I’m still a wanted man. Every second I spend in this city is a risk, every night a threat of getting thrown back into that hell-hole I escaped.

I should disappear, smuggle myself back to Italy and vanish from the face of the earth for the rest of my life. But that would mean leaving Serena behind, in danger. That is no life I want to live.

My old friend Trueba comes to mind often. I worry for him, knowing he’s spending time in isolation on the inside. But there was no hesitation in him when he agreed to do what he did. Old men want to live through the young, sometimes. The best thing I can do for his memory is not make the same mistakes as he did.

I won’t get caught.

But I’ve given it more thought than that. When I realized I’d have to do something big to get the money I need to keep me and Serena safe, I couldn’t help but think of Trueba’s story. One big heist was all it took to make sure they were set.

But it caught up to him eventually.

Jewels are hard to trace. His mistake wasn’t the heist.

It was who he stole from.

“Are you sure your man will come through for us?” I ask Nico, who sits in the passenger’s seat of the car next to me. We’re parked in the lot behind an old convenience store, waiting for a word from one of Nico’s friends.

“I’ll skin his ass if he doesn’t,” Nico mutters, watching his phone.

There’s a jewel handoff going down tonight. While the Cleaners moving into our territory was harsh on the Costas’ business, seeing which of our old contacts started working for the enemy told us who we could trust. When the Cleaners moved into the south side of the borough, a small ring of jewel smugglers we knew went silent.

That means they’re working with the Cleaners now, who probably need the money, badly. Nico did some investigating and got a tip that a handoff is happening tonight. Before the sun rises, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewels smuggled into the country will be handed over to the Cleaners... but we have other plans.

All we’re waiting on is Nico’s informant to give us a location. Smugglers like this don’t stick to the same sites.

I hate the jewel trade. It’s a bloody business, and if there were any other way, I’d have nothing to do with it. But I’d rather the money not fall into the hands of the Cleaners, and I can use it to secure a better life for me and Serena.

As for Nico, my accomplice tonight, he’s planning to use the cash to buy Rafaela a wedding ring. Since he’ll be fencing the goods and putting the money in my account, I promised him I wouldn’t tell.

I take a drink from the thermos of coffee in my hand when I see Nico’s screen light up, and he smiles.

“Got it.”

“Then it’s show time,” I say, and I pull out of the parking lot to start heading toward the coordinates Nico’s man gave us. By the looks of things, it’s just outside the city.

I drive down the highway, following the directions Nico gives me. I have to be careful out on the road. If I get pulled over, it’s all over. Besides the fact that I’m a wanted fugitive, I’m carrying a lot of guns, and I don’t exactly look like a harmless sportsman. It’s late at night, though, and the police are watching for drunk drivers, not men on their way to a heist.

“You know this is insane, right?” Nico asks after taking a swig of the coffee and checking his guns. “We haven’t cased wherever we’re going, we don’t know what kind of manpower we’re up against, we can’t call for backup since the rest of the boys don’t know we’re doing this tonight.”

I open my mouth to answer, but Nico interrupts me, “You’re gonna say ‘love makes you do crazy things, my friend,’ aren’t you? Don’t fuckin’ do it, I swear to god I’ll push you out of this moving car.

Words stolen from my mouth, I just smile smugly while Nico scoffs.

* * *

“He can’t be serious,” I say as we pull up to the wire fence near the coordinates. “Nico, I mean it, is he joking?”

Nico is biting his lip with his eyebrows raised as he looks up at the site the handoff is supposedly going down at. “This guy doesn’t joke much.”

We’re looking up at an old, broken-down Ferris wheel, long since rusted and out of use. Not far from it is a booth advertising cotton candy and funnel cake, but the glass windows are long-since smashed in, and some of the lettering is missing. I see a rat scurry across the counter of a shooting booth that’s had all the toy guns ripped out of it.

An abandoned fairground.

“Not a bad cover,” I admit under my breath before I pull my ski-mask over my head. Nico does the same. We’re outfitted in all black, and we have our guns strapped to us. I think about the way I looked last time I went out on a job like this, and it makes me feel like I was just a kid back then. Maybe what was left of the young buck in me died in prison. I still have the energy, but I know how to handle myself now.

Time to see if it was a change for the better.

Communicating through signs, Nico and I find an opening in the old fence and make our way inside, moving silently.

The shadows of the fairgrounds all around us seem to move out of the corner of my eye. Every now and then, I think I can hear the sound of something skittering. I know it’s a rat or a bird, but I can’t shake the feeling that old ghosts hang around this place.

I’ve never liked fairs.

Soon, I stop Nico as a more human sound reaches my ears: footsteps. I gesture for him to follow me, sticking to the shadows, and we creep closer after the sounds of several men and hushed voices up ahead.

We come around the corner of what looks like an old haunted house-type ride, complete with a badly painted giant bat looming over the entrance. We get low and stay put, because at the open space up ahead in front of it, I see our targets.

There are five men total. It’s hard to tell who is who at first, but their body language gives them away. Two of them are Cleaners: one of them is receiving a large black bag from the others, and the other man stands close to him, tall and as imposing as I might be at a meeting like this. The other three look a little more nervous as they hand off the bags. They are right to be. The Cleaners aren’t to be trusted. It must have been hard for them to set this meeting up in the first place.

I smile under my mask. Icing on the cake.

Hand on my silenced pistol, I wait until nobody’s gaze is turned toward us, and I raise the weapon to take aim. My sights set on the big Cleaner, but when I get a better look at the other man handing off a bag full of jewels, my heart skips a beat.

That face. I know that face.

I lower my weapon as my eyes widen, and Nico looks at me, puzzled. Any other time, I would swear my eyes are playing tricks on me, but I’d recognize that face anywhere.

One of the smugglers is a cop who was at my arrest two years ago.

Nico looks confused, but I give his arm a warning squeeze and shake my head ever so slightly, so I don’t draw attention. Things just got a lot more dangerous. We can’t risk killing a cop. My head is buzzing with questions, most of all, why is he here?

I’ll have to worry about that later, though. For now, I have to figure out how we leave here without a cop’s blood on our hands, because I’m not leaving without the jewels.

I hold Nico’s arm until the men finish their transaction. Nods are exchanged, and the groups part ways. Thankfully, the smugglers are in a hurry. They’ll be out of the way soon enough. We’re still as shadows as each one stalks off, and the moment it’s safe, I nod for Nico to follow me.

We’re going to have to take down the Cleaners separately.

Nico is giving me a “what the fuck are you doing” look, but I press on. We move as quietly as we can around the building to head off the Cleaners. I’m moving faster than I should, and I have to catch myself to slow down. My thoughts are all over the place, but I have to stay focused. I can figure the rest out later.

We round the corner, and we both freeze in our tracks.

At the far end of the haunted house’s side stands a third Cleaner we hadn’t noticed. A lookout. And he’s looking straight at us.

I have no time to think. I raise my gun, aim, and fire, all in the span of less than a second. The man jolts and staggers back, a bleeding hole in his forehead, and he falls to the ground. We’d be in the clear... if the two men with the jewels weren’t just about to pass by him, each of them carrying bags.

“Fuck!” one of them shouts, and they take off in opposite directions.

There’s no hesitation in me. “You take the fast one, I’ve got the big guy,” I say, and I take off sprinting. Nico takes off the next moment, and we’re on our targets like bloodhounds.

My man goes back the way they came, toward the haunted house. I round the corner just as he rounds the one further down, bringing him around to the front of the house. I curse silently as I go after him, and when I reach the corner, he’s gone. There are no hiding spots nearby that I can spot, except…

My eyes fall on the haunted house, and I grit my teeth. It’s a tight space with many shadows, places to hide, and a service exit somewhere inside. He chose a smart place to hide. That’s not going to stop me, though.

I take my weapon out and move in after him.

It’s hard to stay quiet inside the creaky old building. Each step I take risks making the rusty metal floors groan, and I can hardly see anything. The only upside is that he’s at the same disadvantage. But I don’t underestimate him. He had the luxury of casing this joint. He might know it better than I expect, so I can’t let my guard down.

Every other thought leaves my head. I don’t worry about Nico, or about what might happen outside. I’m focused on my sole task.

Keeping low, I move past the ticket stand inside. If there’s a service exit, it’s probably toward the back of the ride. I have no idea whether the entry or exit tunnel is the fastest to take, so I check the doorways of both before darting down the entryway.

Then I hear the sound of a shuffling footstep some ways ahead, and I know I made the right choice. If he moves too fast, he’ll alert me to where he is. My eyes slowly begin to adjust to the dark, and I look in the direction of the sounds.

As if on cue, though, I hear the sounds of running footsteps down the winding hallway, and I take off after him. To my sides, I see the old deactivated skeletons and rusty monsters used to pop out at people on the ride. They’re more unnerving when still and lifeless.

There’s the sound of a gunshot, and I come to a halt and dive into cover, pressed up against an animatronic werewolf in a nook as I raise my weapon, ready to fire back. But there are no more shots. I peek out just long enough to look into the darkness. If he can’t see me, I can’t see him, but if he’s blind-firing back at me, he’s starting to panic. I have to use this to my advantage.

Moving as silently as I can, I hold my gun out and start to feel my way along the wall toward the source of the gunshot.

As my hand runs along a wall, I feel it brush against something cold and metallic. I feel it more and realize that it’s a switch. An emergency power switch? Brakes? Security? I hesitate a moment, but I know I need some kind of distraction, anything, so I pull the lever.

The whole building seems to shudder as the last sparks of energy course through the place. Down the hallway ahead of me, loose wiring overhead pops loudly and rains sparks down, and it lights up the room enough to show me my man, white-faced at the end of the hall.

We raise our guns at the same time and fire off, and I feel the sting of the bullet grazing my shoulder. I sprint forward and start zig-zagging my way down, but when the wires spark again, the man is gone.

The sounds of his footsteps are muffled by the mechanical whirring I hear all around now. Some generator somewhere must have a little juice left in it. I curse my luck. The half-working haunted house is a lot creepier than a dead one.

I get to the end of the hallway and halt at the corner. Behind me, I hear a rolling sound, and I turn to see one of the empty ride cars clunking its way down on the metal tracks. I let it roll around the corner, cobwebs hanging overhead, and as soon as it appears in the next hallway, I hear two gunshots ricochet off the empty car, followed by a curse.

He’s waiting for me. I have to think of something.

My eye catches something across the deadly hallway that’s frankly, horrifying. The ride has sparked to life, which means the animatronic monsters within are trying to move like they did when the fair was running normally. Across from me is a robotic mummy, and every few seconds, it starts to jolt around awkwardly as if trying to pop forward and scare a guest, but a big loose cable running across its chest is holding it back. That gives me an idea.

Just before the next time it pops out, I aim my gun at the cable and fire. With a spark, it’s cut in two, and a second later, the mummy pops out of its plastic sarcophagus, arms raised and jaw hanging open.

“Fuck!” comes a shout from down the hallway, and there’s a gunshot, and part of the mummy’s head comes off from the gunshot. I take the distraction and pop out of cover myself.

Just as I planned, the man’s wide eyes are fixed on the mummy, and by the time his face turns to me, my gun is trained on him, and I squeeze the trigger.

Two quick shots, and the man falls to the ground, dead. I race forward with my gun pointed at him, and I make sure he’s down for good before I take the bags and sling them over my shoulder.

That went well, but I don’t have any time to celebrate: Nico’s still out there.

I race out of the haunted house and listen for the sound of fighting. It doesn’t take long before I hear the gunshots of the other man. Nico’s using a silenced pistol like me, so I can’t figure out his location by listening.

I reach the gravity-spinner ride and move carefully around it before I finally see movement. Nico is blind-firing, ironically pinned down in the shooting gallery booth. Judging by where he’s shooting, I can get an idea of where the Cleaner is.

I should be able to flank him. I move around the opposite side of the gravity-spinner, and I can make out motion just beyond a merry-go-round. I clench my jaw. I can’t deny that the big, badly painted plastic horses will make for good cover if I want to approach quickly. I can see the shooter crouching behind an overturned popcorn stand.

No time to think of alternatives. I rush forward, still close to the ground, and before I can give the other man a chance to react, I use one of the fake horses as both cover and a rest for my arms to take aim, and with the squeeze of the trigger, the man goes down, slumping over his bag.

Nico and I are both still for a moment, as if expecting something else to happen, but after a few beats, we both stand up, grinning at each other, and Nico shakes his head as we make our way to the corpse to get the bag.

“Shit, man, I’m glad we didn’t tell the others about this after all,” he says, taking the bag and slinging it over his shoulder while I check the dead man. “All this? Nobody would believe this bullshit.”

We get the bags together and make our way back to the car as silently as we came in, and in a few minutes’ time, we’re driving back into town.

“Goddamn,” Nico says as he looks over the insides of the bags. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen this much money in one place. Even if it is in rock-form,” he jokes, not daring to touch the glittering stones even now.

“Jewel thieves have the right idea,” I chuckle, glancing at the payload. “You should just skip buying a ring and use one of these rocks for the engagement ring. Find a nice jeweler to do it for you on the down low.”

“No shit,” Nico laughs. “Nah, Rafaela would kill me.” He glances at my arm and notices a dark patch in my black sweater where I’m bleeding. “Hey, you get hit, man?”

“Nothing serious,” I say, shrugging my shoulder. “Got a little more muscle to absorb the sting there now. You all good?”

“He couldn’t get a shot in on me,” he says proudly, “but you still saved my ass back there. Reminds me why I keep helping your ass out.”

We chuckle, and I jab him with my elbow. When he stops laughing, Nico looks over at me with a thoughtful look on his face.

“You’ve been pretty quiet about all this, though. Just what are you thinking about doing with all this cash? ‘Keep Serena safe’ is a little vague.”

“I’ll worry about that,” I say, smiling. “I’ve got something special in mind for my share of the cash.”