Snake Eyes

Chapter 4

The knock on the door had him much too close to pulling out his gun to shoot whoever it was. Today was supposed to be a crunch day so that he could get away and help Pentious tomorrow, but this was the third interruption since he'd come in in the past three hours. "Enter." The word was all but screamed before the door swung open. Artilluro, one of his fathers runners, walked in with his head high, looking around his office with his nose scrunched. If there was one person in the Family he hated as much as his own father, it was this man. Cocky was putting it mildly when it came to the wolf spider. He watched the man idly walk about his office, picking up an hour glass on the bookshelf and playing with it. The damn thing was an antique and Arackniss was much too close to an outburst for that fragile of a thing to be so close to his center of rage. "Did you want something, Artilluro? Or are you just here to waste my time and everyone else's?" He held up the file in his hand, which still needed a signature from him, and gave the man a narrow eyed look.

"Have you had a chance to go over that file the Don sent over yesterday?" Even his speech was too slow for Arackniss.

"Yes, I have. I'm gonna double check the routing logs through the system, which I needed to be here to do, and recalculate all of the costs. Why?" The man nodded slowly and Niss settled his hand on his gun. If the Don ever got taken out in an extermination, the first thing he'd do was get Artilluro and all of his "friends" out. He'd have no use for them since they were virtually useless for anything other than smoking, drinking, jokes, and meaningless runs like this one.

"The Don wants to talk to you once you've gathered a bit more. He's set time aside for you tomorrow at 4 PM. Do not be late, Arackniss." The man pointed a finger at him and put the hourglass down before striding out of the room and slamming the door behind him.

"Oh yeah, cause I need your dumb ass to tell me not to be late, right? Madre cazzo inutile spreco di spazio." He dropped the file to his desk top and dug out the one he had already been working on to finalize it with a signature. After a few more files, he could finally focus on the one that mattered now. Putting the file down before him, he pulled up the system and started crunching the numbers, back tracing who had input the information, and calculating how much this whole ordeal had cost them. When he went to look at the shipping logs, he tried in three different places, but they were no where to be found. Finally he pushed away from his desk and stomped to the door, grabbing his hat and coat. Throwing the door open, he started down the hall, Luca and Stefano falling in line. "We have to go to the goddamned magazzino on sixty-eighth."

"We lookin' for somethin' specific, Boss?" Stefano asked as he ran ahead of Arackniss and held the door open for him.

"Their fuckin' shipment receipts. I ain't got no logs pullin' up for them. So when we get there, they better have physical copies, or a damned good reason I can't pull up the data that should be in the system." He'd been so relaxed when he'd spoken to Pentious on the phone the night before, and now he felt like every drop of pressure had been poured on him ten fold.

"I'm sure they're around here somewhere, sir." He watched as the young man, who couldn't have even been Angel's age when he'd died, dug through box after box in the storage room. They'd reached the warehouse and inquired and had received the run around until this kid. The first person to greet them had passed them onto another who had said it wasn't his department and to try someone else. Arackniss had literally had a hand on his gun when this man had agreed to help them find the records.

"Who normally signs off on the shipments to the eastern districts?" He pulled out his pad and pen before he asked, ready to take down anything useful the kid might say.

"Oh, Eastern is always done by the foreman. He said it's an important section with a lot of high ball stuff goin' out, so he takes care of it himself." Arackniss nodded and jotted the information down before throwing a look at Stefano, who nodded and walked off. He was going to find the foreman and drag him to Arackniss by force if necessary. He wasn't just the son of the Don, after all, he was the one that set up most of the shipments in the first place. If he found out this man was hiding something, he could have the entire warehouse shut down and their routes taken by other warehouses in the area that he could trust. Though, he would probably set up a new system to avoid any sort of fall through with information like this again, sort of like a checks and balances. Nothing would be worse for a skimmer than him setting up a dog.