By two o'clock, the library on the second floor was filled with the only five men left who held territory between the Hudson River and the Newark basin.

They were older men, dressed in heavy wool overcoats and dark suits, their faces lined with decades of surviving federal wiretaps and internal purges. They sat around the walnut conference table where my father had once carved up the garbage disposal contracts in 1991.

On the table between them lay two things: the subpoena demanding Emma Vance’s deposition, and the USB drive containing the raw audio file from the kitchen server.

"If the little girl testifies," said Joe 'The Baker' Campisi, leaning his heavy elbows on the polished wood, "Carlo’s lawyer will make the whole prosecution look like a setup. The state will drop the attempted murder charges against Carlo, and the feds will step in with a RICO indictment naming every man in this room."

"Carlo is your uncle, Alejandro," added Frankie Vitucci, his voice gravelly from forty years of unfiltered Camels. "You don't put blood on the witness stand against blood. It ain't right. It makes us look weak to the families in Queens."

"Carlo tried to choke me on my own rug," I said, sitting at the head of the table. "He sat in my chair and watched me turn blue while he waited for a phone call from Trenton."

"Then shoot him," Frankie snapped, slapping the table with a palm like a slab of salt pork. "Take him out of the county jail during a medical transfer. Put two behind his ear and throw him in the Meadowlands. We’ll back you. But you don't let some four-year-old kid and her mother drag this thing through a public courtroom where every reporter from the *Star-Ledger* can take our pictures."

"No," I said.

The room went dead still.

"What do you mean, *no*?" Campisi asked, narrowing his eyes.

"We don't shoot him," I said. "Because the second Carlo disappears, the Trenton connection gets buried with him. And the man on that speakerphone was State Senator Thomas Gallagher."

The name hit the table like an unexploded shell.

Frankie’s cigarette stayed frozen half an inch from his lips. Campisi slowly sat back in his chair, his thick neck sinking into his collar.

"Gallagher is the chairman of the Port Authority Transportation Committee," Frankie whispered. "He controls the terminal leases."

"Gallagher wanted Carlo in charge because Carlo takes kickbacks and looks the other way when containers go missing," I said. "Gallagher is the one pushing the prosecutor’s office to subpoena Emma. He doesn't want the child on the stand to expose the truth. He wants Sofia to panic and flee the state so the state’s case against Carlo collapses, leaving Gallagher untouchable."

"Then what are you going to do with the kid?" Campisi asked, his voice suddenly cautious, respectful of the abyss opening beneath them.

"I'm going to take Emma to court myself," I said.