I drive. The speedometer reaches heights it hasn’t touched in years. The lanes of the Garden State are mostly empty at this hour. I take the curves wide and the straights hard, and beside me, Lorenzo doesn’t say a word about my driving for the entire ride.
He hands a second gun over the gear shift. I take it.
“Plan?”
“Get in quiet. Find her. Get her out. Anyone in our way dies.”
“And Victor?”
“Victor’s mine.”
“That’s what I figured.”
The roads narrow. The hedges get tall. It’s the kind of road where the houses don’t have numbers on the curbs because the people who matter already know which gate is theirs.
I find Buckhorn.
I slow.
The house is half a mile down on the right.
I see it before we’re close enough to see anything else, because it’slit up—every window in the front lit, the porch lit, the long sweep of the gravel drive lit by garden lamps spaced every fifteen feet or so down the property line.
I cut the headlights a hundred yards out.
I roll the SUV to a stop in the dark of a hedge on the opposite side of the road.
“He’s lit the place up like a hotel.”
“He thinks he’s won, boss.”
“That works for us.”
We move on foot.
Two men at the front gate. Smoking. The cherry of one cigarette and then the cherry of another, in a small bright rhythm. Twenty yards from a tree line they probably haven’t glanced at since they came on shift.
Two more by the side entrance—one with a phone, one with his shoulder against the wall in the slack posture of a man pretending to be awake.
Lorenzo and I read the property without saying anything. I tap left. He nods. He goes left.
I take the front gate.
The two smokers don’t see me cross the last ten yards. The right one’s just lit a fresh one and is cupping his hand to shield it from the breeze, and the left one is laughing at something he said.
I take the left one first. Hand over the mouth, knife across the throat, lower him. The cigarette lands in the gravel and dies. Theright one turns into me with the lit Zippo still in his hand and registers the angle of my approach a moment too late. I snuff him out before the Zippo hits the gravel.
Two.
I move along the hedge to the side entrance.
Lorenzo’s already there. He’s wiping his blade on the jacket of the second man. He looks up.
“Two on my side.”
“Two on mine.”
“His staffing’s light, boss. He must have overpaid the wrong people and underpaid the rest.”
