I put on an old jacket, a ball cap, cheap drugstore glasses, and went into his restaurant for lunch. The Silk Road. Nice place.
Rugs, wood furniture, smell of grilled meat and spices. An ordinary customer would never guess the owner raped women and crippled old men. I took a table by the wall, ordered soup and flatbread, and waited.
Cat showed up forty minutes later. Short, solid man in a dark dress shirt and expensive watch. Close-cropped hair, trimmed beard, and eyes that told me right away what I’d seen plenty of times in war.
The confidence of a man used to deciding what happens to other people. He walked through the room and everything around him shifted. Waiters straightened up.
The cook leaned out from the kitchen and nodded. Two men at a nearby table stood up to shake his hand. Two steps behind him moved Tony.
Square-built, thick neck, dead eyes. Bodyguard. He scanned the room constantly, and when his eyes passed over me, I felt the familiar little stab of adrenaline.
But I sat still, ate my soup, and looked through a free newspaper. Former inmate eating a cheap lunch. Nothing to notice.
During that meal I memorized the layout. Main entrance. Service exit through the kitchen.
Stairs to the basement behind the hallway by the restrooms. Emergency exit into the back lot. Locked with a bar from the inside.
I fixed it all in my head the way you fix coordinates on a map. That evening in the garage we put the puzzle together. Maps, diagrams, schedules, photographs.
Then Liz added the last piece. Through a friend at the electric company—a bookkeeper who owed Liz a favor for helping her get treatment without a long wait—she got the power schematic for Cat’s house. Confirmed.
Single line. No backup generator. Battery emergency lights for maybe ten minutes.
But the real gift came by accident. Bulldog, while scouting around the house, ran into a man sitting outside a convenience store in the subdivision drinking whiskey from the bottle. They got to talking.
Sam had a way of getting people to talk. He listened. Nodded.
And people spilled their lives because somebody was finally listening. The man turned out to be a former guard of Cat’s named Vic, fired six months earlier for drinking on the job. He hated his old boss enough that for a bottle and a little respect he gave us everything.
How many people were usually in the house, where the bedrooms were, where the weapons were kept, and most important, where the basement safe was. In the safe: cash, guns, and folders. “Cat keeps everybody by the throat with those folders,” Vic muttered. “Got dirt on cops, Collins, prosecutor’s people. Whoever gets that safe gets Cat by the throat.”
That changed everything. If we got to the safe, we wouldn’t just get Cat. We’d get proof against the whole network.
The people taking bribes, the officials, everybody who had covered this for years. Everybody who let girls get raped and families get destroyed. I looked at my people.
In their eyes was that same fire I’d seen before combat missions. The hunter’s focus when the animal is already dead and just doesn’t know it yet. Then Liz said the thing that settled the timeline.
This Saturday is Cat’s birthday. Thirty-three. Big party at the house.
Everybody will be there. Crew, political friends, girls, booze. Forty to fifty people.
Liz got it from one of the girls at the parlor who came into urgent care for pain meds because she was expected to entertain guests at the party. I looked at the calendar. Three days until Saturday.
But before the main operation, there was something else to do. Something personal. Victor Crooked and Tony—the two who directly beat and raped my sister—went to the sauna every Wednesday.
The next Wednesday was the day after tomorrow. I planned to pay them a visit. One at a time.
The first strike before the main one. Victor Crooked came out of the sauna at 11:40 p.m…
