24. Twenty-Four
Nikita had given me six men, and four of them were children.
I walked the line in the bay where we'd staged, behind the freight depot, and looked at what I had to work with.
The first two were Dmitri's, which meant they were fine.
The next was a kid named Dev who couldn't keep his hands off his weapon.
He kept checking it like it might wander off on its own.
Twenty-three, maybe, with a girl's name inked fresh on the side of his neck, the skin still shiny.
The one after that had his vest on wrong.
I fixed it without a word, and he thanked me like I'd done him a kindness instead of kept him from bleeding out through a gap he'd left open over his own liver.
His name was Tomas, and he had a laugh on him.
All the way out to the cars he kept the young ones loose, and I let him.
The next one was so young I doubted his face had ever seen a razor.
And the one beside him…
I stopped in front of him. "You're a cleaner," I said.
"EJ,” he said with a big, awkward smile. “EJ Renko. Yeah. That’s me.”
I glanced around. “Are you lost or what?”
“Nikita said all hands." He shrugged. "I can shoot."
"How many men have you killed?"
He swallowed and shifted. “I can hit a tin can at a hundred yards.”
Jesus fucking Christ. He’d never even shot at a live target.
I looked down the line of them, six men, four children, and thought about Dario Kastelani, whose plane was about to touch down on the private airstrip outside of Winchester.
The fucker had left Fin handcuffed to a radiator to die.
He’d ordered the execution of a dozen innocent women, and probably countless more that I didn’t know about.
He was an ice-cold bastard who’d paint the floor with their blood and not lose a minute of sleep over it.
And Nikita sent me boys who shot at tin cans.
I sucked in a deep breath and shoved my hands into my coat pockets.
“All right, listen up, you bastards. Here’s the plan.
Our target is Dario Kastelani. Italian. His plane is landing in Winchester in forty minutes and we’re going to be there to give him a nice lead filled welcome back to fucking Ohio, boys.
You do this right, we all walk away to get laid and paid.
You fuck it up…” I stopped pacing. “Then Nikita executes your last will and testament as filed.”
The kid next to EJ raised his hand like this were math class.
“Put your fucking hand down,” I snapped.
He lowered it slowly.
“Now,” I said, going back to pacing, “There’s only one way to do this right, and that’s my way.
So, you do as I say, and we’re good. There’s one road in and one out of the airstrip he’s using, which makes our job fucking easy.
We’re going to take two cars, post up on the other side of the exit from the airstrip so we’re not on federal fucking ground when we start shooting.
Last thing this org needs is a fucking RICO case because one of you green boys was standing on the wrong side of a property line. So mind your fuckin’ feet, ladies.”
I stopped in front of EJ and tried to imagine what he’d look like as a corpse with a hole in his skull. I found that doing that with my men before an op helped me keep that from happening.
“He lands, they load him and the case into a car, and we let the car come up the road. We don't touch the field. We don't touch the plane. We let them load him like good little boys, and we take the car at the first bend, where it slows. Dmitri’s team will be in car two. You’ll nose in from the front and stop them dead. My team comes up from behind and blocks the retreat. I want all of you sons of bitches out of the car and firing from cover as soon as that speedometer hits zero. Everybody except the fucking driver. Dmitri, you stay behind the fucking wheel and go down so you don’t take a round. I need you there to drive us out.”
Dmitri nodded. “You got it, boss.”
“The rest of you assholes don’t bother picking shots.
Just fucking shoot. Five hundred dollars American for every Italian fucker you kill, so earn those bonuses.
Quantity, not quality. Feel me? And you keep fucking shooting until I tell you to stop.
Then you stay the fuck in cover until one of us vets confirms that Kastelani’s car is a bona fide coffin on wheels. Got it?”
Dev opened his mouth. I kept going.
"Dmitri's car is Dmitri, Leonid, and the kid in the bad vest, whose vest had better be on right this time.
" I didn't look at EJ when I said it. "The rest of you unlucky fuckers have to ride with me.
Renko's on the gate. You close it behind their car once it's past you, and you do not move from it.
Nothing comes in, nothing goes out. That's the whole job.
You think you can shut a gate without shooting yourself? "
"Yeah," EJ said. "Yes. I can shut a gate."
"Then that's all you do."
I rode in the back of my car with EJ up front next to Leonid, and EJ wedged in beside me, and I checked my weapons, starting with the Makarov.
Mag out, count the rounds with my thumb, mag back.
Then I moved on to the spare, then the knife at my ankle.
I'd been doing it in the same order since I was twenty-two and my hands did it without me.
EJ watched me do it like I was casting a spell.
"Can I ask you something, Mr. Laskin?"
"No."
He asked anyway. "Were you scared? Your first one. The first guy you ever—"
"You talk this much on every op?"
"This is my first op."
I looked at him. The starry-eyed thing was all over his face.
The kid was looking at me like I was something he'd cut out of a magazine and pinned over his bed.
I knew that look. I'd worn it once, riding in cars like this one, watching men who knew what they were doing and wanting to be them so bad it ached.
"You scared now?" I asked.
"A little."
"Good. Scared keeps you behind the gate where I put you." I racked the slide and let it forward. "The day you stop being scared is the day somebody scrapes you off a road. You hear me? Stay scared. Shut the gate. Go home to your mamma."
He shifted uneasily and looked away. “Yeah.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s just…” He swallowed. “My mom. She’s gone.”
“Your pop then.”
He shook his head. “My mom was one of Bowen’s girls at the Foxhole.”
Ah, one of the whores. That explained an uncomfortable amount about how the kid had come into the organization and why he was so starry-eyed about it. For a whore’s son, this life was probably the best he could hope for. He sure as hell wouldn’t have known or cared who his father was.
I patted him on the back. “You stick to what I told you, and then you go make some brats of your own then.”
"Yeah." He nodded too fast. "Yeah, okay." Then, quieter, like he couldn't help it: "Thanks. For letting me come."
I didn't answer that. There wasn't anything to say to it that wouldn't make it worse, so I looked out the window at the dark farm country going by and didn't think about how he'd look with a hole in his skull.
The Winchester airfield was nothing, just a strip of light farm country with a windsock and a hangar and a road that ran out to meet the county route, exactly like the satellite photos said.
We posted the cars off the airstrip property, past the gate, on the county side of the line where no federal prosecutor could draw a circle around us.
Dmitri's car waited at the bend with mine forty yards back.
EJ got out and crouched by the gate behind us.
Then we waited.
The car they'd load him into sat by the strip with its parking lights on, a black SUV, driver's silhouette behind the wheel, right where it should be.
But something about the whole scene felt wrong.
I couldn’t put my finger on what, but I had that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach I usually got before an operation went sideways.
That didn’t make any sense considering everything was going perfectly according to plan, aside from being handed a bunch of children to babysit.
This operation was so simple I could do it in my sleep.
Perfect for breaking in a couple of new kids.
Exactly the kind of op I’d have chosen for them.
So why the fuck did it feel so wrong?
Part of it was the timetable. K had moved his plane up two days. Renzo's Thursday pickup would have found Bianchi's dark. A man who counts his Thursdays didn’t fly into a city that just gutted his pipeline unless he likes the odds.
It’s Fin, my brain supplied. He’s not beside you. You’ve gotten attached, Aleksi.
And it was true. Usually, before a job, I was at my sharpest, itching for the chance to stick it to someone who deserved it, but this time my mind wasn’t on the job.
It was back at the apartment with Fin, wondering what he was doing, what he was wearing.
Was he worrying about me? What if something happened, and I didn’t come back?
Who would take care of him? Would he cry for me?
Come to my funeral? I imagined him in the houndstooth suit I’d bought for him, weeping over my casket, and I fucking hated it.
It was the first time I’d ever pictured my own death and recoiled from it wholeheartedly.
I can’t die here. I have to get back to him. That’s all this is. I’m going soft over a mouthy Scottish tailor with nine fingers. Fucking hell.
The plane came in low over the tree line, lights blinking, wheels reaching for the strip.
"Here we go," I said into the comm. "Nobody moves until the car does."
The plane touched down hard and ran out long, engines reversing, and taxied back toward the fuel point with its lights sweeping the strip.
I watched it through the windshield. It swung around tail-first and sat there a minute with the propellers winding down.
Then the door opened, and the stairs came down.