Alek's good eye stayed on me a long second. He did not look angry. He did not look pleased. He looked like a man recognizing a thing he had been waiting to see.
"You are changed," he said.
"That is their doing." I tapped Tomasz Krol's photo once with my knuckle. The scar on the left index knuckle was pale against the matte print. "They will answer for it."
Mikhail did not say anything for a beat. He looked at me the way he had looked at me the first night I came home off the road in late autumn and did not know who anyone was. He did not say it. He just looked.
"Renata," Ivan said, moving us along. He laid a single photo down on the table, separate from the others. A woman in her thirties with kind eyes and a bakery apron. "Nicolo's mistress. Civilian. She does not see anything. She does not hear anything. We take Nicolo at the brownstone on an evening he is not with her."
"Agreed," Alek said.
"Lucia's calendar," Ivan went on. "Standing family dinner she hosts at the Manhattan Beach house. Cesare clears it for the evening. Nicolo clears it. Dario clears it. They all move through that square mile in a window of about three hours, with the shipment pickup at Coney Island Creek running parallel. Cesare counts the cargo himself. He always does."
"Then that is our window," I said.
Alek straightened. He set his palms flat on the table the way I had set mine, and the room turned a little more.
"We move in two nights," he said. "Eyes open. Hands clean where the cops can see. No witnesses we do not control. Mikhail takes the garage on Gerritsen. I take Nicolo in his bed. Daniil takes the warehouse. We hold the chamber until I sign off. We do not improvise."
I nodded once. So did Mikhail. So did Ivan.
The room broke up around the maps and the photographs and the cold coffee and the smell of oil that had not gone bitter at all.
Two nights later I stood at my window before the convoy rolled. The floodlamps threw the kind of cold light that picks out everything you do not want to see in your own hands. The scar on my left index knuckle was bright as a coin. I turned the hand over and studied the palm and put it back down at my side.
I thought of Chloe in her grandma's small kitchen. The pot on the burner. The little radio she had told me about, the one that only got two stations, both in Korean. I thought of the way she sat at that kitchen table with her hair up and her socks on her feet and the steam of tea on her face.
I picked up my phone. Thinking of you. Thumb on send. I put the phone face down before I could read the reply, because I did not want to take her voice into the room I was about to walk into.
I put my coat on.
I went down to the cars.
The earpiece came alive when we hit the parkway. Mikhail first, because Mikhail was always first.
"Gerritsen is hot," he said in my ear. Calm. "Going in."
A long minute. The hum of the road under the wheels. My driver's hands at ten and two. The faint static of three crews breathing in three different cars across the south side of the borough.
"Gerritsen clear," Mikhail reported. "Three down. One alive for questions. None of ours hit." A beat. "Quiet now."
"Copy," I said.
Then Alek, lower than Mikhail, because he was inside a sleeping man's house.
"Brownstone secure," Alek murmured. "Package in the car." There was no sound of shots on his channel. Nicolo would be waking up with a hood on his head somewhere along the Belt, and Renata would be sleeping in another bed entirely with the bakery apron folded over the back of a chair.
"Copy," I said again.
My driver took the last turn toward the water.
Coney Island Creek smelled the way it always smelled. Brine and old diesel and the cold metal of a borough that had stopped pretending to be warm. We rolled up with the headlights off and the engines low, out of the cars and on the rolling door before the men inside knew what the sound on the roof was.
The door went up. We went in.
The first muzzle flash came off the corrugated tin to my left and I felt the heat of it across my cheekbone before the noise caught up. My men spread. Shouted orders in two languages. The Marchetti muscle on the floor scattered for cover behind the pallets and the forklift and the steel drums stacked against the far wall.
I moved along the right side, low, pistol up. A man came around the end of a pallet stack with a shotgun and I put two in his chest before he had the barrel level. He dropped behind the forklift and stayed there. The smell of cordite hit me cleaner than the smell of the creek had.
