Chapter Seventeen
Vito
Give Her Back
Switching lanes, running red lights and stop signs, I drove wildly to my house in under twenty minutes. Russell’s phone kept going to voicemail. Amber wasn’t answering either. Ishmael rode silently beside me, checking and rechecking the ammo in his weapons. He was eerily silent, letting me know he was mentally prepared for anything.
When we pulled up in the driveway, nothing seemed out of place. We saw Russell lying on the floor with a tranquilizer dart hanging from his back at the entrance of the house. His hand extended toward his holstered gun, yet frozen.
I searched the house for Amber, Nicole, or any clue of what had happened. Grunting and unintelligible murmurs brought my attention to an awakening Russell.
“Russell, what happened, man?” I asked the sleeping giant as he came back to life.
He coughed and grunted. “Amber had a family emergency and had to go home. She had just walked out the door when someone rang the doorbell. I thought it was her coming back, so I opened the door and saw a guy standing there. I noticed his car had an Uber Eats sign on the top of it, so I thought Nicole had ordered something. She does things like that sometimes. Since he made it through the guard at the gate, I didn’t think much of it. The guy told me the price for the food, so I turned around to get the money. Then, he got the drop on me. He shot me with a dart. I wasn’t vested up because I had just woken up and got hit with Amber’s emergency and the guy at the door. The next thing I remember is getting up again just now. They caught me slipping.”
Ishmael and I helped Russell up and sat him on the couch. “Looks like they tranq’d you, so it should wear off soon.”
“I’m going to go search the property to see if I can find Mikey. He wasn’t on the gate when we came up, so that’s suspicious,” Ishmael offered.
“I was thinking the same thing,” I told him.
“We gotta get her back,” Russell said, trying to stand up.
I pressed a hand into his shoulder to push him back onto the sofa. “I’m going to get her back. You just sit here and let the tranq wear off.”
“I can’t believe they caught me slipping like this,” Russell lamented.
“They will pay for coming to my house like this.” I punched my left palm with my right fist, then welcomed the pain it caused. The rest of this day would be about inflicting pain on my enemies, who made a liar out of me when I told Nicole I would protect her.
Ishmael came back through the front door. “Found Mikey. He had been tranq’d and was under a tree on the other end of the gate.”
“Is he okay?” I asked.
“He’s more pissed off than anything. He’s sitting on the porch, resting.”
Prosper arrived and immediately set up a command center in my kitchen. He tracked Desi’s movements through his cell phone usage, which had started showing more activity earlier in the day. Tae had gone radio silent, but Desi’s phone had several hits.
The kitchen buzzed with men strategizing and sideline discussions about the best way to go into the last location he had been followed. It was the Carzoni warehouse, a known rival to the DeLucas. “That’s why we couldn’t track him before. They’ve been helping him,” Prosper concluded.
“And the only reason we can track him now is that he wants to be tracked,” Casper surmised.
“Bingo!” Prosper nodded.
“It’s a setup,” Ishmael echoed Prosper and Casper’s sentiments.
“Well, if they want me to come in and get what’s mine, that’s what they’ll get.” I holstered another gun. “I’ll make a few calls to make sure we have all the firepower we need to go in there.”
Casper admonished me with a glare. Going in hot wasn’t his style. After all, he got his name for being a ghost, albeit he wasn’t a friendly ghost. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Security will be tighter than a virgin’s pussy in there. It’ll be so tight you’d think the president is about to visit. And like Ishmael said, it’s clearly a setup. Maybe we need to think this through and come up with another way to get them back.”
Ishmael disagreed. “We don’t have any other option but to smoke them out of there. To turn their setup into our setup. Miracle is coming back home today.”
Everyone turned their attention to me, waiting for my reply. “We’re going in, and we’re going in blazing.” I didn’t have another choice. I promised Nicole I would protect her and was a man of my word. The longer she was in Desi’s possession, the more dangerous it was for her and the lesser chance of her coming home to me. “I’m getting Nicole back, and they’re all going to die.”
“Alright, I’ll ride with you, no matter what,” Casper guaranteed. “But Tae didn’t use his phone for almost twenty-four hours, and then all of a sudden, it starts pinging. We’re being led to this warehouse. How do we know the women are even there?”
“You raise a good point, and I considered that, but we can’t let this lead go. We have too much at stake to not follow where it leads us. Let’s go.”
Each man silently agreed.