A muffled shot sounds. Then an eerie thud and crack as the bullet from Nora’s gun buries in the man’s skull on Pinceri’s right. He falls over in a slump against the table, one arm dangling over the arm of the chair, swaying side to side like a pendulum for a brief moment before it goes still.
“This one’s all yours 53642.70 ?” Nora prompts me, keeping her gun trained on Pinceri, who seems unaffected by the dead man next to him.
Nora nods to me in Pinceri’s direction.
I move my gun from the man on his left and train it on Pinceri instead, while Nora walks around and past me and toward the table. Pointing her gun at the other target’s face she demands, “Get up,” and he does without hesitation, the apprehensive look on his heavily lined face covered by age and sun damage.
Pinceri remains smooth and undaunted.
There’s not much time, I keep telling myself.
I get right to the point.
“How you answer my question,” I say to a smiling Pinceri, “will determine whether you live or die.”
His smile appears more like a grin now, and he turns his head at an angle, looking at me in a sidelong manner. Then he opens his arms wide out in front of him, palms up, and says, “Well, by all means, grace me with your question.”
The man to Pinceri’s left looks between the three of us, moving only his eyes—he’s terrified, unlike his confident boss whose cool attitude is, I admit, throwing me off a bit. I’m used to fear and bumbling, begging on hands and knees, telling me they’ll give me anything I want, do for me anything I want.
“What name is the Levington Daws account secured under in Sweden?” I ask, watching Pinceri closely over the barrel of my gun pointed at his face. “And who, other than you, has access to it?”
Pinceri’s smile thickens.
“That’s what you’re here for?” he asks, cocking his well-groomed head to the other side.
Thuddup!
The man to Pinceri’s left falls dead onto the floor. Pinceri is unfazed.
Nora takes a new magazine from her belt and reloads her gun.
“Carry on,” she says as she presses her bottom against the massive table, locking the magazine into place.
Pinceri and I lock eyes.
“Yes,” I go on, “that’s what we’re here for.”
“And you think that by killing my two most trusted men,” Pinceri says with poise, “that I’ll just give up that information to you—I can always hire more men.” He smiles. “And you won’t kill me because I’m the only one who can give you what you came here for.” He reaches up with both hands and casually tugs on the lapel of his suit jacket as if to straighten it.
“But are you willing to gamble the same on your wife?” I ask with confidence, holding all the cards.
He doesn’t flinch—maybe just a little, but then again, that could’ve just been me thinking that he should.
“What does my wife have to do with this?”
I grin, even though he can’t see anything of my face other than my eyes, and I take another step toward him.
“Oh, you know how these things work,” I provoke—he may not see the grin on my face, but surely he can hear it in my voice. “You know that if we could make it into this room without setting off any alarms, that we wouldn’t have come here if we weren’t prepared.”
“So, you’re saying you have my wife.” He sighs, not with surrender or concern, but as if he were bored. Then he reaches up and rubs the smoothness of his chin with his fingertips. “Is that the trade: the information for the life of my wife?”
Sensing that maybe he doesn’t believe us, Nora pushes herself from the table and walks down the length of it toward him. Producing a photograph from her boot, she tosses it on the table in front of Pinceri.
He glances down at it, then back up at us, before taking it into his fingers. He studies it for a short moment to confirm that the woman, beaten and bloody and tied to the water pipes in the basement of an abandoned building, is in fact, his wife.
He sets the photograph back down, still unflinching, and the more I stand here with this piece of shit who seems like he doesn’t care about what we’ve done to his wife, the more I want to shoot him on principle. But I have to remind myself that he’s probably just trying to keep his cool, avoiding showing his true concern.
Pinceri smirks gently and clasps his hands together on his backside.
“Now I’ll ask you again,” I say. “What name is the Levington Daws account secured under in Sweden and who has access to it?”
Pinceri smiles.
I grit my teeth.
Nora looks at me from the short distance across the room, but doesn’t say anything—this is my mission, my contract, my hit, and therefore my decisions. Not to mention part of my training, and I know that everything I do and say will not only have consequences, but will be judged. By Nora. By Victor. By everyone.
I put a bullet in Pinceri’s right thigh.
He falls against the tall leather chair behind him, one hand involuntarily grabbing the table for balance; the photograph of his wife sliding away underneath his fingers as he sinks deeper into the leather.
“Fuuuck!” he moans through gritted teeth.
And then he laughs.