Page 93 of Lone Wolf

A holding pen.

Evan at last brought his full focus to the ninth man, the one around whom the room’s latent energy swirled. The man had broken the polo-and-khaki dress code, instead wearing a double-breasted dark pinstripe suit baggy enough to indicate abrupt weight loss. Thick black wavy hair without a trace of gray. Sunken eyes magnified by silver-rim glasses, titanium-frame arms denting pronounced sideburns. A slender cigarette holding a good half inch of ash protruded from two knobby knuckles. Above a gaping cuff, a gold Rolex hung loosely around a just-visible strip of hairy wrist.

That was good: Evan needed to keep track of the time.

This man looked connected, a cut above the others. A capo. He nodded at the gray-eyed guard who’d frisked Evan. “Thank you, Domenic.” The capo’s cheeks were concave from illness, and his voice rasped when he spoke. His dark eyes found Evan. “You say you’re a rep of the Wolf.”

From here, Evan could smell his breath. Breath mints covering rot, the reek of necrotic tissue, black spots eating into lungs.

“Yes.”

The capo sipped at his cigarette. His bloodshot eyes watered, showing the hurt.

Behind him the security feeds rotated on the monitors. Evan caught an exterior angle across the blue stucco of the holding pen’s front wall. Near the sun-scorched paint of the entry, darker shades of numerals memorialized the spots where street numbers had been pried free. A six? An eight? The feed rotated before he could snapshot the image, and he vowed to catch it when it circled back around.

Besides, he had to focus on the Rat Pack escapee with the dead lungs who was about to threaten his life.

The man said, “Talking your way in here was the easy part…”

“The hard part’s gonna be getting out,” Evan said.

The man looked disappointed that his payoff line had been preempted.

“You think I’m playing games?”

“I don’t care what you’re doing. The Wolf has received an unusual level of law-enforcement scrutiny from the last job she conducted for you. Her determination is that you have loose lips inside your organization. She has handled the inconvenience but it was costly in time and money. She demands a thirty-percent bonus for having to contend with your laxity.”

For a moment the capo’s face remained still with surprise, wrinkles fanning outward from his eyes like sun rays. Then he smiled, white caps large in his mouth. Evan half expected a gold tooth.

The capo waved his cigarette, tracing a slender scarf of smoke around him. “Her inability to handle her business is no business of mine.”

“It is if the problem originated inside your operation.”

“‘If,’” he said. “You come here. You make threats. Over ‘if.’”

The other men kept a dutiful silence while the capo spoke. Past his shoulder, the surveillance feeds rotated around once more on the monitors, and Evan scratched his nose to cover a quick shift of his eyes to catch the address digits. He snagged the first three—867—before the angle changed once more.

“It’s my understanding that the original agreement provided terms for contingencies like this,” Evan said.

The capo looked surprised.

“You didn’t know that,” Evan said.

“My not knowing means the terms do not hold. And anyone in my employ who believed they could negotiate on their own will be dealt with.” The capo canted forward, head slightly ducked, conspiratorial. “I’m the king of this particular jungle,” he confided, his breath a noxious gas. He wasn’t bragging. He was just telling it like it was. “I only answer to one.”

“God?”

The capo showed his yellowed teeth. “You could say that.” He lifted a slender finger, tobacco-stained at the first knuckle. “In this world, I don’t handle the trifles. Terms and contracts.”

“Who does?”

The capo looked shocked at the audacity of the question. His eyes flicked toward the building on the monitors, the smallest tell.

Evan pieced together a working theory: Money ran through here. Truly incriminating matters—kidnapped humans and murder contracts—were handled at the other site.

“Underlings.” The capo waved his hand, and Evan took the opportunity to check the man’s watch: 11:17.

“It shows weakness,” Evan said, “if they’re agreeing to terms without your approval.”