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My brow furrows. “I’m listening.”

“You know that John Doe you asked me to keep an ear out about? The dead prick they found at the docks with the heart carved into his chest?”

Ah yes, how could I forget my lovely wife’s handiwork. So proud of her.

“Well, I got something,” Doug says. “We’ve got a new intern working down at the morgue who was re-cataloging evidence of both the John Doe and the Jane Doe they found over the summer.”

My mind flickers to the poor girl whose body was found on the shore right before school started this year, with only a suitcase of her clothes and not a thing to say who she was.

“Anyway, this kid fucked up and managed to knock the whole box of Mr. Doe’s personal effects off the table. But when he was cleaning it all up, he found something we missed the first time around.”

I frown. “Yeah?”

“Get this: the guy had a spring-loaded injector pen sewn into a secret pocket of his jacket.”

Ice drags up my spine.

This was the fucker who was tailing Bella. The one I killed when he got the jump on her in that alley behind The Seven Bells.

“And what,” I hear myself growl coldly, “was in the pen?”

Doug exhales slowly. “A neurotoxin called VX-9. It's serious shit, man. You don’t buy it on the street. This is state-actor, black-market, terrorist network stuff. I’m talking North Korea, ISIS-level. Our guys ran it through the database and the fuckin' CIA was blowing up our phone within three minutes.”

Jesus.

A fucking black-market neurotoxin.

And the motherfucker was stalking Bella with it.

“Is there an antidote?”

Doug scoffs. “Better not be asking me because you got dosed with VX-9, man. There is, but it’s even harder to find than the toxin i, and you need to take it within an hour of the VX or you’re fucked regardless.”

My jaw grinds.

“Anyway,” Doug continues, “obviously, that kicked this thing upstairs. Once the lab confirmed what we were looking at, we brought in the feds and started digging a hell of a lot deeper into your John Doe.”

“And?”

“We got a hit. John Doe is Florian Prenga. He’s an Albanian national, which is why he wasn’t showing up in our regular databases.”

I go still.

“Guy had a squeaky fucking clean record in this country. But back in the home country?” He whistles under his breath. “Real piece of work. Bunch of assault charges, sexual battery, rape, arson, about a million weapons-related charges, implicated in seven murders…” Doug scoffs. “But not a damn thing ever came of any of it, because he’s in with this crew called…fuck, I can’t even fuckin’ pronounce it…Vellozera something something?”

“Vëllazëria e Hekurt.” My fingers tighten around the phone as I growl the words. “It means The Iron Brotherhood.”

Doug chuckles. “Shit, man, you speak Albanian?”

“No.”

But I’m about to go talk to someone who does. And if I don’t like what he has to say, he’s not going to be speaking any language ever again.

33

DAMIANO

This is an utterly shit idea.