Chapter 17
The cardboard said Washington Heights, and the block, when I found it, said the rest.
Jones had operated out of the same stretch for as long as I’d known him, which used to say something about his confidence and now said something about how far he’d fallen, because the block had changed and Jones hadn’t.
It belonged to a young pack now — a contested edge, the kind of turf that gets traded in blood every few years — and the wolves working it had the jumpy, overextended scent of men holding more ground than they could comfortably defend.
Boys in three doorways, moving to cars that slowed and rolled on inside thirty seconds.
Lookouts on the corners who clocked me from a block out and didn’t know what they were clocking, only that it didn’t fit.
That was the problem with reaching Jones now. He’d tucked himself into the middle of someone else’s territory like a tick, and to get to him, I had to cross ground where a strange wolf was an event and a strange wolf with a price on him was a windfall.
I didn’t try to be invisible. Invisible gets you followed.
I walked in like I belonged, like I had business and the business was none of theirs, and I let the old name sit on me where the nearer ones could catch it.
It bought me half a block of hesitation — long enough to read the layout, mark the exits, find the alley behind Jones’s building.
It didn’t buy me the whole way.
Two of them peeled off a doorway and fell in behind me, not close, just close enough — the loose herding pace of wolves who’d decided to find out what I was before they committed to anything.
I turned into the alley like that had been the plan, and when the first one came around the corner a step ahead of his caution, I was already inside his reach.
It was fast, it was ugly, and I am not proud of how easily the old training came back.
The first one I put down before he understood the geometry had changed.
The second got a hand on me and a knee into my side, and for one bad second, the two of us were a single thrashing animal against a chain-link fence — and my wolf surged up wanting to end it the permanent way, the Zorander way, the way that left a body and a message.
I held it. I put him down hard, instead of forever, felt the breath go out of him, and stood over both of them in the cold with my pulse loud in my ears and the wolf pacing furious circles inside me because I hadn’t let it finish.
They’d live. They’d wake up in twenty minutes humiliated and they’d tell the block a Zorander had walked through, and that was a cost I was now spending freely, because every place I touched lit up behind me like a trail of fires.
I was trading speed for noise. There was no version of this that stayed quiet.
The back door of Jones’s building was unlocked. The office was twenty feet down an inner corridor, the door pulled nearly shut, low voices through the gap. Three. I went through without ceremony.
Three men. Cocaine on the desk. Two guns on the table and a third holstered on Jones, who was closest and half out of his chair before I crossed the room and put a forearm between his eyes and folded him over the desk on the way down.
The second man went for the table; I got there first, swept both guns to the floor, and put him into the wall hard enough to stay.
The third — young, low in whatever hierarchy this was — had his hands up before I’d finished turning.
“Door,” I said. He took it at a run.
Jones got himself upright against the far wall, one hand raised, one pressed to the side of his head where the desk corner had opened his eyebrow.
He was bleeding. And under the blood, his scent told me the rest of it — the sweetish chemical reek of a body metabolizing alcohol it hadn’t touched in years.
He’d fallen off the wagon. That was how they’d gotten to him.
His eyes did the calculation I’d watched him run a hundred times — assess, weigh, decide how much trouble he was in. He got there fast. He’d always gotten there fast. It was his best quality and it had never once translated into doing the right thing.
“Logan.” Steady, despite the blood. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“You don’t.” I picked up one of the guns, checked the magazine, set it on the desk between us, well out of his reach and in mine. “Sit down, Jones.”
He sat.
I stayed standing. The geography of a room mattered — who was seated and who wasn’t, where the door was, who was closer to it. Jones knew it too, which was why he kept his eyes on mine, instead of the gun.
“You sold me,” I said. “My location. My detail. My wife’s routine.”
“They came to me. I didn’t go looking for it—“
“My wife.” Quiet. “My six-year-old son. Three days in a room with explosives zip-tied to their bodies, Jones.”
He closed his mouth. Something moved in his face that might have been real. It didn’t change anything, but I noted it.
My wolf wanted to put him through the wall for it. I held it where it was. I’d done enough of my father’s work in rooms like this one to know exactly how easy it would be, and exactly what it cost on the other side.
“How much,” I said.
A pause. “Does it matter?”
“No. But I want to hear you say the number.”
He said it. It was large. I’d thought it would be.
“Now tell me the part that keeps you alive,” I said.
“The Contis don’t know my world. They couldn’t have found you, vetted you, structured a job like this — they don’t have the wiring.
Somebody brokered it. Somebody who knew to come to you, knew what you were worth, knew enough about me to point them at you in the first place.
” I leaned a fraction closer. “Who put the Contis on you, Jones?”
And here it was — the thing Reyes had refused to name, the thing the whole chain had been bending toward.
Jones knew it was the dangerous answer. I watched him weigh whether the danger was me or the man he was about to give up, and watched him decide, correctly, that the man in front of him with the bounty and the dead-calm eyes was the nearer threat.
“It was a broker,” he said. “Old-school. Came to me three weeks ago, said he had a client who needed a high-value subject located, deep background, full pattern-of-life. Paid half up front, cash, no haggling. I didn’t ask who the client was — you don’t, at that money.
” He wiped blood out of his eye. “But I make it my business to know who’s standing behind whoever’s paying me.
It’s why I’m still here.” A breath. “The broker was wired into the Conti money through their financial side — a woman named Sera Voss, runs their US operation out of Midtown. She’s the one who can touch Marr’s structure, if anyone can.
You want the money trail, you want Voss. ”
“That’s not the name I asked for,” I said.
Jones looked at me, and for the first time, the professional calm cracked, because he understood that I already half-knew, that Reyes had pointed me here on purpose, that the question wasn’t really a question.
“The broker,” he said. “The one who found you, sold you, put the whole thing together.” He swallowed. “It was Jeff Alli, Logan.”
The room went very quiet. The space heater’s absence, the distant block-noise, my own heartbeat — all of it dropped away into the single clean note of a name I had not said out loud in thirty-four years.
Jeff.
Jeff, who had broken my face over a girl in a schoolyard when we were nine and decided afterward that anyone who’d take a punch like that was worth keeping.
Jeff, who had been my right hand. Jeff, who had called my father on a January night in 1989, and told him about Kerra, who lived, and walked out of a burning building while she didn’t.
Jeff was alive. Jeff was in the life. And Jeff had sold me to the Contis the same way he’d sold Kerra to my father — by deciding, again, that he knew better than I did what I could afford to lose.
“He’s alive,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.
“He’s more than alive.” Jones was watching me with something close to pity now, which from Jones was almost unbearable.
“He’s connected. After your father died and the pack came apart, Jeff went freelance — fixer, broker, the guy who knows the guy.
He’s careful, he’s good, and he’s the one who reaches Voss.
You don’t get to Sera Voss in this climate without going through somebody she trusts, and she trusts Jeff.
” A pause. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what the job was for.
I swear to God I didn’t know they’d put a bomb on a kid. ”
I picked the gun back up off the desk.
“Logan.” Careful now. Not pleading — Jones didn’t plead. Just asking the question directly, the only thing he had left to offer. “What are you going to do?”
I thought about Amy in a hotel I’d already decided we had to leave. The zip-tie marks on her wrist she hadn’t mentioned once. Noah pretending to be fine.
“You’re going to close this down tonight,” I said.
“The block, the supply, the arrangement, all of it. And then you’re going to disappear somewhere the Conti network can’t reach, because when they work out you’re the leak that let me slip them, they’ll come, and they won’t send a broker.
” I paused. “That’s everything I’m giving you, Jones. Don’t make me regret it.”
He nodded once. His eyes were steady.
I dragged the man from the wall clear of the door, checked his breathing — slow, even — and left them all where they were. I went out the back, through the alley where the two from the block were starting to stir.
I should have felt the thing falling into place. The chain had a shape now: Jones to Jeff, Jeff to Voss, Voss to Marr. A clear road, every link confirmed.
I understood that the road to ending this ran straight through the one man I had promised myself I would never have to look at again.
I’d have to look at him.