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The city beyond the ramp is already dark enough.
At the threshold of the lift Elias stops me with two fingers on my sleeve. “I have something big to tell you,” he says. Quiet. Only for me. “But only once this is all over.”
Curiosity bites.
The file? A name I do not have yet? A past he has not fully emptied onto my table?
I put the thought aside and lock it.
“After,” I say. “Then you tell me everything.”
My boy nods. The doors open onto concrete and black cars and the night that belongs to Tito Lucci until we take it from him.
Now it is time to end the Lucci men once and for all.
The rooftop next to the club is a black slab of cold. Wind cuts across the tar and the low parapet. The city noise rises from the street like heat.
Below us the new Lucci club throbs: bass in the brick, light leaking from upper windows, a queue at the front that has no idea what is about to walk in through the roof.
We are all in black. Armed. Ready. Hardy. Mackensie. The best of my assassins and soldiers, faces I have tested and not found wanting.
Breath fogs and vanishes.
No one talks unless they must.
Elias is already inside. His gun is in coat storage, tagged and waiting where Hardy arranged it. He walked in looking like a boy on a date with trouble. I can picture the way he will smile at a doorman and then become something else when the first shot lands.
Close by, one of the men fixes the zip line. A dark line across a dark gap. Test. Tension. A nod.
We cross one by one.
I go third and the line takes my weight as I whizz across the sky.
The club roof comes up under my boots. Gravel. A service hatch. The smell of extractors and cigarette ends.
When the last man is across I gather them in close.
“We fight for victory,” I say, voice low and locked. “We kill or we are killed. There is no middle. Zane is mine. Tito is mine. You clear the rest. You do not stop to admire your work.”
A murmur of assent.
Mackensie’s eyes find mine.
Hardy’s do not need to, I trust that his mind is already in warfare mode.
I lead them to the hatch. We drop into the top floor like a second night. The first Lucci man is in a corridor with a bottle and a laugh still in his mouth. He does not finish the laugh. Mackensie puts him down and we keep moving.
A second in a doorway. An assassin takes him quiet, barely any blood spilt.
We work downward. Stairs. A private room where two senior men are counting something that will never be spent. They reach, but it’s too late.
Then the boundary to the main club. A burst of automatic fire stitches plaster. An armed guard comes off the landing with his weapon up and one of mine takes the burst in the chest and goes down hard.
Another of ours drops on the stairs, throat opened, and keeps sliding.
I do not stop. Mercy is for the weak. I told my generals that in a room at Keller’s. I live it now.
We hit the main club area in a wave. Lights. Smoke. A DJ booth already abandoned. Tables overturned. Lucci men and their hired guns pouring from the back rooms and the bar.
