"One piece. I promise."
I go to Leone next. That conversation goes about as well as I expected.
"No," he says.
We go back and forth. I make my case. He makes his. The standoff lasts for a minute, which is long for Leone and an eternity for me. I win, barely, with conditions: take Carmelo,confirm Ferrara is alone before I leave the vehicle, any sign of a setup and I'm gone. No heroics.
"Aurelio told me to keep you safe," Leone says. "Don't make me fail on the first week."
"I'll be back by two."
"You'll be back by one, or I'm sending Claudio after you, and then nobody's going to have a good day."
Fair point. Claudio showing up anywhere uninvited tends to shorten lifespans, especially when it involves me, his ‘little brother’ by mere minutes.
I take Carmelo. We drive in the SUV and the silence in the car is the Carmelo brand of silence, the kind that doesn't need filling because the man beside you communicates through presence and violence and the occasional single-word sentence that carries more weight than most people's speeches.
"You need a new knife," I say, because I can't help myself.
He looks at me. Those dead-gray eyes that have seen things I don't want to know about and done things I definitely don't want to know about. "I know."
"I'll get you one."
"No. I'll find my own." He goes back to the window.
That's the most words Carmelo has said to me in a week, and it's the clearest I've ever heard him on anything. The knife he gave Aurelio was his. The next one has to be his too. I respect that, even though the image of him reaching under the car seat for a Glock instead of pulling his knife from his belt is going to bother me until he finds a replacement.
We drive in silence for the rest of the way.
The parking structure off Eighth is concrete and dingy lighting. I pull into the lower level and kill the engine. Two cars. One sedan I recognize from Ferrara's security detail. One empty Honda that could belong to anyone.
"Stay in the car," I tell Carmelo. "Watch the exits. If this goes sideways, come get me."
Carmelo nods. He reaches under the seat, pulls out the nine-millimeter, checks the magazine with the efficiency of a man who's handled weapons since before he could spell his own name, and racks the slide. The man buried his knife with a dead Don and replaced it with a handgun within forty-eight hours. That's Carmelo's version of grief counseling.
I get out and walk toward the sedan. My gun is in my waistband, snug against the small of my back, and my hands are visible because Ferrara asked for a conversation, not a confrontation, and showing up with my hand on a weapon would set the wrong tone.
Ferrara is in the driver's seat, window down. He looks worse than he sounded on the phone. The silver hair is uncombed, which is a first because this is a man who showed up to a midnight negotiation at Marcello's looking like he'd stepped out of a magazine. The scar on his jaw is more visible against skin that's gone pale, and his hands are on the steering wheel even though the engine is off, gripping it with ferocity.
"You came," he says.
"I said I would."
"Get in."
I walk around to the passenger side and open the door. The car smells like cigarettes and the particular stinky-ass body funk of a man who's been stressed for days without sleep. Ferrara doesn't smoke. The ashtray has three butts in it. He started sometime in the last forty-eight hours, which tells me everything about how rattled he is.
"The order to break the alliance came through a channel I've never seen before," he says without looking at me. "Not from Marco directly. From someone who contacted Marco through a hidden back channel."
"The people above both families."
"You know about them."
"We decoded Kreiss's files. We found the connections. We know the war was engineered."
He nods slowly, and something in his shoulders releases half an inch. "Then you know what I'm about to tell you. These people need us fighting so we don’t see what they’re building."
"What are they building?"
