Iosif
She doesn't panic.
I've just told a civilian woman, in the plainest possible terms, that the man she killed tonight was connected to people like me, and she hasn't bolted for the door or dissolved or started making the kind of noise that would require me to manage her in ways I'd prefer not to. She's gone paler, and she's pressed her hands harder against her thighs. She's staring at me with those wide, blue, exhausted eyes, but she's still here. Still thinking.
"People like you," she says carefully. Not quite a question.
"Yes."
"And they'll know it was me."
"Not yet." I keep my voice even. "But by morning, if Vinzlee's house hasn't been cleaned and you've been seen walking through this part of the city with blood on you, then yes. They'll know."
She absorbs this. I watch her do it in a slow, methodical way that tells me she's processing. She’s not stupid. That was clear from the first minute I saw her. She's in shock and she's terrified, but she's still thinking in straight lines. Which is more than most people manage in circumstances that are considerably less severe than hers.
"What does that mean for me?" she asks.
"It means," I say, "that you have a short window in which the situation is manageable. That window closes when his men can’t reach him."
"Manageable," she repeats, and there's a thread of something in it that tells me she's noticed I've used the word manageable instead of words like safe or okay or any of the other softening vocabulary people reach for when they're trying to make bad news easier to swallow. "And are you going to manage it?"
I look at her.
This is, in fact, the question. The one I've been sitting with since the sequence of events assembled itself in my head. The question of what I do now, and why, and what the answer commits me to.
If I manage this woman, remove her from sight, clean the scene at Vinzlee's house before his people find it, control the information… I control the narrative. I determine how Vinzlee's death is understood and by whom. That is an enormous amount of leverage.
That is the rational calculation.
It's also true that she's sitting in my office in a torn blue dress with blood in her hair. She defended herself in a man's kitchen with a chef's knife and then walked through the city alone, and she answered every question I asked without ever asking me to help her.
"Yes," I say. "I'm going to manage it."
Something crosses her face.
"Why?" she asks.
"Because you walked into my club," I say. "Which means you're inside my walls. And I don't leave problems inside my walls unresolved. Vinzlee also had several of the local police in his pocket, so they aren’t going to be any help to you."
It's not the whole answer, but it's not a lie either.
She holds my gaze for a moment, and then she nods. Small and precise. A decision being made, or accepted.
I stand.
"There's a bathroom through that door." I gesture to the far end of the office. "You'll find what you need under the sink. Clean up as much as you can." I move to the cabinet behind my desk and open the lower drawer. I keep a change of clothes in here, and set a dark shirt on the edge of the desk. "You need to change out of the dress."
She looks at the shirt. Looks at me.
"I'll make some calls," I say. "Take ten minutes."
She takes the shirt without a word and crosses to the bathroom door. She walks with the slightly deliberate quality of someone who doesn't entirely trust their legs. The door closes behind her.
I wait until I hear the water running.
Then I pick up my phone.
The first call takes four minutes. By the end of it, my brother and two of my men are enroute to Vinzlee's house to clean it, document what they find, and make sure the scene tells the right story before anyone else arrives to read it. The second call is shorter. A contact who owes me a significant favor, positioned in the right place to ensure that if any noise was heard in Vinzlee's street tonight, it is quietly attributed to a domestic situation that has already been resolved. The third call I don't make yet because the third call requires more information than I currently have, and more information is currently in my bathroom.
