He couldn’t have been more wrong about that.
• • •
Getting into the apartment was almost embarrassingly easy since it was a standard residential lock. I’m shocked that they didn’t have an electronic system for the door. I was prepared for that scenario. But ten seconds and I was inside, closing the door behind me, standing still in the dark while my eyes adjusted.
The place looked exactly like you’d imagine a twenty-one-year-old with unlimited cash and zero supervision would set up. Three pairs of Jordans lined up by the door like a sneaker shrine. A gaming rig in the living room that rivaled an arcade in Shibuya, Japan. Kitchen counter buried under takeout containers and empty Casamigos bottles. And on the wall next to a Georgetown pennant, a framed photo of Manny and Rodrigo at some family event, both of them grinning, arms around each other, looking like two brothers who loved each other and didn’t have a care in the world.
I stared at that photo longer than I should have.
I had one just like it with Quest. Same energy, same pose, same two brothers standing close with their whole lives ahead of them not knowing what was coming. The only difference between that photo and this one was that my brother was in the hospital because Manny’s brother tried to murder his pregnant fiancée over the Caribbean.
That was the only difference that mattered tonight.
I found a chair in the corner of the living room, sat down, and let the darkness settle around me. No lights. No sound except the hum of the refrigerator and the faint bass from somebody’s speaker a few floors below. Just me and the patience I’d been building my entire adult life for moments exactly like this one.
My phone lit up in my pocket. I almost let it go but checked the screen out of habit. It was my baby girl Dream.
Goodnight Daddy. I love you to the moon and back. I prayed for the baby again. Sweet dreams.
I read it twice. Then I locked the screen and slid the phone back into my pocket and sat there in a twenty-one-year-old’s dark apartment waiting to end his life while my daughter wished me sweet dreams from a house in Pittsburgh where she believed her father was on a business trip.
I didn’t text her back. Not because I didn’t love her but because I didn’t want her goodnight anywhere near what I was about to do. Some things don’t belong in the same sentence. Some things don’t belong in the same man. But here I was holding both of them at the same time, and the phone screen had already gone dark, and Manny’s keys were already jingling in the hallway.
The front door swung open at 1:23 AM.
He came in sloppy and unaware. Keys clattering to the floor, shoulder catching the doorframe on the way through, a boneless stumble of a young man who’d had too many rounds and not enough water. He was laughing at something on his phone, face lit up by the screen, completely oblivious to the fact that someone was sitting six feet from him in his own living room watching his every move.
He reached for the light switch.
I was on him before his fingers got there. One hand sealed over his mouth, the other gripping the back of his neck. I drove him face-first into the wall hard enough to punch a crack through the drywall. His phone hit the hardwood. His body went limp for half a second from the shock of it and I used that half second to wrap my arm around his throat and squeeze with everything I had until his knees buckled, his eyes rolled white, and he crumpled to the floor.
He was out before his body finished settling, the whole thing over in maybe eight seconds from light switch to unconscious.
I stood over him and flexed my hand. My knuckles were throbbing, drywall dust on my sleeve. I was looking down at a kid who’d probably never been hit in his life, laid out on his own floor. I felt absolutely nothing.
I zip-tied Manny’s wrists behind his back, taped his mouth shut, and dragged him down the hall to the service elevator. The building was dead at 1:30 in the morning on a weeknight,nothing moving except the faint buzz of someone’s TV behind a closed door. I loaded him into the trunk of the rental, shut it gently, and pulled out of the garage heading south toward Anacostia.
• • •
The Rios owned a Colombian restaurant called Casa Rios. It was a spot off of Columbia Rd. that served overpriced empanadas to the neighborhood during the day and washed cartel money through the register at night. The place had been on federal watch lists for years but Rodrigo had enough lawyers on retainer and enough local politicians on payroll to keep the feds playing footsie instead of kicking down doors.
The lawyers weren’t going to help him tonight.
I parked in the alley behind the building at 2:15. The restaurant had been dark since ten. No lights, no movement, and no security cameras, which told me Rodrigo valued discretion over protection at this particular location. Made sense for a money laundering operation. You don’t record evidence of your own crimes. But it also meant nobody was watching me pick the back door lock in thirty seconds flat and step into a kitchen that smelled like old grease and cilantro.
I dragged Manny through the kitchen and into the dining room and propped him in a chair at the center table. His head drooped forward, chin to chest, but he was starting to come around. I could hear him making sounds behind the tape, groggy and confused, his fingers flexing against the zip ties as his brain tried to catch up to his situation.
I didn’t wait for him to get there. I didn’t need him awake for a conversation because we weren’t going to have one. This wasn’t an interrogation. This wasn’t me extracting informationor leveraging a hostage. This was a message. Written in fire. Addressed to Rodrigo. Signed by the Banks family.
I walked back into the kitchen and turned on every burner on the commercial stove, all eight of them clicking to life in a row, blue flames jumping up from the cast iron grates. Then I found the gas line feeding the backup propane tank for the grill and opened it wide. The hiss filled the kitchen immediately, that heavy chemical smell pooling low at floor level before spreading outward, climbing toward the dining room where Manny Rios was starting to realize that he wasn’t in his apartment anymore.
I walked through the dining room one last time. Manny’s eyes were open now, wide and terrified, darting around the room trying to make sense of where he was. When they landed on me the fear turned into something primal and he started thrashing against the zip ties and screaming behind the tape, muffled desperate sounds bouncing off the walls of his brother’s own restaurant.
I stopped at the front door and looked back at him. A kid who probably thought cartel money was just family money, that his brother’s empire and his Georgetown tuition existed in two separate worlds that would never collide. He was wrong about that.
Quest spared Mateo’s son. Showed mercy to the child and his wife. Rodrigo answered that mercy by trying to murder Quest’s pregnant fiancée and unborn baby over open water.
I pushed through the front door and closed it behind me. Got in the rental, pulled out of the alley. I was two blocks east on MLK when the explosion hit. The blast rocked the car hard enough to rattle my teeth. In the rearview mirror I watched a fireball punch through the roof of Casa Rios, climbing into the night sky, orange and furious against the dark, lighting up the block like a second sunrise.
