Chapter 6: Mercy Costs Extra

On the other side of the windshield, Kirill didn't move.

"Men with gasoline come to burn my sister's kitchen," he said, "and you want me to let them walk away."

"They're dockworkers. Vin's putting them in front so they die first."

"I know why he's doing it."

"Then don't give him what he wants."

He was quiet.

Across the street, a woman with a stroller walked between us, and he waited for her to pass.

"Get in the car, Simona."

"Is that a yes?"

"It's a get in the car."

I got in the car.

He didn't say yes until we were back on Bustleton Avenue, and then he said it in Russian, to the phone, and hung up.

"What did you tell them?"

"That anyone who shoots a man tonight answers to me."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet. You haven't heard the price."

At eleven-fifty I was in his office on the second floor with the lights off.

The window looked down on the dark parking lot behind the banya.

Kirill stood beside me with his hands in his pockets.

Nadia was locked in the kitchen with a baseball bat and strict orders, and she'd told him exactly where he could put them.

At eleven fifty-eight, two vans pulled in without headlights.

Men got out with red gas cans.

Nine of them.

I knew the way the first one walked.

Benno had come himself.

He'd put himself in front of his own men, sixty-two years old in a flat cap, carrying a gas can.

Behind the vans, a black sedan rolled in and stopped.

Three of Vin's soldiers got out and stayed by the car with their guns out, watching the dockworkers.

Not covering them.

Herding them.

"There," Kirill said softly. "Now you see it."

The lights came on.

Every floodlight on the building, all at once.

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