Preview
T-Bone, who stood with Mad Dawg in the club's showroom, heard his cell phone ring. He picked it up immediately, anticipating Yuki on the other end. He answered,
"Yuki? Is it time?"
But T-Bone was startled to hear a man's voice: "Yes. Get ready."
"Who the fuck is this?"
"This is Danny Choi. It's all right, we're going to assist Yuki downstairs. She told me what has to happen. You know what to do, right?"
"...Right." He was more than slightly surprised that Danny would be helping them...
but Yuki said he would, and T-Bone realized he should have known better than to doubt her. But what the hell did Danny mean by 'we'? Before he got the chance to ask, Danny hung up.
Mad Dawg looked at him expectantly. "It's goin' down?"
"Yeah." Anticipation increased in his being. "Yeah Dawg, it's goin' down."
"We live for her, and we die for her. You feelin' me, T?"
"Won't be any other fuckin' way, my brother."
at either end of a long hall behind the V.I.P. rooms. At each end was a set of stairs that led down to the basement, and when one reached bottom from either end there was a second long hall. Halfway down this hall was a sliding door that opened into a handsome dining room where food would be served for special meetings.
One such meeting was being held that late night, a dinner presided over as ever by Antonio Pucci.
Pucci was seated at the head of a large table...seated with him were the leaders of several other operations, from narcotics to vending, from across Missouri and Illinois
under the control of the Roccoli crime family. On both sides of him were two soldiers
who mirrored the all-business appearance of their colleagues upstairs. They were the only ones in the room who weren't laughing with Pucci because he had just finished telling a particularly raunchy joke as they celebrated a record month of ill-gotten profit.
All sat in front of plates full of Italian food and glasses of sweet concord wine.
Pucci, from the perspective of his colleagues, appeared to be a very happy man, and it was difficult not to laugh with him. It was also easy to understand why someone in his position would be happy: he was the rising star in Boss Roccoli's organization,
coming up from nothing within a handful of years with a nasty combination of financial genius and cobra-like cunning to become the capo of his operation. He was just within the rarified air that was occupied by Nico himself, his son Guido, their
family lawyer-slash-consigliere, and a handful of others. Rumor was that Pucci would rise to the rank of Underboss to Guido Roccoli when his father inevitably retired.
Yes, Pucci seemed to be a happy man even to those in the room who secretly chafed at the thought of being subordinate to this son of a bitch.
But...they couldn't have known there was more than one reason the one they knew as Antonio Pucci laughed.
And if they knew the reasons...they would have stopped laughing with him.
Outside in the basement hall, Danny Choi walked forward silently past the dining room door to the far end of the hall and its stairwell. Standing close to the bottom of the other stairwell was Delilah, still in her silk robe.
Then Yuki strode up to the door. She stopped there, and reflected on where she had been. She thought of where she could be going from here...because of this moment.
She whispered to herself softly, "Now."
Words did not matter. Thought did not matter. Only action.
She opened the door.
the movement of the door, and his laughter died. He blinked in seeming confusion at the stranger who was at the doorway, and his enforcers responded with similar expressions. A few at the table took notice that the one they called Pucci wasn't laughing anymore, and turned to see what he was looking at. In rapid succession, everyone else at the table did the same.
They all saw the woman, standing at the threshold.
No one else noticed that the expressions on the faces of the one called Pucci and his guards had changed. From confusion...to something else.
It was recognition.
All of this took the space of between four and five seconds.
Then, for most of those in the dining room, time by their perceptions slowed...
almost a blessing considering they had approximately another six seconds of life to them. It was a natural reaction when the woman reached under both sides of her hooded coat, and then each of her hands brought into the light a Mini Uzi submachine
gun.
Yuki pointed both weapons directly at Pucci and squeezed the triggers.