Chapter 10 — Murder and Robbery
The stairwell smelled like cigarette smoke and old carpet, same as every residential building in the Bronx that had been losing a slow argument with time since 1970.
Luca worked a piece of gum, threaded the suppressor onto his sidearm, and kept his voice conversational.
"Simple operation. We go in, anyone who's a threat gets put down immediately. Anyone who isn't — we control them first. I need at least one of them talking before the night's over."
Léon was half a step behind him, case already open and repacked into a carry configuration, moving with the particular economy of someone who had done this enough times that preparation was indistinguishable from breathing.
"Understood," he said. Then, after a beat: "What if there's only one person who presents a threat?"
Luca glanced back at him. "One person? You'd call that a threat?"
Léon closed his mouth and said nothing further.
The first location was a third-floor unit in a residential building off Hunts Point — the kind of apartment that had two locks on the door and curtains that never opened.
Luca pressed the gum over the peephole, smoothed it flat, and looked at Léon, who had already produced a compact bolt cutter from the rig on his thigh and was positioning it at the door chain's likely placement.
No words needed. Luca raised three fingers, counted down, and rang the bell.
A man's voice, wary: "Who's there?"
Luca cleared his throat.
What came out of his mouth was a woman's voice — warm, slightly breathless, with just enough edge of distress to be convincing.
"Hi, I'm so sorry to bother you — my water pipe burst, I can't use my bathroom. Could I possibly use yours? Just a quick shower, I promise I won't be long."
Beside him, Léon went very still.
"Miss," the voice said, suspicious but visibly reconsidering, "I can't see you through the — can you step back a little?"
Luca, still in the register: "I'm literally in a bathrobe right now, it is freezing out here, I would really love a hot shower and then maybe we could find somewhere warm to—"
"Okay, okay, hold on—"
The sound of a deadbolt turning.
Léon looked at Luca with an expression that was not quite human surprise but was the closest thing to it that Léon's face apparently produced.
The door cracked open. Léon's bolt cutter bit through the chain in one clean motion. Luca's foot hit the door at the same moment and the whole thing swung open hard.
His gun was up before the man finished processing what he was looking at.
The man stared at Luca — tall, male, very much not wearing a bathrobe — with the specific expression of someone whose brain had hit a wall.
"What the—"
"Quiet."
The suppressed shot took him in the thigh. He went down.
Léon was already inside and moving, clearing the back rooms with the systematic efficiency of someone who had made a study of angles and didn't waste motion. Thirty seconds later he came back out with a second man, hand locked behind his back, guided forward with the practiced ease of someone managing a much larger person without apparent effort.
Both men ended up on the living room floor. Luca took in the room: a folding workbench against the far wall, stacked bags of cut product in blue packaging, a small scale, a heat sealer. The blue packaging was distinctive — the same brand currently moving through every major distribution point in upper Manhattan.
He picked up one of the bags and turned it over.
The product inside looked right. The packaging was right. But these two men weren't Frank Lucas's people — Frank's operation ran through family, through people he'd known his whole life, through a chain of custody that didn't include random white guys in the Bronx.
Which meant these two had either bought from a distributor several steps removed from Frank's direct network, or — more likely — they were knocking off the brand. Taking their own product, packaging it to look like Blue Magic, and selling it on the strength of a reputation they hadn't earned.
Underground trademark infringement. Remarkable.
The man on his knees with his hands laced behind his head was talking before Luca asked anything.
"That's not mine, I'm just holding it, you've got the wrong guys—"
"Holding it for who?"
The man's mouth closed. His eyes went to his partner.
His partner, from the floor, gave him a look that said don't you dare.
The suppressed shot was almost quiet.
Luca moved the muzzle six inches to the right.
"Holding it for who. I'm not asking again."
The remaining man looked at his partner. Looked at Luca. Made the only calculation available to him.
"Stansfield. DEA. Stan Stansfield."
"There we go." Luca straightened up. "Thank you for your cooperation."
Bip.
He holstered the weapon, picked up the bag he'd been examining, and started loading the product into the duffel he'd brought.
"Let's go, Léon. Next location."
Léon looked at the two men on the floor — both shots centered, both clean, no drama about it — and fell in beside Luca without comment.
They worked through four locations over the course of the afternoon.
The routine settled into a rhythm after the first one: approach, entry, control, question, collect, move. Luca handled the social engineering — the doorbell pretexts ranged from the bathrobe story to a convincing impression of a building maintenance worker with a leak complaint — and Léon handled the rooms, materializing from whatever shadow or angle was available with the kind of quiet efficiency that made Luca genuinely understand why the man's card was SSR.
Their styles were opposite and complementary. Léon worked the environment — used doorframes, furniture, the geometry of a room to stay unseen until the moment he chose to be seen, and then the moment was already over. Luca was more direct. Good angles, good timing, and marksmanship accurate enough that economy of movement was its own strategy.
Between the two of them, a room with four people in it was a problem that lasted about ninety seconds.
[You eliminated 11 armed criminals involved in drug trafficking and distribution. You defended the peace of the community.]
[+5 Skill Points][+2 Skill Fragments — Total: 27]
The fifth location, in a building near Fordham, was the one that broke the pattern.
Either Rourke had gotten word out — possible, given the timeline — or one of the earlier locations had a phone call go out before they'd finished. Either way, the curtains were drawn when they arrived and the first sound from inside after Luca knocked was a burst of automatic fire through the door that took out a section of doorframe at chest height.
Both of them were already flat against the walls on either side.
"Come on in!" a voice called from inside, with the aggressive confidence of someone who had a lot of guns and a reinforced position. "We're waiting for you!"
Luca reached into his jacket and produced a fragmentation grenade. He held it up where Léon could see it.
Léon produced one of his own.
"Tony tells me you're good with these," Luca said conversationally, pulling the pin.
"It's like throwing a baseball," Léon said, pulling his. "You aim, you throw."
"I appreciate the tutorial."
They threw them through the door at the same moment and moved back around the corners.
The building shook.
In the ringing silence that followed, Luca clapped a hand to his forehead. "Please tell me I didn't just blow up ten million dollars in product."
They went in together, cleared what needed clearing, and discovered that the storage was in a back room that the blast hadn't fully reached. Most of it was intact.
Luca exhaled.
By eight in the evening they were back in the car, the trunk carrying roughly twelve million dollars in product across five locations, and Luca's Fragment count had climbed to fifty-four.
The final stop was the apartment building on Morningside Heights.
Léon stopped at the entrance and stood there for a moment with the expression of a man doing math he didn't like.
"I don't work on locations with women and children present," he said. It wasn't a question or a request. Just a statement of where his line was.
He'd been in that building long enough to know who Norman was, and he knew Mathilda's situation.
"I know," Luca said. "I'm not touching the family."
Léon looked at him.
"Mathilda and I have an understanding," Luca said. "I'm not going to harm her or her brother." He paused. "Norman's a different matter, but that's not tonight's job. Tonight I just need to confirm one thing."
What he didn't say out loud was the rest of the plan — clean and straightforward in its logic. Norman had skimmed from Stansfield's product. Stansfield was already looking for him. That sequence was going to play out whether Luca intervened or not.
What Luca intended to do was get Mathilda and her little brother out of that apartment before Stansfield's people arrived, and then use Stansfield's inevitable visit as the opportunity to end the problem.
One operation. Multiple outcomes.
The part that required actual effort was the timing.
"Okay," Léon said simply. He turned toward the building entrance.
"Wait."
Luca counted out cash from the duffel and held it out — a substantial roll, far beyond what Tony would pay him for a day's work.
Léon looked at it. Shook his head. "Tony handles my payments."
"This isn't from Tony. This is from me." Luca kept his hand out. "You covered my back in five locations today. That's worth more than whatever Tony's rate is."
"I didn't cover your back. You didn't need covering."
"I needed to not be thinking about the rooms I couldn't see. That's what you gave me." He moved the cash slightly forward. "Take it."
Léon was quiet for a moment. The particular quiet of someone who wasn't used to being given things without conditions attached and was checking for the conditions.
"How much is Tony charging you per target?" Luca asked.
"Five thousand."
Luca kept his expression perfectly neutral.
Tony is charging me twenty thousand per target and paying Léon five thousand.
He made a mental note to have a separate conversation with Tony at some point.
"Take the money, Léon."
Léon took it. He looked at it for a moment with the expression of someone who had rarely held this much cash that was actually his.
"Next time I have a job," Luca said, "I'll come to you directly."
Something in Léon's face shifted by a small degree. Not warmth exactly. But the acknowledgment of something.
"All right," he said.
"Get some sleep. Good work today."
Léon went inside. Luca watched the door close behind him, then stood in the cold for a moment, running through the checklist.
[Bond: Léon — Interested]
One tier up from Stranger.
It begins, Luca thought, and went upstairs.
Across the city, in the wreckage of the Hunts Point warehouse, Stansfield moved through the room with his hands clasped behind his back, taking inventory of what was left.
Which was: nothing.
His agents had fanned out through the space with flashlights, turning over empty shelving units, checking the floor for remnants. One of them came back and delivered the summary with the careful tone of someone managing bad news:
"All five locations hit. Everything's gone. Only location untouched was Norman's."
Stansfield absorbed that.
Norman's.
He tilted his head slightly. "What was Norman's status?"
"Product came back ten percent short last time we moved it. Purity was down. Financial reconciliation didn't clear."
"So Norman's been playing games." Stansfield said it quietly, almost to himself. The tone wasn't angry — it was the tone of someone updating a mental ledger. He crouched beside one of the bodies and ran his thumb along the entry wound with a clinical interest that had nothing to do with grief.
"Someone knows our network." He stood. "They knew the locations, they knew the custodians, they left Norman deliberately." A pause. "That's a message."
His lead agent waited.
"Go pick up Norman," Stansfield said. "Get the goods. Whatever he's holding." He straightened his jacket. "Then put him down. Clean." He walked toward the exit. "And bring enough people. If they've been watching Norman, they've been watching us watch Norman."
He stepped over the threshold into the cold air outside and looked up at the sky with the detached consideration of a man who was already three steps ahead of the current problem.
"The Lucchese Family," he said softly, to no one in particular.
He'd remember that.
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