Page 17 of The Dangerous Dance

"Because it keeps being true."

She stands as well, dusting rosin from the back of her leggings with the philosophical air of someone who has accepted that the studio floor is always going to win. "Just be careful tonight. The Irish will be watching that location after last week."

"I know." I sling my bag over my shoulder. "That's why I'm going in differently."

She looks at me for a moment longer than the conversation requires. Then: "I'll keep the light on."

"You always do."

I pick up the tail at twenty past nine.

I'm three blocks from the apartment, on my way back from getting food, which is a genuinely mundane reason to be on the street at twenty past nine and therefore the best possible reason — there is nothing that reads as innocent as someone carrying a paper bag that smells like takeout. I have my coat, my scarf, my hair down. I look like a young woman who lives in the neighborhood and is coming home with dinner.

The tail is behind me on the opposite side of the street, and he is good. Much better than the men Vito's people use, which I know because I've made a study of that particular style of surveillance. He doesn't mirror my pace exactly — he's slightly variable, which is correct technique. He doesn't look at me directly in the windows I'm using to watch him. He has changed, I believe, some element of his outer layer in the last thirty seconds — a hat, maybe, or the way a collar sits — which suggests training that goes beyond amateur.

He is still, however, following me.

I don't change my pace. This is important. The moment a target changes pace in response to a tail, the tail knows they've been made, and knowing they've been made changes what they do next. I want him to think he's invisible for exactly as long as it takes me to decide where and how this ends.

I turn right at the corner, which takes me into a slightly busier block — a bar on the near side with people standing outside despite the cold, a restaurant with its door propped open and warm light and noise spilling out. Coverage. Movement. Multiple points of exit and entry.

He follows me around the corner. Still good. Still variable.

I stop to look at my phone, which gives me six seconds of still target — and a stationary target is a surveillance problem because a tail must also stop or risk closing distance — and in those six seconds I confirm that he is now on my side of the street, approximately twenty-five feet back, stopped in front of a closed storefront and doing an adequate impression of a man checking his own phone.

Good technique. Not good enough.

I go into the restaurant.

Not through the main entrance, which faces the street, but through the bar side door, which requires cutting through the covered alley between the restaurant and the bar next door. It is dark in the alley. It smells like city and cold and the kitchen exhaust from the restaurant's ventilation. I move through it in fifteen seconds and come out on the parallel street on the other side of the block, which means I've crossed through the building without entering it in any way a camera on the main entrance would capture.

I walk two blocks east. Then I double back on a street that runs behind the tail's last known position, which takes me along a route that means I am now, briefly, following him rather than the other way around.

He is standing outside the restaurant entrance looking at his phone with the particular expression of someone who is recalibrating because what they expected to happen didn't. He's already on his phone, calling it in, and his posture has the frustration of someone reporting a failure to someone who is not going to be pleased.

I walk past him on the opposite side of the street.

He doesn't look up.

Viktor calls at eleven.

"I picked up a tail tonight," I say, before he can open. "Costello's man. I lost him."

Silence. Then: "Explain."

"He was good. Better than the men I've seen on Italian assignments. But he closed distance when I stopped, which gave me the make, and I went through a building." I keep my voice even, factual, the way my father taught me to report. Information first, always. Interpretation after. "There's something else. He put a tracker on me at the first warehouse. I've been carrying it in my coat lining."

"Since when."

"Since the night of the warehouse. I found it during the fight. I leave it in my coat while I operate, then collect it before I return home. He thinks he has eyes on me. He doesn't." I pause. "I'm telling you now because the tail confirmed it — he's running parallel surveillance. He's resourceful. He's watching me. And he doesn't know I know either of those things."

Another silence. Longer this time, and I can feel Viktor reassessing — the particular quality of a man moving pieces around a board in his head, deciding what this information changes.

"You should have told me sooner," he says.

"I needed to confirm he didn't have other surveillance before I flagged it. Reporting a tracker I'd found and then having it turn out there were three more would have been unhelpful."

"And now you've confirmed."