Chapter 5
Pietro
We had the two men in the basement.
It was colder in here than on the street. Concrete floor, bare bulb, drain in the middle and a wet ring around it from when Marco’s man had bleached the place. There was a table bolted to the wall and two chairs, one of which had all but lost its seat to old water damage. I did not take a chair.
Salvatore stood in the center of the room, sleeves rolled to the elbow.
There was blood on the hem of his left cuff.
He had been working the younger of the two would-be kidnapers for forty minutes, alternating between questions and the slow, calculated application of a broomstick to the soft spots in the man’s body.
The man had pissed himself at the fifteen-minute mark, but otherwise hadn’t given much up.
Tonio was at the table, holding the older one’s wrist flat against the wood with both hands.
His face was calm, but there was a light in his eyes that meant he was having fun.
The older one was sweating hard, even though the room was cold enough to make your teeth ache.
Sal had cut their shirts off at the collar and left them in just the ribbed undershirts, which were now damp and clinging to skin.
It was good that she wasn’t here.
I stood with my back to the door. The blood had already dried in the cracks of the concrete, old stains layered under the new.
The air was thick with the metallic stink of it and something older—cigarette ash, mildew, the ghosts of men who had not left this room.
The taste of her was still in my mouth. I had tried to wash it out, twice, with salt water and then coffee, but it lingered.
My hand was bandaged. The bite had not gone through to bone, but it had bled enough that I had to wrap it twice before it stopped.
I flexed the fingers now, testing the pain, and it spiked hard up the back of my forearm.
Salvatore looked up and saw me. His gaze went from the line of my coat to the bandage on my hand, took in the fact that my shirt was damp at the collar where I had washed my mouth in the kitchen sink, and made a judgment about all of it that he did not share. He nodded once.
“Where’ve you been?” he said.
“Looking for her,” I said.
He waited for a beat. “Find her?”
“Yep. Then I lost her again.”
He nodded again, as if he had expected nothing else.
The older man at the table spat sideways and tried to twist out from under Tonio’s grip.
Tonio tightened his hold and bent the man’s wrist a quarter turn further than it wanted to go, making him hiss and bare his teeth.
The sound was raw. It echoed off the walls, ugly, like a cat fighting.
Sal walked around behind the younger one, who was shivering now and blinking hard to keep his eyes clear. There was a thin line of blood at the corner of his mouth. Sal put a hand on the man’s shoulder, not hard, but in a way that said you are staying here until I say otherwise.
“You know who I am?” Sal said.
The man nodded. He tried to say a name but it came out as a wet grunt.
“Good,” Sal said. “Then you know what happens next.”
Tonio, from the table, said, “Make it quick. I don’t want to have to join in.”
Sal shot him a look, then back to me. “Then let’s get on with it.”
He stepped in front of the younger one and crouched, making himself level with the man’s face.
He spoke low, in Italian. I could pick out the key words: who, money, woman, pain.
The man shook his head, then nodded, then shook it again, like a dog trying to get water out of its ear.
Sal let him go a minute, then straightened and walked to the table.
Tonio was already standing with the older guy bent over the table, one arm braced against the man’s shoulder, the other pinning his wrist flat to the scarred wood.
It was a fucked-up twist on a schoolyard game: palm splayed, fingers straining to peel free, but Tonio’s body blocked any shot at escape.
He looked like he could’ve just as easily been teaching the guy how to throw a fastball, except Tonio grinned when the man tried to yank back and couldn’t.
“A real character, this one,” Tonio jerked his chin at the guy, still smiling.
I took a good look. Heavy brow, pitted skin.
A nose that’d been busted years ago and maybe never set right, left side of his jaw shadowed with an old bruise.
The hands were knobby, joints swollen, veins raised like cables.
His accent, when he’d tried to beg earlier, wasn’t Sicilian or even Italian.
Bratva, for sure. Ukrainian or Russian, maybe a bit of both, the way the vowels slurred.
I didn’t need to say it. But the room liked the sound of spoken certainty, so I gave them what they wanted.
“Character is right,” I said, keeping my voice low.
Sal nodded, once. “Bratva muscle. Not local.” He said it like a death sentence.
Tonio snorted, then leaned closer to the man’s ear. “So, what brings you to our basement, cyka?”
No answer. Just the man’s breath, fast and sharp, gumming up the air with spit and snot. The stink of terror was a chemical thing; you could almost see it, like heat rising off the concrete.
Sal turned to the man, his hands loose at his sides. “Why are you here?”
The man just stared at the wall behind Sal, jaw clenched and eyes hot with something—rage, shame, something that made him more dangerous than any idiot who folded at the first sign of pain.
Tonio shifted his weight, dug a thumb right into the web of flesh below the man’s pointer finger. The pressure made a wet, popping noise, and the man hissed through his teeth.
“Tell us,” Tonio said, gentle, like he was talking to his own kid. “You don’t want to draw this out. I, on the other hand, would be very happy to.”
Still nothing.
Tonio sighed, then shot me a look. It said: permission? Or maybe: want to take over? I shook my head. This was their game. I stuck to the wall, hands in my pockets, pretending not to notice the blood drying into my bandage.
Sal looked at me. When I didn’t move, he turned back to the guy, then reached into his pocket for the kitchen knife. Bone handle, blade sharpened so many times the metal looked skeletal. He opened it slow, let the click echo in the silence, and set it upright on the table by the man’s thumb.
Tonio tapped the hilt with a knuckle. “You want me to do it, or do you want to talk?”
Silence.
Sal didn’t move. Tonio took the knife, and with a practiced grip, lined the edge right up against the first knuckle. He didn’t cut. He just let the blade rest there, cold and certain.
This time the man did twitch, but Tonio had the leverage. He pressed the hand down, until the nails scraped at the lacquer. For a second, I thought the guy would pass out, but he just spat at the floor. “Was a job,” he said, finally.
Tonio relaxed a hair. “What job?”
The man’s lips curled. “Pickup.”
Sal’s turn to speak, voice clipped. “Who?”
The man’s eyes flicked between us. “Girl.”
Tonio grinned. “We know it was a fucking girl, you idiot. But who is she? Why did you have to pick her up?”
He wouldn’t look at any of us. “Don’t know. Don’t know who she is.”
Sal didn’t even flinch. “You know her name?”
The man grunted, shrugged, then shut his mouth. But the lines in his neck betrayed him, so Tonio pushed the knife until it drew a thin bead of red.
“Who wanted the pickup?” Sal said, soft as a lullaby.
The man tried to tough it out, but the pain was real now. “Halberd,” he spit. “It was Halberd.”
The room stopped. All of us, even the younger guy in the corner, felt it.
The fucking hedge fund. They had connections to dirty money, Valenti money.
Someone snitched, and the managers and staff ended up in prison.
Even some Valentis got tied into it. A dirty business.
It should have been a dead story—everyone who mattered was locked up or dead in the ground.
“Halberd is dead,” I said. “Halberd’s in prison.”
The man bared his teeth. “Men in prison. But the money’s still out there.”
He wasn’t wrong. Money was always out there, sliding along wires and through offshore accounts, outlasting the men who made it. Some accountant in the Caymans was still cashing invoices for the dead.
Sal asked, “What did they want with her?”
The man sucked in a breath, held it, then let it go. “Alive. That’s all. No questions.”
“Why?” I demanded, stepping closer. “Why risk importing muscle for this girl? You’re not even from here.”
He darted his eyes at me—up, down, like he was calculating my price—but he must have seen something that disagreed with him, because he just shook his head. “Not our job to know. That’s above us.”
Sal folded his arms, stared at the knife, then at the man. “You ever see her before this?”
“No.” The answer was instant.
Tonio eased the hand up, just a fraction, to give him hope. “You were to deliver her where?”
He hesitated. “Norridge. Safe house.”
“And then?” Sal pressed.
The man’s mouth went dry. He licked his lips, then said it: “Brothel. She’d be sent to the house. Like the others.”
He said it soft, but the word hung in the chill, slick and ugly.
Sal’s hand went flat on the table, hard enough to make the chair jump. For a second, nobody said anything.
The older man kept talking, like he couldn’t help himself now. He named a Norridge address, then two women who had gone before, both dead. I watched his eyes while he said it. I watched the way his pupils got small at the end, like a man about to pass out.
The room got even colder.
I did not want to hear anymore.
I left Sal and Tonio to it. I went up the stairs, through the kitchen, and out into the courtyard.
I did not bother with my coat. I wanted the cold to do something to me, but it didn’t.
It was nothing. The sky was a smear of black and sodium yellow, the kind of night that never quite lets go of the city.