Vitali checks his phone again then stows it. He leads the way to the back door. I let Joe and his crew go ahead of me. I don’t want all these men at my back in the dark. They probably don’t want me at theirs either, but they have to deal with it. I follow everyone into the dark stairwell. At the top, there’s a square of the city’s lighter darkness, plus a partial view of Quinn’s silhouette.
We move quietly upward and emerge through the trapdoor into the parking lot. Quinn lowers the steel door and rolls the dumpster back over it. The DiMaggios undoubtedly scouted this location after I exposed it, but the cameras never picked them up, so they didn’t come close enough to discover the trapdoor. They’ll think we’re still inside.
I could never have come up with this plan. I don’t think like this. But Vitali is good at it.
A plan, however, can only shape the conflict, like a fence or a wall shapes a fighting ring. Within that space, it’s just instinct and viciousness.
I go to my assigned location at the east corner of the building with Vitali. Quinn and Joe are at the west corner, and the rest of Joe’s crew is fanning out farther. There are two men already on the roof and four others in vehicles ready to box the DiMaggios in. This is everyone, all of us but Sasha, who agreed to stay back with Lucas. Vitali really wants this finished.
It takes a while, but they come, just like Vitali said they would. They roll up in three black vans, headlights off. They stop outside the gym, engines idling. Then the van doors slide open, and over a dozen armed men get out.
When they reach the front of the gym, our crew in vehicles comes roaring in from the side streets. The DiMaggio men shout and start running back to the vans—and we start firing.
One of the vans tries to pull away, but our cars slam into the vans, front, side, and rear, boxing them in.
The guns are noise-suppressed, but there’s a lot of shouting. This is an old, industrial part of the city, which buys us some time before the noise draws attention, but we don’t have forever.
Brick chips by my face. I duck back then lean out to fire again. Vitali is crouched below me. I’m half straddling him and brushing him every time I move. I hate it so much, but it’s the only way for both of us to actively shoot while using the building’s protection.
Vitali draws back to reload his gun. His elbow bumps my knee as he works. I don’t let myself react to it. Iwantto react. I feel it under my skin. But I stay focused.
The remaining DiMaggio men make it back to their vans. Vitali and I close in from our side, Quinn and Joe from theirs. We outnumber the DiMaggios now, but they have cover and we don’t, and our snipers can no longer help us.
Vitali and I reach the van nearest us. I try the sliding side door, but it’s locked. Two of our men get to the driver’s door on the other side. The driver is dead, slumped against the wheel. Our guys get that door open. They’re met with gunfire, but they manage to hit the unlock button. I yank open the sliding door while Vitali fires into the van’s dark interior as their noise-suppressed shots patter out from inside.
Behind me, an engine roars, and the middle van jumps the curb. It rocks and nearly overturns butmakes it onto the sidewalk, trying to get around the blockade.
The side door slides open. I’m moving before I even see the gun because I know it’s coming and I know where it’s going to aim. I get in the way. The bullet hits my chest like a punch, but I’ve been hit so much harder than that.
I catch hold of the edge of the sliding door and use it launch myself forward. With my other hand, I grab the shooter and yank him from the van. He yelps as he goes tumbling onto the sidewalk, where I know Vitali will deal with him.
The van swings as the driver aims around the barricade to reach the street. I almost get slung back out as the van lumbers down over the curb, but I grab hold of the driver’s seat. I’ve lost my gun, so I grip the driver’s head with my bare hands and snap his neck before he even knows it’s coming. He slumps against the wheel, pulling it toward the curb again.
The swaying van bounces partway onto the sidewalk but doesn’t make it this time. As the van tips and gravity pulls sideways, I cling to the driver’s seat to avoid getting ripped down into the crushing space of the open door, which is now below me.
The van crashes onto its side and slides across the pavement with a shriek of metal. The noise and movement through the darkness is so disorienting that reality kind of vanishes for a second. Maybe that’s why, when everything goes still, the pitch-black space confuses me. On a certain level, I know I’m stillin the van. When I let go of the driver’s seat and sit on the pavement, I know, mostly, that I’m in the space of the open sliding door.
But the black box surrounding me opens a pathway in my brain. I had forgotten this, how they used to turn off all the lights in the prison, plunging it into a darkness that would last for hours, or sometimes days.
Men would lose their minds in their closed-in, pitch-black cells. The longer it went on, the more they would yell and scream and cry. The sounds were muffled and distorted by the concrete walls and steel doors. It was so strange to be surrounded by that but isolated. It was so surreal, like a nightmare.
How could I have forgotten that?
I start shivering. I don’t know why. I’m not scared. And I could just open that other sliding door above me. I don’t know why I don’t.
God, I’d forgotten this. The pit that forms in your stomach. The strange, pressurized nothingness.
I jolt when that sliding door opens above me, letting in the lighter darkness and a shadowy glimpse of my brother.
“JesusChrist! Fuck, Roman, are you okay?”
When I don’t answer fast enough, Vitali jumps up onto the side of van by the door opening.
I stand up because I don’t want him coming down into this space with me. I put my hands on the edge of the frame and pull myself up. Vitali and I both jump down. His eyes are darting all over me. He grabs at my bulletproof vest like he’s going to checkunder it. Normally, he doesn’t do shit like that, but he’s not thinking. I push him away.
Quinn comes over. He and Vitali start talking agitatedly, but I tune it out.
I walk along the sidewalk, trying to reorient, trying to stop shivering.
