Reyes pushed his coffee to the side and flipped the folder open for the third time that morning, like the numbers might have changed since eight a.m.
They hadn’t.
Enzo Radic.
Twenty-four, no priors, half-Irish on the father’s side, worked the edges of the DiMeo crew out of Newark.
Six months ago the name had appeared twice in surveillance transcripts, both times as background.
Last month it had appeared eleven times.
This week, fourteen.
The photograph paper-clipped to the front a kid leaving a social club, coffee in one hand had gone from a preliminary flag to an active file three weeks ago without anybody announcing it.
The pattern looked clean on paper.
Small collections.
Envelope drops.
The sort of low-tier work a crew handed to an associate they were testing or didn’t trust yet.
Except the name kept sitting next to money that moved, debts that cleared, disputes that settled before they became problems.
“You’re doing the thing,” Agent Kolar said from the next desk over.
“What thing.”
“The thing where you stare at a file like it insulted your mother.”
Reyes turned a page.
“This kid.
Six months ago he’s nobody.
Now he’s collecting on a year-old debt Sal Rizzo couldn’t close.”
“Maybe Rizzo’s losing his touch.”
“Maybe.” Reyes tapped the photo.
“Or maybe the crew found somebody who makes them look smarter than they are.”
Kolar leaned back, hands behind his head.
“So we pick him up.
Squeeze him.
See what falls out.”
“And he lawyers up, we get nothing, and the crew knows we’re looking.”
“Then what?”
Reyes closed the file.
Stood.
Picked up his jacket from the back of the chair and checked his watch.
“Then we find somebody who’s already scared and we give him a reason to stay that way.”
The drive took twenty minutes.
Kolar drove.
Reyes watched the neighborhoods change from the blocks where people called lawyers to the blocks where they didn’t.
Danny Corso lived above a dry cleaner on a street that had seen better decades.
Reyes had pulled his jacket two months ago on a minor transport charge nothing that would stick, barely enough to file.
Just enough to scare a man who didn’t want to go back inside.
They climbed the stairs.
Knocked.
Corso opened the door with the chain still on, saw Reyes, and went very still, doing math on how far the fire escape was.
“Mr.
Corso,” Reyes said.
“We need to talk.”
“I got nothing to say.”
“That’s fine.
We’ll do the talking.”
Corso looked past them down the stairwell, checked the street through the window at the landing’s end, and let them in.
The apartment smelled like old cigarettes and takeout nobody had thrown away yet.
Reyes stayed standing.
Kolar closed the door.
“You’re not in trouble,” Reyes said.
“Then why are you here.”
“Because you work corners for the DiMeo crew.
Collections, drop-offs, the sort of thing that doesn’t make the news but puts you in rooms where people talk.”
Corso lit a cigarette.
His hand shook just enough.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Reyes opened the folder.
Set a photograph on the table between them.
Enzo Radic, leaving a social club on Eighth Street, coffee in one hand.
Corso looked at the photo the way a man looks at a bill he can’t pay.
“I seen him around.”
“Where around.”
“Just around.
He’s new.
Does work for the crew.”
“What kind of work.”
“I don’t know.
Collections.
Errands.
Same as anybody.”
Reyes set another photo down.
Corso at a bar, talking to a man whose face the Bureau had been photographing for six years.
“You were in the room when Tommy Bellucci told three guys to settle a territory dispute.
You heard who got what.
You heard the names.”
Corso’s cigarette burned between his fingers, ash building.
“I don’t remember.”
“You remember.” Reyes pulled a chair out and sat.
“Mr.
Corso.
I’m not asking you to be a hero.
I’m asking you to be a witness.
There’s a difference and it’s the difference between us.”
“You don’t know these people.”
“I know exactly these people.
I know what they do and I know what they do to people who talk.
Which is why we do this carefully, slowly, and nobody knows your name until the day we’re standing in court with twenty other witnesses and you’re not special anymore.”
Corso stubbed the cigarette out, half-smoked.
Lit another one.
“What do you want.”
“I want you to keep doing what you’re already doing.
You hear something, you call a number.
You see something, you write it down.
Dates, names, money.
We corroborate it six ways, we build a case that doesn’t need you until it’s too late for them to do anything about it.”
“And if they find out before that.”
Reyes met his eyes.
Didn’t lie.
“Then you call me and we pull you out.”
Corso smoked.
Looked at the photo of Enzo Radic on the table.
“What’s he got to do with it.”
“He’s new.
He’s moving up.
People who move up fast get careless or they make other people careless, and careless is when we get what we need.”
Kolar, from the door, said it quieter.
“You’re small enough they’re not watching you yet.
That won’t last.
You help us now, you’re a witness.
You wait, you’re a defendant.”
Corso’s hand shook harder.
Reyes took a card from his jacket.
Set it on the table next to the photos.
“You don’t have to decide right now.
But the number’s there.
You call it, we talk.
You don’t, we come back with a warrant and you go in alone.”
He stood.
Kolar opened the door.
Corso didn’t move.
Just sat there with the cigarette burning down toward his knuckles, unsmoked, and his eyes going back and forth between the card and the door like one of them was going to move first.
They were halfway down the stairs when Corso called after them. The source of this chapter is g.com.
“If I do this.
If.
Nobody knows?”
Reyes stopped.
Looked back up.
“Nobody,” he said.
“Not until it doesn’t matter anymore.”
Corso nodded.
Once.
Like a man agreeing to surgery he knows will hurt but might let him live.
“I’ll call,” he said.
Reyes drove back.
Kolar worked a toothpick between his teeth and watched Newark slide past the window.
“Think he’ll hold?” Kolar said.
“Long enough.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then we find another one.
There’s always another one.”
Back at the office Reyes opened the file, pulled a blank page, and wrote the date at the top in his neat block capitals.
Beneath it: *C.
I.
CORSO PRELIMINARY COOPERATION ESTABLISHED.
LOW-TIER ACCESS, PROXIMITY TO TARGET SECTOR.*
He dated the page again at the bottom.
Signed it.
Set it in the folder behind the photograph of Enzo Radic, the kid whose name kept appearing in places it hadn’t been six months ago, the new center of gravity in a crew that didn’t know it was being weighed.
Kolar dropped a fresh file on Reyes’s desk.
Leaned against the edge.
“You really think this kid’s the way in?”
Reyes tapped the photo.
“I think he’s smart, he’s hungry, and he’s making people around him money.
That’s how you rise.
It’s also how you stop being careful.”
“And when he stops being careful?”
Reyes closed the file.
Wrote one word on a Post-it note and stuck it to the folder’s edge.
Patient.
“Then we’re there,” he said.
Kolar left.
The office emptied.
Reyes sat with the file under the fluorescent hum and the cold coffee and the knowledge that somewhere in Newark a frightened man was holding a card with a number on it, and in six months or a year that number would ring and the voice on the other end would say something worth dating.
The photograph stared up at him.
Enzo Radic.
Smart kid.
New money.
Rising fast.
Reyes had seen this shape before.
The crew’s context changed Irish, Italian, Russian, didn’t matter but the shape stayed the same.
A young earner who solved problems, who made the guys above him look smarter, who climbed because he was useful until the day he climbed too far.
The file would thicken.
Corso would call.
Other voices would surface, scared men trading testimony for safety, and piece by dated piece the machine would clarify.
It always did.
Reyes turned off his desk lamp.
Put the file in the drawer.
Locked it.
Outside, Newark sat the same as it always did wet streets, amber lights, the hum of a city that didn’t stop moving just because the law was watching.
Inside, in a locked drawer in a federal building, a case had just grown its first live thread.
Somewhere else, Enzo Radic was celebrating a win, counting money, earning his way up a ladder he thought he could see all the rungs of.
He couldn’t.
The noose and the climb were the same rope, and Marcus Reyes had just started pulling it tight.