Callum beelines straight toward a guy who can’t be more than twenty-two years old. He’s wearing ripped skinny jeans, an oversized Fila sweatshirt, and a puffy pair of Yeezy boots. He’s puffing from a vape and he looks blazed out of his mind.

“Morning,” Cal says politely.

Zimmer gives him a slow nod.

“Can we talk in private?” Cal says.

“You can say whatever you want to say,” Zimmer tells him lazily.

“It’s for my privacy,” Cal replies coolly. “Not yours.”

Zimmer regards him with narrowed, bloodshot eyes. But after a minute, he hauls himself up from the oversized beanbag chair he was lounging upon and leads us to the back corner of the warehouse. Here we can all sit down on a sectional couch of uncertain age and color. Quite honestly, I’d rather not sit down, seeing as it’s stained with mystery fluids. But those are the kinds of sacrifices you have to make when you’re the guest of a gangster.

Zimmer sprawls out on his side of the couch. Cal and I sit at a ninety-degree angle.

“So?” Zimmer says, taking another long puff off his vape.

Without preamble, Cal says, “I want to know if you brokered a hit against my sister.”

Zimmer lets out his breath in a plume of thick white smoke. It curls out his nostrils and mouth simultaneously. His eyes peer through the smoke, dark and glittering, like a dragon.

“If I gave out that kind of information,” he says, “what the fuck kind of broker would I be?”

“I understand that,” Cal says, keeping his voice measured. “But here’s the thing, Zimmer. We’ve never had any conflict. I stay up on the north end of the city. You run things how you like down here. We maintain a mutual level of respect. If you were to broker a hit against a member of my family, and I were to find out about it . . . I would consider that an act of aggression.”

Zimmer takes another pull off his vape. His relaxed posture hasn’t changed. But I can see a new alertness in his eyes and a tension in his muscles. His face is still, but there’s a gleam of anger in his eyes.

“I would consider it aggressive,” he hisses, “if you came into my house and threatened me.”

The silence stretches between Cal and Zimmer for several minutes. I’m not planning to say a goddamned word. Cal knows this guy, I don’t—but I am watching everyone else in the room, out of the corner of my eye. Keeping track of the big bouncer who’s standing off on our right-hand side, close enough to be summoned at a moment’s notice, and the rest of Zimmer’s people, too, who might be fucking around on Call of Duty, but are no doubt armed—every single one of them.

Finally, Cal says, “I have a piece of information in trade. I know a boxcar full of Rugers went missing from the Norfolk rail yard a couple weeks ago. One hundred and fourteen guns spread out across the city. Mostly here on the south side.”