Page 28 of Merciless Daddy

“Then hear it. Stand down.” Her voice was absolutely level. “Salvatore. Stand down. Say it back to me.”

I looked at the screen. Sixty grey dots and one green pulse in a garage off Coney Island Avenue.

“Understood,” I said.

And I hung up.

The office was very quiet. Angela was watching me with her hands in her lap. Pietro had straightened up off the back of her chair and gone still in the way he goes still, which is the way a man goes still when he has already decided and is waiting to be asked. Tonio had put down the coffee pot at some point in the last ten minutes and I hadn’t heard it happen.

“We take her,” I said.

“That’s not what she said,” Angela said quietly.

“No.”

I put my phone in my pocket and looked at my brothers.

“We take her before she reaches the house,” I said. “Not at the restaurant, too many civilians, too many exits. On the road. There’s a stretch past Floyd Bennett where the service lane necks down to one lane and there’s water on both sides and nothing to hide behind. Tonio, we need a truck out there in six hours. Something big enough to fill the road and slow enough to look like an accident. Pietro, plates, spares, and something with a hood you don’t mind bending.” I checked my watch. “Wheels up in forty minutes. It’s a two-hour flight and I want three hours of daylight on that road before I put anyone on it.”

Neither of them asked me a single question.

Tonio was already dialing. Pietro reached past Angela, closed the laptop, and picked up his coat.

“Guns?” he said.

“All of them.”

The service road past Floyd Bennett Airfield ran between black water and black water, one lane each way, and the wind came off Jamaica Bay hard enough to make your eyes run.

We’d landed at Teterboro at three. By six-forty Tonio had a refrigerated lorry with New Jersey plates parked in the weeds a quarter mile up with its lights off and its diesel ticking, and Pietro had a grey SUV nosed into a maintenance turnout with brush pulled across the hood, and I was standing in the dark with my coat open and my breath going up in front of me like smoke.

I had picked the ground because there was nowhere to go. Water left, water right, one lane, no shoulder, and a bend at the far end that meant a driver wouldn’t see the road was gone until he was already committed to it.

I had picked it because it was the safest place in the five boroughs to take a car apart with a woman in the back seat.

“Fourteen minutes,” Pietro said in my ear. He had Angela on a line to Chicago and Angela had three green dots crawling across a map on a laptop in a kitchen above a restaurant. “They left the restaurant at seven-oh-two. Two minutes late.”

Two minutes late. Somebody had been slow getting into the car.

Good girl, I thought.

“Nine minutes.”

Somewhere behind us a jet came off Kennedy and the whole sky shook.

“Four.”

“Tonio.”

“Pronto.” His voice was very calm. Tonio’s voice is always calm at moments like this. “You say when.”

Headlights came round the bend, three sets, close, running fast the way men run when they’ve been told no stops.

“Now.”

The lorry came out of the weeds and across the lane and Tonio put it into a jackknife with the handbrake, and forty feet of trailer swung across that road and stopped dead like a wall God had dropped. Brakes screamed. The lead SUV went sideways, clipped the trailer’s bumper, came to rest at an angle with its headlights pointed at the water. The armored sedan stopped hard behind it. The third vehicle reversed—and met Pietro coming out of the turnout at thirty miles an hour, hood to trunk, and stopped being a vehicle and started being a problem for an insurer.

Then it was quiet except for the wind and one engine and somebody shouting in Russian.