Chapter 2 #2
Except it isn't. Because kidnapping and killing a federal prosecutor isn't cleaning a crime scene.
It's an act of war against the United States government, and the response will be proportional.
And because somewhere underneath the clinical assessment, in a place I don't examine too closely, there's a voice saying that killing a woman whose only crime was doing her job well would make me something I haven't been yet, something worse than what I already am.
"The heat will be enormous," I say. "FBI, Marshals, NYPD, every agency in the city will be looking for her."
"Which is why it needs to be you. Anyone else leaves a trail. You don't."
"I'll need time to plan."
"You have forty-eight hours to get this in motion."
"That's not enough."
"Make it enough." Diego's voice hardens. "And Mateo? This isn't a request. The family has decided. If you can't do this for your own brother, we'll find someone who can. And they won't be as gentle as you."
He hangs up. I stare at the phone on the counter and let the silence fill the apartment.
Forty-eight hours to plan a kidnapping. The logistics aren't the problem.
I can plan an extraction in my sleep because it's just a sequence of variables to control.
Entry point, exit route, transport, containment.
The problem is the target. Sofia Navarro isn't a cartel associate who knows the rules and understands the risks.
She's a civilian, a government official, someone whose disappearance will trigger a response I can't clean away with bleach and a hacksaw.
And she's the woman who put my brother in prison.
I pull up everything I can find on her. It doesn't take long.
She's not hiding. Her name is on court filings and press releases and a Georgetown Law alumni page that features a photo of her in a navy blazer, her dark hair pulled back, her jaw set, looking directly into the camera with the expression of someone who has already decided she's going to win whatever argument comes next.
She's thirty. Born in Jackson Heights to Mexican immigrants.
Her father died when she was nineteen. She put herself through college and law school on scholarships and stubbornness in equal measure.
She joined the U.S. Attorney's Office straight out of school and clawed her way into the RICO division within a few years, a trajectory that speaks to either exceptional talent or exceptional persistence. Probably both.
She lives alone in the same neighborhood she grew up in, in a walk-up on a residential block.
There is no boyfriend in any of the social media profiles I can access, which are sparse.
She's not a person who lives online. She's a person who lives in courtrooms and case files and the particular kind of obsessive focus that I recognize because I see it in my own reflection every morning.
I study the photo from the alumni page for longer than necessary.
There's something in her eyes that I can't name, some quality that goes beyond confidence or determination.
It looks like conviction. Not the legal kind.
The kind that comes from the marrow, the unshakable certainty that what you're doing is right.
I've never had that. I've had loyalty. Duty. The desperate, animal drive to protect what's mine. But rightness? That's a luxury for people who got to choose their lives.
I close the laptop and stand at the kitchen window.
Dawn is bleeding into the sky over Queens, turning the rooftops gray and then gold.
The laundromat downstairs hasn't started yet, so the building is quiet, and in the quiet I can almost hear the voice in my head that I've spent years learning to ignore.
You don't have to do this.
But I do. That's the truth I keep coming back to, the one that sits at the center of everything like a nail driven through a floorboard.
Alejandro is my brother. My blood. The kid I fed and clothed and protected in a country that didn't want us, in a city that would have eaten us alive if I hadn't found a way to be useful to dangerous men.
I did terrible things so that Alejandro could do better things. That was the deal I made with myself at seventeen, standing in Carlos Vega's garage with a mop in my hands and my brother's future spread out before me like a map. I would be the darkness so he could live in the light.
And now the light is a concrete cell and a twenty-five-year sentence, and the woman who put him there is sleeping in a walk-up in Jackson Heights, and I have forty-eight hours to decide what kind of monster I'm willing to become.
I already know the answer. I've always known.
I start planning.
Where to take her is the first problem and the easiest to solve.
The cartel owns property across the tri-state area, most of it acquired through shell companies and buried under layers of corporate paperwork.
There's a house in Putnam County, a converted farmhouse on twelve acres outside Brewster, that was used as a distribution relay point until the route changed a couple of years ago.
It's been sitting empty since then. It’s remote with a single access road that I can monitor.
Cell service is unreliable but the landline works.
There are no neighbors within a mile in any direction.
I drive up the next morning to check it out.
The house is in decent shape, with four rooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom with running water.
The previous occupants left some furniture behind, including a bed, a table, and a couple of chairs.
The windows are small and high, which means they're hard to climb through.
The doors are solid wood with deadbolts.
The place isn't exactly a prison, but it's close enough.
I spend the day preparing. I bring in food for a week, water, and clean linens.
I set up a space heater because the old furnace is unreliable and February in Putnam County is unforgiving.
I'm methodical about it, treating it the way I treat every job, as a set of variables to control and details to manage.
If I think about it as logistics, I don't have to think about what I'm actually doing.
Which is building a cage for a woman who has done nothing except her job.
The thought surfaces and I push it down. I'm good at pushing things down. Years of practice.
Back in the city that evening, I begin surveillance.
I watch her building in Jackson Heights, the route she walks to the subway, the coffee shop on the corner where she stops every morning.
I watch from a parked car, from a bench across the street, from the window of a Dominican restaurant where I order food I don't eat.
She moves through her neighborhood with the confidence of someone who belongs here, who knows every face and every storefront, who waves to the old man sweeping the sidewalk in front of the barbershop and stops to pet the stray cat that hangs around the grocery store.
She doesn't look like a woman who has received death threats.
She looks like a woman going about her life.
There's something in the set of her shoulders, the length of her stride, that says I am not afraid of you.
Not to me specifically. To the world in general.
To anything that might be watching from the shadows.
I’m watching from the shadows. And despite everything, despite the job and the orders and the forty-eight-hour clock ticking down in my chest, I find that Sofia Navarro is the bravest person I've ever seen.
It's an inconvenient observation. Bravery doesn't make someone less of a target. I've cleaned up brave men before. Their courage didn't slow the bleach.
I file the thought away and focus on logistics.
Tomorrow night. Her building. The window between when she arrives home and when the street gets busy enough to produce witnesses.
I'll have the van staged and ready. Chloroform is unreliable in practice despite what the movies suggest, so I'll use a sedative instead, fast-acting, administered by injection.
She'll be unconscious within seconds and awake within hours, at the farmhouse, with no idea where she is or how she got there.
Clean. Quiet. No mess.
That's what Diego wants. That's what I'll deliver. And then, when she's locked behind a solid wood door in an empty farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, I'll sit across from her and explain her options, and she'll be smart enough to take the one that lets her live.
That's the plan. It's a good plan. Airtight.
I tell myself this while I sit in the dark in my apartment and stare at the photograph of a woman with fire in her eyes, and I try not to notice that my hands, which have never shaken during a job, are shaking now.
They shouldn't be. This is just another job. And if she won't cooperate, it ends the way all my jobs end, cleanly and quietly, with no trace left behind.