"Understood."
"Hey." A pause. "Don't make it quick."
"Copy," I say as the line goes dead.
Kreiss's safehouse is a row house in East Baltimore. Brick, three stories, narrow, squeezed between a laundromat and a vacant lot.
We go in at two in the morning. Ten men, Bonaccorso and Castillo mixed, all ready for whatever is behind that door. It goes down on the first kick. The hallway is dimly lit and narrow and smells like cigars, the roof and walls yellowing from someone smoking inside. A man at the bottom of the stairs reaches for agun and I put two rounds in his chest before his hand gets to the holster. He drops and we step over him and move up.
Second floor. Two rooms. One empty, one occupied by a man sleeping on a cot with a laptop open beside him. He wakes to the sound of boots and doesn't get to sit up before one of my men puts him on the floor and zip-ties his hands. The laptop goes into a bag as I look around in disgust. Garbage is piled around the room with full ashtrays, a smoke burning in the corner of one. The carpet has browning piss stains, and the scent almost knocks me flat on my ass.
I leave and head up to the third floor. One door that’s locked. I kick it and it holds, so I kick it again and the frame splinters and the door breaks. Werner Kreiss is standing in the middle of a room that looks nothing like the rest of the house.
Clean desk with two monitors. A shredder running, eating documents as fast as the machine can pull them through. A go-bag on the floor, packed and ready. He was leaving. Tonight, maybe tomorrow. The consolidation Alexandra tracked was exactly what she suspected, an exit strategy. Kreiss was pulling his money out, ready to disappear somewhere we couldn’t track, and we caught him somewhere between step nine and step ten of his get-away plan.
Not today, fucker. Not fucking today.
He's smaller than I expected. Five-ten, thin, gray hair, glasses. He could be an accountant or a professor or someone's disappointing uncle. Nothing about his appearance suggeststhat he's been running a trafficking pipeline through two mafia territories for two years and destroying the lives of women and children to do it.
He looks at me, then at the gun in my hand, and at the men behind me.
"DiAngelo," he says. He knows my name. Of course he does. He's had people inside our compound for years. "Your boss sent the loud one.”
"Shut up until I tell you to speak." I step into the room. "Turn off the shredder."
He doesn't move, so I shoot it. The machine sparks and dies and the half-eaten document hanging from its teeth flutters to the floor.
"The operation is over, Kreiss. The marina, the Meridian Star, the facility, the pipeline. We know what you've been moving, and we know where it goes and in four days there will be nobody left alive who works for you."
"You don't know who I work for."
"I know enough."
"You know nothing." He says it without anger, but with the tired patience of a man explaining long division to a child. "I'm one node in a network older than your family and mine combined.You can kill me, and someone replaces me within the week. You can burn the facility, and another one opens within the month. The infrastructure isn't a building or a boat or a man. It's a system, and systems don't die because you shoot their middle management."
"Maybe not, but I sure as fuck will feel better when middle management dies, with all due disre-fucking-spect."
He looks at me for a long time. Then he reaches for the go-bag, slow, one hand visible, the other moving toward the zipper. I know what's in the bag before he opens it. There's always a gun in the go-bag, because that's the rule for men who know they're living on borrowed time.
He's fast for his age. The gun clears the bag, and his hand comes up and I'm already firing. Two rounds center mass. He staggers, hits the desk, knocks one of the monitors to the floor. The gun drops from his hand. He slides down the front of the desk and sits on the floor with his back against it and his shirt turning red and his glasses crooked on his face.
I crouch in front of him. Up close he looks even older, wrinkles embedded in his skin, mottled red marks spreading out from his nose and up his cheekbones. He’s an ugly son-of-a-bitch, but his appearance will soon be improved with a neat little hole through his skull.
"Who do you work for?" I ask.
He smiles. "The same people who will come for you when they find out what you did tonight. Bigger than you, DiAngelo. Bigger than the Bonaccorsos and the Castillos put together. You killed one man. There are thousands."
"I only need to kill one to send a message." Levelling the gun at his forehead, I pull the trigger, relishing the way his head kicks back before coming forward again.
He dies looking at me. The light goes out of his eyes much quicker than I’d have liked, but skinning him alive would take too much time and a bullet is twenty-five cents.
I stand and dust my hands off on my pants. "The hard drives," I say. "The laptops, files, anything and everything, into the bag.”
My men work. Carmelo supervises. Dario's team secures the perimeter and reports the street clear. I stand in the middle of Kreiss's room and look at the monitors, the desk, the go-bag, the dead man on the floor who told me I killed one and there are thousands.
He wasn't wrong.
The hard drives and the laptop and the unshredded documents will go back to Alexandra and Charlotte and they'll find what Kreiss was connected to. The money will lead somewhere above him, somewhere bigger, somewhere the names Custodian and Foundry and Westpoint appear in contexts that none of us understand yet.
