Chapter 37
RAFFAELE
The phone in my hand buzzes a second time.
I look down.
A saucepan.
A small orange cartoon saucepan, sitting under the bubble of text I’ve spent the last minute deciding whether to believe or not. I look at it for the length of a breath.
Then I’m moving.
I’m out of the bedroom and on the stairs before my head catches up to my legs. The folder’s in my jacket. The gun’s in my hand. The phone’s in the other hand, and I’m typing one word with my thumb as I take the stairs three at a time.
Coming.
I send it.
I take the front steps in two strides.
Lorenzo’s by the SUV. He’s got the side panel open and is digging through the case in the back. He turns when he hears the gravel.
“Any luck with— “
“I know where she is.”
He stops what he’s doing.
“What?”
I hold the phone out. He takes it. He reads the address. He reads the messages above it.
“Saucepan?”
“Inside thing.”
“Boss.” He shakes his head. “I’ve witnessed a lot of code in my life, but a saucepan emoji is a first.”
“Forty minutes north. We move now.”
“Backup?”
“No.”
“Boss—“
“Half our guys turned tonight. Half. I don’t know which of the ones still answering their phones are mine and which are Victor’s, and I’m not interested in finding out by getting Bea killed. It’s you and me. We go in as two.”
He looks at me.
“Two ghosts.”
“Two ghosts.”
“Alright.” He closes the panel. “Then I’m bringing the bag.”
We’re on the road inside ninety seconds.
I drive. The speedometer reaches heights it hasn’t touched in years. The lanes of the Garden State are mostly empty at this hour. I take the curves wide and the straights hard, and beside me, Lorenzo doesn’t say a word about my driving for the entire ride.
He hands a second gun over the gear shift. I take it.
“Plan?”
“Get in quiet. Find her. Get her out. Anyone in our way dies.”
“And Victor?”
“Victor’s mine.”
“That’s what I figured.”
The roads narrow. The hedges get tall. It’s the kind of road where the houses don’t have numbers on the curbs because the people who matter already know which gate is theirs.
I find Buckhorn.
I slow.
The house is half a mile down on the right.
I see it before we’re close enough to see anything else, because it’s lit up—every window in the front lit, the porch lit, the long sweep of the gravel drive lit by garden lamps spaced every fifteen feet or so down the property line.
I cut the headlights a hundred yards out.
I roll the SUV to a stop in the dark of a hedge on the opposite side of the road.
“He’s lit the place up like a hotel.”
“He thinks he’s won, boss.”
“That works for us.”
We move on foot.
Two men at the front gate. Smoking. The cherry of one cigarette and then the cherry of another, in a small bright rhythm. Twenty yards from a tree line they probably haven’t glanced at since they came on shift.
Two more by the side entrance—one with a phone, one with his shoulder against the wall in the slack posture of a man pretending to be awake.
Lorenzo and I read the property without saying anything. I tap left. He nods. He goes left.
I take the front gate.
The two smokers don’t see me cross the last ten yards. The right one’s just lit a fresh one and is cupping his hand to shield it from the breeze, and the left one is laughing at something he said.
I take the left one first. Hand over the mouth, knife across the throat, lower him.
The cigarette lands in the gravel and dies.
The right one turns into me with the lit Zippo still in his hand and registers the angle of my approach a moment too late.
I snuff him out before the Zippo hits the gravel.
Two.
I move along the hedge to the side entrance.
Lorenzo’s already there. He’s wiping his blade on the jacket of the second man. He looks up.
“Two on my side.”
“Two on mine.”
“His staffing’s light, boss. He must have overpaid the wrong people and underpaid the rest.”
“Inside?”
“Whoever else is left. Don’t expect competence.”
We slip in through the side door.
The mansion is exactly what I expected. Old money, given to somebody with no taste. We move down the first hallway shoulder to shoulder, low, the way we’ve done a hundred drills’ worth of hallways together.
A guard at the end of the corridor turns. He sees Lorenzo. He starts to draw. Lorenzo takes him with one round through a suppressor that sounds like a cough in a library.
He goes down.
We step over him.
The next room is empty. The room after that has a man asleep in a chair, his rifle across his knees, the strap not even fastened. I take him without waking him.
Another two in the back gallery near the kitchen—one’s on his phone, the other’s eating out of a bowl. He sees me and drops the bowl. It shatters at his feet. He doesn’t get the chance to draw.
I lose count somewhere after the second hallway.
I only care about one thing.
Find her.
Find her.
Find her.
We hit the foot of the main staircase.
We stop.
There are voices around the corner.
Lorenzo holds up a hand.
We listen.
Two men. Standing maybe ten feet from us, on the other side of the wall, near the base of the back staircase.
“—says bring her up. Top floor.”
“Now?”
“That’s what the text says. Top floor bathroom. Says drag her up if she gives us trouble.”
A laugh.
“Drag her. Yeah. He likes them feisty, doesn’t he?”
“He likes them however they end up after he’s broken them in.”
“You think he wants us to stay?”
“Stay?”
“Yeah. Hold her, or—you know.”
The other one is quiet for a second. Then a low whistle.
“You hear the rumors about him?”
“What rumors?”
“You haven’t heard? Guys in the rotation last month. They were saying he’s got—certain fantasies.”
“Like what?”
“Like—listen. I’d bet money. He’s gonna get her up there, get her undressed, and then he’s gonna ask one of us—one of the bigger ones, one of the muscular guys—to get in the shower with her while he just sits in the corner. That’s where his head’s at. I’m telling you.”
“Sick little fuck.”
“But, hey, as long as we’re getting paid.”
“Maybe we should ask for top floor duty tonight. Who knows, we might get lucky—“
I can’t listen to this for another fucking second. I round the corner before Lorenzo’s decided whether to stop me.
The first one turns. Not fast enough. My knife goes in under his jaw. The second one’s reaching for the gun at his hip. I’m already there.
I put the second knife—Lorenzo’s spare, taped where I can grab it at the inside of my forearm—into the side of his neck and pull. He goes down sideways, spraying me with blood.
“Piece of shit,” I sneer.
A second later, Lorenzo’s at my shoulder. “Boss.”
“Top floor. Bathroom.”
“I heard.”
“That’s where she is. That’s where he is.”
“Then that’s where we’re going.”
“No. I’ll go.”
He starts to protest. I cut him off.
“Check the rooms on the way up. Clear them all. I’ll take the top floor alone.”
He looks at me.
“Boss.” Quieter. “Save some for me.”
“No promises.”
I take the stairs three at a time.
He goes the other way.