. Her hands were shaking; she pressed her wrists against her thighs to stop it.She pushed the door.The silence was physical. It pressed against her eardrums the moment the door sealed shut behind her, and she stood there for a full two seconds just adjusting to it. The room was small and deliberately dim. A low amber pendant lamp hung over a square table of dark walnut. The walls were paneled in something warm and acoustic.