Chapter 74: Oddities
The heavy, familiar smell of river brine, coal ash, and raw timber hit Ricky’s lungs the moment their hired carriage rattled onto Washington Street. The chaotic roar of drayage carts and shouting teamsters was deafening compared to the quiet, velvet-lined corridors of the Waldorf-Astoria, but to Ricky, it felt like coming up for air.
Beside him, Marek let out a long, heavy sigh, slumping back against the leather bench.
"I never thought I’d say this," Marek muttered, pulling his flat cap low over his eyes, "but I’m glad to be back in the dirt. Breathing that perfume and walking on marble floors for days... it’s exhausting."
"It’s tiring, yeah," Ricky agreed, his eyes scanning the familiar brick facades of the West Side. "But it has its rewards. We planted the seeds."
"Yep," Marek nodded, stretching his aching legs. "I might go back there someday, though. I’ll miss the electricity and the hot water."
Ricky smirked, reaching down to grab the handle of his leather suitcase. "Well, you will. Tomorrow."
Marek froze mid-stretch. He turned his head slowly, staring at Ricky in pure disbelief. "Wait... what?"
"You’re going back uptown tomorrow," Ricky chuckled. "You’ve got to guide Jimmy and Michael’s crew with the first batch of midtown deliveries. They don’t know the avenues up there, and they don’t know how to talk to hotel staff without sounding like they’re shaking down a corner grocer."
Marek groaned loudly, rubbing his face with both hands. "Jesus, Ricky. And here I thought things were finally getting back to normal."
"They are," Ricky smiled, clapping Marek on the shoulder as the carriage pulled to a halt outside Aunt Molly’s five-story building. "Until the Williams brothers are familiar with the places and the unwritten rules of high society, that is your new normal."
Marek surrendered with a defeated sigh. "Fine."
They stepped down onto the busy sidewalk. Before Ricky could even signal for someone to help with their bags, two young teenagers in clean, oversized canvas coats scrambled out from the alleyway.
"Let me take care of that for you, Mr. Kowalski." one of the boys said eagerly, reaching for Marek’s bags while the other moved to assist the carriage driver.
Marek blinked, thoroughly surprised. Ricky frowned slightly, not recognizing either of the kids, but Marek let go of the luggage anyway.
Before Ricky could ask who they were, the heavy front door of the building opened. Evelyn stepped out onto the stoop. She wore a sharp, dark wool skirt and a pristine white blouse, holding her trademark wooden clipboard against her chest.
"Welcome back, sir," Evelynn said, offering a smooth, professional smile. "How was the trip?"
"It went well," Ricky said, stepping up the stone stairs with his suitcase of tailored clothes. "Over the past week, we secured weekly delivery deals with three popular establishments for the branded luxury liquor. We also met a few influential figures. A couple of them might be very useful for the political side of the business later on."
Evelynn paused, her pen hovering over her clipboard. "Only three deals? Forgive me, sir, but I expected at least ten."
Marek scoffed, stepping past them into the hallway. "The truth is, Evelyn, they don’t recognize the brand. Midtown buyers are stubborn."
"Marek’s right," Ricky said, leaning against the doorframe. "It doesn’t matter how amazing they taste. If the label isn’t widely recognized by the upper class, there’s no market for it yet. However, two of the hotel managers jumped at the massive profit potential once they tasted it. They ordered a small volume for now to test their patrons."
Ricky gestured down the street. "But it wasn’t just liquor and cigars. Since most of them didn’t want unknown spirits, we pivoted. We secured bulk delivery deals with a handful of large grocery stores and midtown restaurants for dry seasonings, high-grade meats, and cooking supplies. We canvassed the entire district, and we probably captured about seven percent of the storefronts."
Evelynn made a quick, neat note on her clipboard. "Everyone starts small, sir."
"Yep," Ricky agreed, heading up the wooden stairs.
By the time they reached the fourth floor, Marek didn’t even bother taking his boots off. He walked straight into his room and collapsed face-first onto his mattress, dead to the world.
Ricky walked into the executive office at the end of the hall, tossing his suitcase onto a side chair. He dropped into his oak swivel chair, letting out a long breath as he reached for the glass decanter of whiskey on his desk. He poured two fingers of amber liquid, enjoying the quiet of his own space.
"Anyway," Ricky called out as Evelynn stepped into the office behind him. "What’s with the new kids downstairs? And what did I miss while I was gone?"
Evelynn stepped up to his desk, flipping a page on her clipboard. She didn’t miss a beat.
"Per my administrative authority in your absence, sir, I have recruited an additional fifteen men as field agents, and seven more for the warehouse staff," Evelynn reported smoothly. "I also hired ten additional watchers to supplement the existing eleven, bringing our neighborhood security detail to twenty-one lookouts. Additionally, I hired six new office clerks. We’ve officially leased and occupied the entire third floor of Aunt Molly’s building to house the accounting expansion."
Ricky froze, his glass hovering inches from his mouth. He stared at her.
"Evelynn," Ricky said slowly. "Don’t you think that’s a bit over the top? I was only gone for a week."
"No, sir," Evelynn replied without a trace of hesitation. "I expected significant roster changes would be required after your successful trip uptown. So, a day after you left, I began recruitment. I rotated the new field agents into the existing routes to create a faster, more efficient delivery network. Three-man squads simply aren’t enough to handle the current average of one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty orders daily."
Ricky took a sip of whiskey, and promptly choked.
He coughed violently, slamming the glass down on the desk as the alcohol burned the back of his throat. He pounded his chest, staring at her with watering eyes.
"One hundred and fifty?" Ricky wheezed. "Since when?!"
Evelynn smiled calmly, completely unfazed by his coughing fit. "Since a day after you left, sir. The Williams brothers did most of the heavy pushing. The forged documents Mr. McClain provided gave them total confidence. They’ve been aggressively pitching every storefront in the Village. They are currently averaging twenty to thirty dollars each per day just from their two-percent commission bonuses."
Ricky leaned back heavily in his swivel chair, his mind spinning as he ran the math. If the Williams brothers were making twenty to thirty bucks a day just on a two-percent commission, that meant they were individually moving over a thousand dollars of freight every single shift.
"Damn," Ricky muttered, rubbing his temples. "I didn’t think the forged shipping manifests would have that massive of an effect."
"That’s not all, sir," Evelynn added, turning another page.
Ricky braced himself. "I’m listening."
"Our highest single day of customer orders hit exactly two hundred," Evelynn said.
Ricky’s head snapped up. "Two hundred?! Is that true?"
"Yes, sir," Evelynn nodded. "Before you left, you reserved the secondary storage shed and mentioned you expected daylight deliveries to reach two hundred per day. The route leaders took that as a quota, and they have been pushing relentlessly to hit that average."
Ricky rubbed his face with both hands. "I did say that. But that was an absolute maximum capacity warning, not a daily target. And I set up the second shed just in case I was delayed uptown."
"Well," Evelynn continued smoothly, "four days ago, I had to start securing steady, legitimate supply contracts from various import companies and trading houses nearby."
Ricky blinked. "Real suppliers? Why?"
"Because the primary storage shed ran out of stock entirely," Evelynn said flatly. "And as of two days ago, the secondary storage shed is already at eighty percent capacity. The demand was outpacing your... private inventory reserves."
Ricky didn’t say anything. He just sat there, letting the sheer, terrifying scale of the expansion sink in. A knot of deep stress began to tighten in his gut.
"Evelynn," Ricky said, his voice dropping into a serious, concerned register. "Don’t you think that’s too weird of a development? It’s mathematically impossible that we jumped to an average of one hundred and fifty client orders per day overnight. Even with aggressive sales and flawless forged papers, that volume shouldn’t be possible. Where did all those extra orders suddenly come from?"
Evelynn lowered her clipboard, her green eyes sharp and analytical. "I ran the market statistics, sir. My best estimated guess is that the smaller, independent merchants and mid-tier trading companies simply gave up. They couldn’t compete with our prices, our quality, or our delivery speed. They’ve begun liquidating their inventory and redistributing their wagons elsewhere in the city. We didn’t just win new clients, Mr. Stevenson. We absorbed the vacuum left behind by the fleeing competition."
Ricky stared at the wall for a long, quiet moment. The Soho spotters hadn’t just been taking notes—they had realized they were beaten. The Founder’s Syndicate had accidentally established a total monopoly over the lower West Side in less than a month.
"Oh, right," Ricky murmured, letting out a slow, heavy exhale. "That... that actually answers all of these oddities."
"Speaking of oddities," Evelynn said, her tone suddenly shifting away from corporate logistics and into a colder, more dangerous register. "That’s not all, sir."
Ricky looked up, his jaw tightening. "What is it this time?"
"Danny received a piece of information from the Orphan lookouts three days ago," Evelynn said softly. "A uniformed police sergeant has been secretly hiring groups of young men from the tenements to surveil us."
The air in the executive office went dead still.
Ricky’s eyes hardened, the casual exhaustion of his trip vanishing instantly as his street-survival instincts locked into place. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the oak desk.
"I figured that possibility might come sooner or later," Ricky said quietly.