It was freedom.
I didn't let it show. The number was a hook, and hooks only worked if you bit.
"Who's the mark?"
Toni reached into his jacket—the inside pocket, the one that probably cost more than its own lining—and produced a photograph. He slid it across the Formica table the way you slide a card in a game where you already know you're winning.
I picked it up.
The photograph was shot from a distance, slightly grainy, the kind of image taken by someone who didn't want to be noticed taking it. A man leaving a building—what looked like a restaurant, dark awning, a heavy door held open by his own arm. He was tall. Broad. Built like violence was a hobby or a job or both, the kind of body that took up more space than its measurements should allow. Dark hair, messy. Dark coat. A face that looked like it was built for silence—hard jaw, heavy brow, features arranged with the blunt economy of someone who'd never had to be charming and had decided against learning.
I studied it clinically, without attachment, looking for information. The way he held the door said right-handed. The way his weight sat said he favored his left side, or was guarding it—injury, maybe, or habit. His eyes were dark even in the grainy distance of the photograph, and they were looking at something off-camera with an expression I couldn't name from this angle. Not angry. Not calm. Something in between, something pulled taut.
He was a stranger. A mark. A means to four thousand dollars and a bank balance that didn't make me want to stare at walls.
I pushed the photo back across the table.
"Why should I care about this particular job over any other?"
Toni looked at me. For once, his face didn't perform anything. It just was—a face, a man, someone sitting across a table who knew something I didn't.
"Because," he said, "it's not just a job."
He reached into his jacket again. The same inside pocket, but this time his hand moved differently—slower, more careful, the way you handle something that might go off. He produced a folded piece of paper. Not crisp, not new—creased and soft along the folds, the kind of paper that had been carried and put away and carried again, handled by someone who understood what it held.
He slid it across the table the way someone handles something fragile. Or dangerous. Or both.
I opened it.
My hands went still.
The blood left my face.
Holy fuck.
Chapter 3
Santo
TheEisenhowerwasdoingits usual thing—three lanes of brake lights and bad decisions, the whole expressway crawling like something wounded. That was something we had in common.
I'd felt the stitch go somewhere around the Cicero exit. Not a dramatic event—no pop, no tearing sensation, just a sudden warmth on my left side that started small and spread with the patient certainty of something that had been waiting for permission. By Harlem Avenue the gauze was saturated. By the interchange the blood had soaked through the gauze and into my shirt, a slow dark bloom spreading across the fabric just below my ribs like ink dropped in water.
I was supposed to go to Bridgeport. Debrief with Nico at the office, walk him through the sit-down, catalog every name and number and handshake for the files I kept in my head and the ones I kept in the locked drawer of my desk. Nico was good—thorough, loyal, the kind of soldier who wrote things downin a system that actually made sense—and he'd be expecting me. He'd been expecting me for forty-five minutes, because I'd texted him before the sit-down and said two hours, and two hours had come and gone while I sat in traffic bleeding into my shirt.
I called him one-handed, the phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder.
"Postponed," I said. "Tomorrow."
A pause. Nico knew better than to ask why. "You need anything?"
"No."
I hung up. The blood kept coming. Not fast—not the kind of bleeding that meant arterial, meant hospital. Just steady. A patient, warm insistence, the body's way of saying you tore something and I'd like you to know about it, and I acknowledged the information the way I acknowledged all information from my body: noted, filed, deprioritized.
I was angry with myself. Not for pulling the stitch—that was inevitable the moment I decided to throw combinations at a heavy bag three hours before a sit-down. No, I was angry for noticing. For caring.
The Oak Brook exit appeared and I took it, merging into the quieter roads where the houses got bigger and the trees got older and the silence had a quality you could almost taste—the particular hush of money and distance and the understanding that whatever happened in the city stayed in the city. The family property sat at the end of a private road lined with oaks that had been there longer than any Caruso. The gate recognized my car and opened without prompting. I pulled into the garage, cut the engine, and sat.
