“The rest of you assholes don’t bother picking shots. Just fucking shoot. Five hundred dollars American for every Italian fucker you kill, so earn those bonuses. Quantity, not quality. Feel me? And you keep fucking shooting until I tell you to stop. Then you stay the fuck in cover until one of us vets confirms that Kastelani’s car is a bona fide coffin on wheels. Got it?”
Dev opened his mouth. I kept going.
"Dmitri's car is Dmitri, Leonid, and the kid in the bad vest, whose vest had better be on right this time." I didn't look at EJ when I said it. "The rest of you unlucky fuckers have to ride with me. Renko's on the gate. You close it behind their car once it's past you, and you do not move from it. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out. That's the whole job. You think you can shut a gate without shooting yourself?"
"Yeah," EJ said. "Yes. I can shut a gate."
"Then that's all you do."
I rode in the back of my car with EJ up front next to Leonid, and EJ wedged in beside me, and I checked my weapons, starting with the Makarov. Mag out, count the rounds with my thumb, mag back. Then I moved on to the spare, then the knife at my ankle. I'd been doing it in the same order since I was twenty-two and my hands did it without me.
EJ watched me do it like I was casting a spell.
"Can I ask you something, Mr. Laskin?"
"No."
He asked anyway. "Were you scared? Your first one. The first guy you ever—"
"You talk this much on every op?"
"This is my first op."
I looked at him. The starry-eyed thing was all over his face. The kid was looking at me like I was something he'd cut out of a magazine and pinned over his bed. I knew that look. I'd worn it once, riding in cars like this one, watching men who knew what they were doing and wanting to be them so bad it ached.
"You scared now?" I asked.
"A little."
"Good. Scared keeps you behind the gate where I put you." I racked the slide and let it forward. "The day you stop being scared is the day somebody scrapes you off a road. You hear me? Stay scared. Shut the gate. Go home to your mamma."
He shifted uneasily and looked away. “Yeah.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s just…” He swallowed. “My mom. She’s gone.”
“Your pop then.”
He shook his head. “My mom was one of Bowen’s girls at the Foxhole.”
Ah, one of the whores. That explained an uncomfortable amount about how the kid had come into the organization andwhy he was so starry-eyed about it. For a whore’s son, this life was probably the best he could hope for. He sure as hell wouldn’t have known or cared who his father was.
I patted him on the back. “You stick to what I told you, and then you go make some brats of your own then.”
"Yeah." He nodded too fast. "Yeah, okay." Then, quieter, like he couldn't help it: "Thanks. For letting me come."
I didn't answer that. There wasn't anything to say to it that wouldn't make it worse, so I looked out the window at the dark farm country going by and didn't think about how he'd look with a hole in his skull.
The Winchester airfield was nothing, just a strip of light farm country with a windsock and a hangar and a road that ran out to meet the county route, exactly like the satellite photos said. We posted the cars off the airstrip property, past the gate, on the county side of the line where no federal prosecutor could draw a circle around us. Dmitri's car waited at the bend with mine forty yards back. EJ got out and crouched by the gate behind us.
Then we waited.
The car they'd load him into sat by the strip with its parking lights on, a black SUV, driver's silhouette behind the wheel, right where it should be.
But something about the whole scene felt wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on what, but I had that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach I usually got before an operation went sideways. That didn’t make any sense considering everything was going perfectly according to plan, aside from being handed a bunch of children to babysit. This operation was so simple I could do it in my sleep. Perfect for breaking in a couple of new kids. Exactly the kind of op I’d have chosen for them.
So why the fuck did it feel sowrong?
