Stevie Warsame eases his large body into the car without speaking. He pours himself some coffee from a thermos and grimaces at the first sip. “You make shit coffee, Bazooka,” he says to Brazuca, who’s staring at him from the driver’s seat.
“You’re breaking my heart.” Brazuca starts the engine and pulls away from the line of parked cars on the road. He glances back for one last look at the unassuming two-story house that the BMW’s tracker led him to. It’s on a quiet, tree-lined street, with plenty of yard space. Which means that, though it doesn’t really look like much, the Burnaby neighborhood they’ve been watching must be an expensive one. He’d even caught a glimpse of a pool in one of the backyards. A backyard pool. In Vancouver, a place where it was a luxury to have anything better than a shitty, overchlorinated indoor pool—the kind that Brazuca swims in every morning.
Warsame, who has just walked by the house for a closer look, is unruffled, as always. “You want to hear the good news or not? Seems like your average private residence but there’s a camera above the door and in the driveway. TV’s on inside, so someone’s home. What’s the deal with this case, anyway? Cheater?”
“Just some surveillance for now,” Brazuca says, not wanting to get into it just yet.
Warsame doesn’t like this. “What exactly are we surveilling? Way I see it, I’m doing you a favor.”
“I’m paying you!” Lam’s pockets are deep to support hiring outside help, but Brazuca hasn’t yet told Warsame who the client is. To get the Somali ex-cop to do anything, however, you need to make it worth his while.
“Yeah, so what? I don’t have to be here, bro.”
There is a directness to Warsame that comes with his easy smile. He’d lived through a war in Somalia, had his childhood upended to move from a Kenyan refugee camp to Canada, learned a new language in order to enforce the laws of his new country. He had seen more than any person ought to have, all before he grew out of childhood. You could not dissuade him when he wanted something—or convince him that your needs were greater than his. His unwillingness to let anything slip past was what made him such a good investigator.
Brazuca sighs. “Friend of mine asked me to look into an OD. Dealer’s connected to the Triple 9s. A lead set me up on this house.”
Warsame’s incredulous look mirrors Lee’s when Brazuca told him the same thing. “You’re digging up a supply chain for an OD? What the fuck for?” It was dangerous work, best left to the police—as Warsame well knows.
“Favor, mostly. Just seeing where it goes.” Brazuca isn’t fooling anyone with his feigned casual tone, especially not Stevie Warsame, but he’s still glad when Warsame decides this is enough information for now.
But by his look, he’s not going to be put off for much longer. “I’m gonna grab some food. You need me later?” Warsame asks, when Brazuca drops him back at his car a few blocks away.
“Yeah, stick around if you can.”
Warsame nods. “Your dime. Let me know if you want me to bring some more guys on for the job.”
“Yeah, thanks, man. I want to see how this plays out a little first.”
Warsame doesn’t come cheap and Brazuca has a feeling that his guys wouldn’t be, either. He’s not ready yet to start contracting more work without a better idea of what he’s dealing with. He waits until Warsame pulls away in his two-door sedan with tinted windows before mixing a protein shake from a container that he now stashes in his glove compartment. In this moment, drinking his healthy shake and thinking about his muscle mass, he is not aware of just how much he resembles another field operative, one who had surveilled Nora’s daughter, Bonnie, last year. A gun for hire.
He circles the neighborhood and is about to pull into a free space with a decent view of the house he’s been watching when the garage door opens. A brand-new Toyota pickup truck backs out onto the road. As it passes, giving him a honk to get out of the way, he catches a glimpse of a bearded man with a baseball cap pulled low. Brazuca waits in his MINI Cooper until the pickup turns the corner. Before he follows the truck, he sends a text to Warsame: On the move.
In separate cars, they tail the truck to the bearded man’s place of work. Watch him park his car in the employee lot.
“Surprise, surprise. Looks like you found your Triple 9 link to the Vancouver port,” says Warsame, over the phone.
Brazuca grins. Maybe this will be easier than he thought. He ignores the nagging suspicion that nothing ever is, certainly not for him. But maybe, just for once in his goddamn life, his luck has changed for good.