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CHAPTER 2: THE GHOST OF RED HOOK
Inside Trauma Bay Three, the air was sixty degrees, smelling of antiseptic floor wash, pharmaceutical adrenaline, electrical ozone, and the sour, metallic tang of blood drawn for toxicology screens.
The woman lay on the high-low examination table beneath two high-intensity surgical halogens.
An oxygen mask was clamped over her mouth and nose, misting with rapid, shallow exhalations. An intravenous line dripped hydrocortisone and atropine into the median cubital vein of her left arm.
Her dark hair was plastered against her forehead with cold, clammy sweat.
Claire Reed.
The girl who had vanished from my life six years ago.
The girl who had worked as a junior cartographer in the municipal archival vaults beneath the Brooklyn Navy Yard; the woman who had stolen my heart in the back booths of a quiet diner on Atlantic Avenue before I traded my father’s surveying instruments for a mafia empire and a name whispered in terror across the five boroughs.
Six years ago, on a freezing November night beneath the Manhattan Bridge, my father’s old enemies had blown my warehouse apart with twenty pounds of military C-4.
I had arrived to find only charred timber, twisted steel, and a pool of arterial blood on the cobblestones. The police had delivered a gold signet ring and a death certificate. My underbosses had told me she was buried in sixty feet of East River sludge.
