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I pull the second chair round and sit down in front of him, knees almost touching his.

"Wes. Look at me. Not at him." I point at Rafe. "At me."

He looks at me.

"You're going to be all right," I say, in the voice I keep for the little room downstairs, the one with the tissues and the water jug. Low, warm, unhurried. "Breathe for me. In through the nose. That's it. Good man."

And he does. In through the nose, out through the mouth, calming down for the man who strapped him to the chair.

"Now. Rafe's going to ask you some things and you're going to answer them, because the other way is very undignified and you strike me as a man who'd hate that."

Rafe has brought my shears up from the prep room, as I’ve requested. German, forged for opening a chest, and he's chosen them on purpose. I've used them a hundred times on people who could no longer feel pain. That was the whole point of them.

Rafe sets the blade against the little finger, below the second knuckle, and closes his hand.

The bone gives. It's a small sound, softer than you'd think, like a knife going through the joint of a chicken, and it's the softness that turns my stomach. The finger drops onto the arm of the chair and rolls off.

Wes doesn't scream. Not yet. His mouth is open and his eyes have gone enormous while nothing comes out of him at all. I keep my face still and my hands loose on my knees, waiting.

Then he screams, the sound high and thin, not Oscar-winning for sure. The scream goes on, breaks in the middle, and continues until there's no air left in him. With immense effort, he drags a breath in and does it again. The strap creaks. His heels hammer my carpet. Blood runs off the arm of the chair in a steady line and soaks straight in.

The finger now lies near my shoe. Tomek has turned to face the caskets and is studying the silk like there's going to be a test on it.

Between screams, Wes gives us an address in Bushwick.

"Good," I tell him. "That's very good. You're doing well."

Then he pisses himself. I hear it before I smell it—the hiss of it, and then it's coming through the seat of the chair and onto my carpet. Rafe swears and steps back out of the way.

And Wes says sorry, not for the drugs but for the mess. He says it four or five times, sobbing. "Sorry … I'm sorry … Sorry about the carpet." I crouch down, hands on knees, waiting for something meatier from him.

In the end, the ring finger gets us a brother-in-law and a name inside the port authority.

It comes off badly. Rafe has to go at it twice, and on the second cut the hand jerks in the strap and the shears slide and open him across the back of the hand.

Blood comes out in a jet. It hits me across the jaw, under the ear, down the throat, and a long stripe of it soaks into the front of my crisp white shirt. It's warm and coppery.

I don't so much as blink. But Rafe goes still with the shears half-raised, and Tomek stops chewing. Even Wes, mid-scream, seems to understand that the room has just changed and he doesn't know why.

My men do know why though. They've all worked for me long enough to know that the one thing you never do is get me dirty.

There is blood on my collar and I have a table reserved at eight. She is never late, as I've found out in all of the seven years I've kept an eye on her. The spare shirt upstairs is a blue one that sits wrong at the neck. She will notice, won’t she?

I make some mental calculations. It's fifty minutes home through the tunnel, and it's six-twenty now. The shit is drying on my throat and this man is still making that noise—he's been going on a while and doesn't seem like he's going to stop. I can feel the taste in my mouth now.

I stand up.

Rafe steps back fast, shears in hand. "Boss."

Here is my one rule. I don't do it myself. I ask, other men answer, and afterwards I go downstairs and put people back together with these hands. That is the status quo. It has held for twenty years.

I'm four feet from the shears, and I want them in my hand. I want to cross the room, take them off Rafe, and finish Wes myself. I've already worked out that it would take nine seconds. And what I feel, standing there with the plan laid out and another man's blood on my throat, isn't horror. It's something much worse—it's a yearning for blood.

"Laszlo," Constantine says quietly.

CHAPTER 9

Laszlo