“Evening,” I said quietly. “Time to go home.”
The address was a limestone townhouse, the kind with a brass door knocker shaped like a lion’s head. The wife met me in a silk robe, her knuckles white around a cup of tea that had long gone cold. vice stories
I pulled on my boots. This was the part of the job they didn’t put in recruitment pamphlets—the part where vice stopped being about gambling dens or backroom card games and became something else entirely. Something that crawled under your skin and nested there. “Evening,” I said quietly
“Just one more hand,” he whispered. “I can turn it around. I always do.” I pulled on my boots
I looked at the boy. Then back at the father. “No,” I said. “You don’t. You never do. That’s the vice, Leo. It tells you you’re one hand away from winning. But you’re not playing to win. You’re playing to lose. And now you’re teaching your son the same lesson.”
“Got a runner,” said Dino’s voice, gravel and cigarette smoke. “Upper East Side. Wife says he’s been gone four hours. Normally I’d wait till dawn, but there’s a kid in the car.”
“He’s not a bad man,” she said, before I’d even asked. “He just… he can’t help himself. The horses, the cards, the—” She stopped, swallowed. “He took our son. Said they were going for ice cream. That was seven hours ago.”