“… need leverage,” Zeke is saying. “Real leverage. And to get leverage, we need a threat.”
Bastian hums skeptically. “How exactly do you propose we get that?”
“We feed him to the feds.”
I listen for a while as they brainstorm all the various ways they could try to coerce a Bratva underboss into turning snitch, or install some kind of camera in Aleksei’s hideout, or lure him into a trip, or, or, or… It’s all far-fetched, to say the least, and I know by Bastian’s increasingly doubtful hums—especially when Zeke starts saying he knows a guy who makes great prosthetic noses and mustaches—that none of it has a snowball’s chance in hell of working.
But as I lie there, half-listening to their increasingly desperate schemes, something starts to form in my mind. A thought, fragile as a soap bubb
