I don’t say what use.
Lorenzo’s face goes hard.
“Sick fuck.”
“We need to find her tonight. We don’t sleep until we find her.”
“Boss. We’ve got nothing. Half our guys are dead. Half of what’s left we don’t trust. We’ve got no address. No intel. Victor could have moved her into any of fifty properties in two states by now.”
“Then we call the ones we still trust. We make the list. We start cutting through it.”
“Alright. I’m with you. I’ll kick ass till I drop tonight, you know that,” Lorenzo promises. “But the logistics, boss. The logistics arefucked.We don’t know who’s with us anymore. The son of a bitch has got us looking sideways at every guy we’ve ever put on a payroll. He’s done something to my whole fucking head about who I can trust. I don’t know how he pulled it off, but he did. We’re paranoid by design. That’s the trap inside the trap.”
“He overplanned this shit.”
“Right down to the gauze on my side. He probably thinks we’re both dead, by the way. The whole point of the warehouse was that nobody walks out of it. He’s sitting in a chair somewhere right now waiting for the call that says the D’Amico problem is handled.”
Something clicks.
I give Lorenzo a quick glance. “He thinks we’re dead.”
“I just said that, yeah.”
“Lorenzo.”
“What?”
“Anybody you’ve got left that you trust completely. Right now. The shortest list.”
“Three guys. Maybe four if I’m being generous about Tommy’s cousin.”
“Send them to the warehouse. Now. Burn it. Burn the whole fucking building down. Bodies, vehicles, everything. I don’t want a single recognizable face left on that floor.”
He stares at me.
Then he gets it.
“He’s going to send someone?”
“He’s going to send someone to confirm. He has to. He doesn’t move on whatever he’s planning with her until he knows we’re in the ground. When his confirmer pulls up to the warehouse, there’s going to be a fire with no faces in it. Maybe he reads it the way I want him to read it. Maybe he doesn’t. But for a few hours—maybe a day—we have the only advantage he didn’t pay for.”
“That we’re alive.”
“And he won’t know it.”
Lorenzo’s already pulling his phone out.
“On it.” He’s dialing. He stops at the doorway. “So, what’s the play, boss. After the warehouse?”
I shake my head. “He overplanned everything,” I say again, still half in disbelief. “He bought half my people. He set up the meet, the address, the road crew, the timing, the inside crew here. He thought of all of it.” I glance back at the bed one more time. “What he didn’t plan for was two ghosts coming for him.”
“Two ghosts?”
“That’s us.”
He almost smiles. “That’ll do, boss.”
He turns, goes to make his calls.
