As daylight neared and he started nodding off, Sergei threw back a couple of pills Katashi had sold him. He couldn’t remember exactly what they were, but they worked like Red Bull’s steroid-addicted cousin. In minutes, he was wide awake, heart thumping as much from the chemical as anticipation.
Activity down on the pier told him people were heading this way. He wasn’t nervous. Everything was in place. Everything was going according to plan.
The only question that remained—who was the mark?
He knew the hierarchies of all three organizations like he knew his own apartment. After all, it was impossible to play chess without knowing what all the pieces were and how they could affect the game. When everyone was onboard, he’d know which piece was going down today.
How he’d make his move depended largely on who the mark turned out to be. Someone who knew how to work on boats? Sergei would fuck up an engine so the man would be sent in to fix it. A day drinker? Sergei would catch him by the immense, fully stocked bar on the second deck. Some poor sap with no sea legs? Sergei’d take him out while he was heaving over the side.
More variables than he liked when he was already on a job, but it couldn’t be helped. By the time he disembarked, one of the goons would be dead, and he’d have more money to add to his “get the fuck out of Cape Swan” fund.
Commotion drew his attention to the dock below. He craned his neck. At the end of the pier, near where the fishing boats came in, Felice was right in a fisherman’s face, stabbing a finger at him and shouting.
Sergei held his breath.
“How the fuck do you explain this?”
“It was… it was the crabs!” The man’s accent made Sergei’s skin crawl. He couldn’t put his finger on the exact nationality, but the man had clearly come from the same part of the world he was.
“The crabs.” Felice laughed humorlessly. “So now I have crabs getting into my merchandise and stealing it from me. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t… sir, I don’t know if—”
“What the fuck happened to my merchandise, Ivan?”
“I don’t know! When we pulled up the trap, all the other bricks, they were good. But this one… this one is no good. Cut open. Wet.”
“I can see that, asshole!” Felice barked. “Do you have any idea how much this is costing me, Ivan? This whole fucking kilo is ruined. That’s over a quarter of a million dollars. A quarter. Of a million. Dollars, Ivan.”
Ivan said something Sergei couldn’t hear.
“For that much money,” Felice bellowed, “I could sell your family to—”
“Please, please, Mr. Maisano! I’ll do anything!”
Their voices dropped, and Sergei couldn’t hear them anymore, but he’d heard enough anyway. Cringing, he fought the urge to get sick. It wasn’t unusual for the crabs to mess with the bricks, or it could have been sabotage from a competitor. Either way, it wasn’t the hapless Ivan’s fault.
Felice wouldn’t care. And Sergei had heard that the asshole had, on at least one occasion, sold a man’s family into a sex trafficking ring in Southeast Asia. No one was quite sure why—maybe to make a point to the man, or make an example of him to others—but it was a very persistent rumor.
This was exactly why Sergei never cut crab pot lines when he was diving. It was tempting, if only to kick the wops in the financial balls, but the hapless middlemen who were responsible for the merchandise left in those crab pots would feel the pain much more severely than their handlers ever would. Just last year, three of them were killed before Corrado Maisano realized it was scuba-diving Cusimanos stealing their coke, not the fishermen.
Which of course, meant that diving out in the harbor was more dangerous than ever. Some of the goons had taken to shooting divers for sport under the guise of protecting their “interests.” From what he’d heard, the scuba instructors in town were even starting to warn people not to surface until they were right next to a boat flying the diver down flag. Otherwise, the bubbles had a tendency to attract Mafiosi like blood attracted sharks.
And that meant today’s escape route was going to be dangerous as fuck, but there was no other way to off a man on a boat in open water and get away undetected. Once Felice found that body, he’d tear his boat to pieces looking for the killer, and Sergei had no intention of being anywhere near it when he did.
He looked down at the dock again. The commotion had died down, and Felice was on the way to the boat, flanked by his usual posse of assholes. As they boarded along with the boat crew, Sergei immediately zeroed in on one. Agosto Privitera, a lieutenant. Not a big fish, but the other two were no-name soldiers. Not even made men.
Behind the Mafiosi were three workers in dingy, threadbare clothing that contrasted sharply with the expensive tailored suits of the Maisanos. Sergei thought he heard the men speaking in hushed Korean, but he didn’t pay them much attention. They weren’t part of his agenda.
Privitera, however…
Sergei grinned as he headed down to the bedroom to hide. He had his target.