“I like to consider it hoping for the best,” he said. “But Dawson?”
“Yeah?”
“I need you to be honest with me for this to continue. I need to know it’s done.”
“It is. I swear on my love of the water.”
“Swear on Violet.”
My throat closed. “I won’t ever swear on her, but I will swear on everything in my life but her.”
He hesitated. “Okay. Well. We’ll have to take it a step at a time then.”
We hung up, and I called the agent in charge at the hospital and added Dax to the list before locking the Aston Martin and heading into the building.
Malone, Nolan, and several other agents who had been with us at Jada’s the night before were huddled around a table in the conference room. They’d moved from the house next to the Moris’ so the FBI could use it in the future, if they needed to, without blowing their cover. I wasn’t sure any of the men had slept or showered, and the remnants of their meals were scattered across the surfaces of the room. I felt guilty for the rest I’d had, for the ability to escape and lose myself in Violet.
When he saw me in the doorway, Malone pushed away from the table and came toward me.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said.
I turned, and we fell into stride, leaving the building and walking through the streets toward the pier. The sun was setting, dropping over the horizon and turning the water into a mess of colors that reminded me of arriving back in New London less than two weeks ago. It felt like my world had rotated one hundred and eighty degrees in that short space of time. Or more like they’d all run full force into each other, hitting the wall and crumbling everything around it. Three merging into one.
“Have any of the men given us anything useful?” I asked.
“No. Not yet. They all lawyered up, but I can tell Saito is shitting bricks, waiting for the hit squad,” Malone said as quietly as his deep voice allowed him to go.
Saito-san knew the same thing we did. The Kyōdaina would rather see their people in the ground than in custody.
“Does he know where Ken’Ichi might have gone?” I asked, wanting him to know exactly where the man was so we could end this.
“If he does, he isn’t saying,” Malone said.
“Maybe I should take a shot at him?”
Malone stopped, shoved his hands into the pockets of his dress pants, and then said, “You’re off the case.”
Even though it wasn’t a surprise, it still stung.
“I can’t hand in my badge. Not yet. Not until he’s behind bars,” I told him the truth.
“No one wants your badge,” Malone said, a rare sign of emotion in his voice.
“Four years, hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of dollars spent. I’m pretty sure someone is out of a job.”
“While this operation is a bust and management has closed us down, they also know the truth. We all know the truth, which is that we’ve gathered more information on the Kyōdaina and the Leskovs from this than the Bureau has in a decade. We have one of their senior operators in jail, along with a chain of money and guns. It wasn’t a complete failure, Langley. We just need to review the data, regroup, and try again.”
“It wasn’t a win, though,” I responded.
He didn’t disagree, but he did say, “Sometimes, winning comes in a series of small steps.”
“Violet told me we’d gotten too big for our britches,” I said with a wry smile. “That we were pretty stupid if we thought we’d be able to tumble down their house of cards that easily.”
“We’ve knocked them back quite a few pegs. They aren’t going to be able to use Mori Enterprises shipping containers for a long time, if ever again. They’re going to have to shore up all their legitimate businesses to hide the criminal ones deeper. I can guarantee you, Leskov isn’t going to be dealing with Mori anytime soon,” he said. “I’m not done with any of them.”
“But I am?”
“You’re too close to it now. You were already too close, but it was to our advantage before. Now… Now you have Violet Banner tangled in it, and you will always worry more about her than any other aspect of the operation.”
It was the truth.
“It’s why we need to find Ken’Ichi,” I told him. The thought of him coming after Violet or any of the