Page 36 of Lawbreaker

“We’re here, boss,” Ben interrupted his thoughts.

“So we are.”

There was a light in the second-story motel room where they’d been asked to meet a contact.

“Lucky for us that this guy knew the right bar to hit to find a contact,” Tony chuckled. “And that Rudy was having a whiskey sour when he started asking questions. I swear to God, some people have the craziest damned ideas about how we work things,” he added, shaking his head.

Ben checked his .45 and holstered it, then spoke to two contacts who’d arrived much earlier and had the room staked out.

“We ready?” Tony asked, checking his own weapon before he stuck it back in the pancake holster behind his back.

“Ready.”

“I wonder if there’s something about government offices that drains brain cells,” he muttered as Ben came around the car to open his door, looking around constantly.

Unknown to the target inside, he had his own men down here, concealed and ready for any surprises. There was even one on the stairs, who nodded, then jerked his head toward a nearby door. The signal meant everything was okay, no danger from any quarter. Of course there was always danger. Tony didn’t even trust his own men. Except for Ben, who’d proved many times that he was in Tony’s corner no matter what.

But that only meant that he was safe until one of the other really big bosses decided he’d done something unforgivable and called a vote on whether or not Tony would be hit. In which case Ben would be sent to off him. It was the way things were done, as he’d told Odalie. Only somebody close could get close enough for a hit. Hate it though Ben might, it would be his life or his and Tony’s lives, and the hit would still get made. Better not to think too much about that, he decided. It was the here and now he had to deal with, not the future. Besides that, Teddy liked him. Teddy was about as high up as it got.

He knocked on the door, the knock Rudy had shared with the contact when he’d shared the location for the meet. The door opened. The man inside, young, nervous, wearing a suit off the rack, quickly slid his pistol back into its holster, fumbling a little. “Sorry,” he told Tony as he invited him in with Big Ben. “I’m twitchy.”

“We’re all twitchy. What do you know,” Tony asked, “about a sting in my territory?”

“Don’t know exactly where the aggravation began,” he told Tony. “Except that it’s coming from New York. Sal the Penny got hit in his own living room in front of his family. That’s not how we do things. This new generation came up on video games. They like gore.”

“I remember Sal. He was one of Dad’s pals.”

“Yeah. Well, the cops are on it. No matter who you are, murder is murder. If they catch him, he’ll be a guest of Uncle Sam until his hair turns silver.”

“Maybe not that long,” Tony said deliberately. “Sal had friends.”

“He had a lot. Plus the trouble is coming from a punk kid.”

“What?”

The contact laughed, a little too loudly. “No joke, a kid barely twenty years old. His dad was a made man. He learned it from the floor up and he likes it. He’s not greedy—he just wants what he thinks should be his,” he added.

“He won’t like what he gets,” Tony said simply. “The big guys like our friend in upstate New York don’t like noise. It draws attention from the feds.” He leaned forward, his dark eyes steady and piercing. “Anybody who puts a hit in my territory is asking for trouble.”

The younger man swallowed and averted his eyes. “Sure, sure, and that’s why I asked to meet you, to tell you about this. The kid needs to be taken out before he brings down the heat on all of us.”

Tony was still staring at him. “Where do we find this kid? And what sort of backup are we talking about?”

The younger man brightened. “I’ve got the data, I mean, the lowdown, right...right here.” He fumbled an envelope out of his pocket and laughed as it tangled. “Uh, you did a job with the feds not so long ago, didn’t you, and they saved your bacon? I heard about it.”

“Yeah,” Tony said, his voice going soft, “they did. I owe them for that. But I told them up front, I don’t sell out my people, even if I die for it.”

“That’s how we all feel. Nobody wants a rat for a pal.”

Tony looked through some typed sheets that contained two grainy photographs, three names—one in boldface—and an address in Newark. “Your guys got somebody on this?”

“Oh, yeah. We...we got a guy out of Quebec.”

Tony’s eyebrows went up.

“He’s a veteran of many hits,” he told Tony. “And he hasn’t got one blemish on his record. Not one. That tell you how good he is?”

“It tells me a lot.”