Blue Moon - Lee Child Page 0,20
supermarket’s parking lot, aiming to walk through it and rejoin the main drag where it let out.
* * *
—
Gregory got the news more or less immediately, from a janitor cleaning up in the emergency room. Part of the Ukrainian network. The guy took a smoke break and called it right in. Two of Gregory’s men, just arrived on gurneys. Lights and sirens. One bad, one worse. Both would probably die. There was talk of a car wreck out by the Ford dealer.
Gregory called his top boys together, and ten minutes later they were all assembled, around a table in the back room of the taxi company. His right-hand man said, “All we know for sure is earlier this evening two of our guys deployed to the bar to do an address check on one of the former customers from the Albanian credit operation.”
“How long does an address check take?” Gregory said. “They must have finished long ago. This must be something else entirely. It’s obviously separate. It can’t have been the address check itself. Because who the hell lives all the way out by the Ford dealer? No one, that’s who. So they let the guy out at his house and noted the address, maybe took a photograph, and then they headed over to the Ford dealer afterward. Why? Must have been a reason. And why did they crash?”
“Maybe they were chased in that direction. Or decoyed. Then bumped and run off the road. It’s pretty lonely out there at night.”
“You think it was Dino?”
“You got to ask, why those two in particular? Maybe they were followed from right outside the bar. Which would be appropriate. Because maybe Dino is making a point here. We stole his business. We expected some reaction, after all.”
“After he twigged.”
“Maybe he has now.”
“How much of a point is he going to make?”
“Maybe this is it,” the guy said. “Two men for two men. We keep the loan business. It would be a surrender with honor. He’s a realistic man. He doesn’t have many options. He can’t start a war, with the cops watching.”
Gregory said nothing. The room went quiet. No sound at all, except muted chatter from the taxi radio in the front office. Through the closed door. Just background noise. No one paid any attention to it. If they had, they would have heard a driver calling in to say he had let out an old lady at the supermarket, and was going to use his waiting time while she shopped to earn an extra buck, by driving a guy home, to the old tract houses east of downtown. The guy was on foot, but he looked reasonably civilized and he had cash money. Maybe his car had broken down. It was four miles there, and four miles back. He would be done before the old lady was even out of the bakery aisle. No harm, no foul.
* * *
—
At that moment Dino was getting a much earlier and incomplete snapshot of part of the news. It had taken an hour to travel up the chain. It included nothing about the car wreck. Most of the day had been spent disposing of Fisnik and his named accomplice. Reorganization had been left very late. Almost an afterthought. A replacement had been sent to the bar, to pick up on Fisnik’s business. The chosen guy had gotten there a little after eight o’clock in the evening. Immediately he had seen Ukrainian muscle in the street. Guarding the place. A Town Car, and two men. He had snuck around to the bar’s rear fire door, and snuck a look inside. A Ukrainian guy was sitting at Fisnik’s table in the far back corner, talking to a big guy, who looked disheveled and poor. Obviously a customer.
At that point the chosen replacement regrouped and retreated. He phoned it in. The guy he told called another guy. Who called another guy. And so on. Because bad news traveled slowly. An hour later Dino heard about it. He called his top boys together, in the lumber yard.
He said, “There are two possible scenarios. Either the thing about the police commissioner’s list was true, and they opportunistically and treacherously used the disruption to muscle in on our moneylending business, or it wasn’t true, and they planned this thing all along, and in fact tricked us into clearing the way for them.”
His right-hand man said, “I suppose we must hope it was the former.”
Dino was quiet for a long