Chapter 6 - THE STEAKHOUSE
It was a Tuesday night when the fragile routine came apart.
The meeting was at a high-end steakhouse in the Loop, and the Russo family had rented the entire dining room. It was a sit-down with Victor Volkov, a Russian importer who controlled the flow of illegal firearms down through the Canadian border, and whose name had come up twice in the investigation of the sniper’s rifle — a rifle that had been traced, through two defunct serials and a language of paperwork designed to defeat exactly this kind of tracing, to one of Volkov’s missing shipments.
Volkov claimed ignorance. Volkov claimed a great deal, in fact, and he claimed it politely.
Daniel wanted restitution.
The restaurant was dim, low-lit and golden, smelling of aged beef and cigar smoke and lemon oil on polished wood. Norah stood near the swinging doors of the kitchen, out of the direct line of sight, wearing the black suit that was now her uniform and looking, she was fairly sure, like a hostess who had taken a wrong turn and had not yet been corrected.
She had memorized the roster that morning. That was her job now — Carmine handed her a list, and she memorized the faces, and then she went to the places the faces would be and checked them against each other.
Volkov arrived with four men. They were enormous, all four of them, wearing heavy wool coats cut loose enough to hide the bulk of body armor underneath. Volkov himself was thin and wiry, with dead eyes and a small polite smile that never once reached them.
The conversation was terse.
Daniel could not speak — his jaw was still wired, and would be for weeks yet — so he wrote. He wrote his demands on a small notepad and slid it across the white tablecloth, and Carmine read them aloud in a flat, unhurried voice.
It should have looked like weakness. A boss who cannot speak his own threats, having them read for him like a court clerk.
Daniel weaponized it. He stared unblinkingly at Volkov the entire time, his bruised face utterly still, while Carmine read out the terms, and the effect was not weakness at all. It was worse. It was the patience of a man who had already decided what would happen and was merely informing the other party of the schedule.
Norah was not watching the table.
She was watching the room.
The restaurant staff had been cleared out. That was standard protocol — control the environment. The bartenders and the waiters moving through the dining room were Russo men in borrowed aprons, and she had checked each of them against the morning roster on the drive over, matching faces to names to the memory of the list.
Eight of them. She was sure of eight.
Then a ninth came out of the kitchen.
He wore a white waiter’s jacket and carried a silver tray with a fresh glass pitcher of ice water, and he walked toward the table with the measured, unhurried pace of a professional.
Norah frowned.
She did not recognize him from the roster. She ran the list again in her head, quickly, names and faces, and he was not on it. Not in the bar, not in the dining room, not on the door.
She watched his feet.
He was wearing heavy rubber-soled boots. Not the light non-slip shoes of a restaurant worker — heavy, lugged, tactical boots, the kind you wore when you needed to move fast on wet ground.
She watched his hands.
He was gripping the silver tray with white-knuckled intensity on both edges, and the tray was perfectly balanced, and that was wrong. A real waiter carries a heavy tray on an open palm, letting the center of gravity under the rim do the work. You did not grip a tray like a steering wheel, because you could not grip it like a steering wheel and also set it down.
He was not carrying water.
He was carrying a prop.
And his eyes never once looked at the glasses on the table, or at the men he was walking past, or at anything at all in the room.
They were locked, dead center, on the back of Daniel Russo’s head.
He’s going for the blind spot.
The man was ten feet from the table. Norah’s hand dropped to her hip out of pure animal reflex and found nothing there, because Carmine had never trusted her with a gun, and would not for months yet. She had no weapon. She had no time to shout a warning that would almost certainly get Daniel shot in the crossfire the instant he turned.
So she moved.
She stepped off the mahogany wall and cut into the waiter’s path just as he passed the kitchen doors, and she did not tackle him, and she did not throw a punch. She had learned something in the last three weeks. She had learned that in a room like this, the environment was a weapon if you were willing to use it.
She stuck out her left foot and kicked the heavy brass-plated leg of a vacant dining chair directly into the man’s shin.
He tripped.
May you like
His forward momentum — fueled by the adrenaline of an impending killing — betrayed him completely. He stumbled hard, and the silver tray tipped, and the pitcher of ice water crashed to the floor and shattered in the exact center of the silent room.
The noise was like a gunshot.
