The morning Paul Aniston was to be abducted, Jason Nakos rose at 5 a.m. to work out the finishing touches.

He shouldn't have slept a wink, but he knew he needed to be sharp, needed every mental edge he could get, so he took an Ambien precisely eight hours before his alarm would go off. Around 3:30, his bladder woke him, but after he relieved himself, he slipped back into oblivion without so much as picturing the faces of Paul or Nicky.

It was a different story when his cell started the digital chiming he wasn't allowed to snooze. The guy plotting the murder of these two kids was probably the mob man most regretful about their demise.

Which was as it should be, but so often not the case.

His sleep problem had been easily remedied with drugs, but there wasn't such an elegant solution concerning necessary sustenance. He needed to eat. He couldn't get through this day on an empty stomach. Rocks filled his belly, some sharp and some smooth, slowly churning nauseatingly and occasionally stabbing him from the inside. The coffee maker went on automatically at 4:55, and the carafe filled with steaming Folgers. He forced water down. He forced gulps of coffee between bites of Honey Nut Cheerios, a measured exact recommended serving size relentlessly endured purely for caloric necessity. It tasted like dusty straw. But slightly honey-flavored dusty straw.

A short stack of papers sat on the kitchen table next to him. Every time he paused to swallow and digest for a second before shoving down another spoonful, he flipped a page which he perused while he chewed the next bite. He would pick up Paulie at 6:30. Make sure Cassandra saw them leave together in Jason's Aston Martin Atom. He was glad he owned the most distinguishable car in the Bay Area. Jack Costas would be in the back seat in case Paul got nervous and tried to escape.

That's precisely what happened. The generous offer to sit shotgun immediately raised Paul's hackles, and even in the early morning sunshine flooding easily into his Richmond neighborhood suburban street of bungalows, he was sure he was about to be garroted. At least he'd die, in his mind, like a classic mobster. Like Jimmy Hoffa. Like Luca Brasi.

​Maybe the backseat would have been a better option.

They drove three blocks and turned the corner — the second they were out of sight of Paul's house, the kid tried the passenger seat door, with no subtlety, and found it kiddie locked. Then he panicked. The kid, it turned out, didn't think well in a crisis. Before he went for the gun in his holster, he thought lunging at the driver was a good idea, so one hand went to his piece and the other whacked Jason in the back of the head in a wide swing. It was disorienting enough that he lost his sense of direction despite all efforts to keep control of the slow-moving car. It veered left at ten miles per hour, scaring the living daylights out of pedestrians on the sidewalk. Next second, Paul went stock still, feeling every detail of the muzzle of Jack Costas's gun pressing into the skin on his neck.

"Hollowpoints in the car are messy, kid," said Jack Costas. "Remember the clean up in Pulp Fiction? Please don't make me shoot you in the face inside this car. I don't even know if Vincent Vega shot Marvin with a hollowpoint, I can only imagine the explosion of blood that's gonna come out of your head if I shoot you with one of these. It's my fault, I shouldn't have loaded these babies today. Just didn't expect you to go bucking all over the place and endangering our driver, our own persons, and pedestrians on the nearby sidewalk. Over what, Paul, what's got you panicking? Did you do something Jason and I should know about, something that might explain why you should feel so endangered by our company despite the public and brightly lit location?"

"It's not the current location I'm worried about," Paul said, and he slid back to his seat. He looked from Jack to Jason and back again, and asked, "Where are you taking me?"

Jack cocked the gun and said, "So the cards are on the table, but they're face down. Explain to me why I'm answering your questions?"

"It's just like we said," Jason interrupted any chance for Paul to answer, and Jason took his eyes off the road for a second to scowl at Jack and let him know there wasn't any need for such levels of hostility. "We're escorting you to a meeting. Just calm down. There's no need for bloodshed, but you're the one thrashing around. You hit first, and if you do it again, Jack's going to have to make a big mess of you. How about you just lean back in your seat and let determinism take you to some better fate than getting scraped out of my leather interior."

"I'd be taking you with me," said Paul, as they crawled through the traffic on the four lanes of Geary, divided by a median of California trees and shrubs with no grass. Jason always liked to think Geary would be the fastest corridor to cross the city, but it never was. "Or at least signing you into SF county jail. If I explode inside your car at quarter to seven in the morning on Geary Street, you two are going down for it."

"How about if I said come along quiet or we'll kill your wife?" said Jack.

"I don't care about my wife. You're going to have to blow my head open. Damn both of you."

"He's right, Jack," said Jason, drumming his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. As if any of that had been a signal, Jack dropped his hollowpoint-loaded Glock onto the seat next to him and, before Paul knew what hit him, had an ether soaked rag over his mouth and was holding it airtight. Paul Aniston struggled and flailed, again swinging in Jason's direction but this time swatting air, for the ten seconds it took for him to fall unconscious.

Jason kept his eyes on the road and said, "Well, good to see we've botched the plan by 6:39 a.m. You looking forward to carrying an unconscious man into an abandoned warehouse in broad morning light?"

"How exactly," said Jack, "did you hope to persuade a conscious man to enter said abandoned warehouse, day or night, Jason? I told you the plan was shit. Many aspects of the plan are shit. Of all the things likely to go wrong, this was the most likely. At least we're on schedule. At least you didn't drive the car off the road into the mansion of some upper-middle-class citizen. At least we're not both coated in several liters of blood, it'd be a nightmare to restore this machina, but she's such a beaut, someone would have to do it. And maybe we'd still have friends left to let us know how the restoration comes along while we're in the clinker, as Paul pointed out. Jeez, the victim himself sees the flaws in your plan. How the hell did you get this procedure green-lighted?"

There was no silence for the rest of the car ride toward the Dog Patch, while Jack picked apart every aspect of Jason's carefully tailored plan and railed that no one had listened to him.

Finally, as Jason drove over the Fourth Street bridge on their urban voyage's final leg, he lost his temper.

"No one listens to you because you never stop talking. Try a little restraint and some brevity next time. You want lessons I'll coach you. Persuasion 101. But there's a reason I was able to shoot down every last one of your objections, Jack, other than the fact that I'm right. It's because they all want me to be right. They like me. No one likes you. Because you never shut up."

It was the last thing Jason would have expected, but Jack Costas fell silent for an entire 120 seconds after that. Only when the Atom​ turned onto 3rd street did he mutter, "Hugo likes me." It was brief but still petulant. Jason would keep that in mind for lesson two.

Third Street traffic was light at this time of day, not the hustle and bustle a man committing a crime would want to conceal, say, carrying a dead knocked-out coworker out of his easily distinguishable car and into a sketchy ex-factory.

It wasn't quiet enough to preclude the presence of any witnesses. Still, there was an open spaciousness to the wide lanes and empty lots between the few cruising cars and the bay. It was possible they could wait for a break in the few joggers and vehicles to carry Paul past the Dendron Systems building far enough for any prying eyes to not be sure what they saw. The object of the game was to attract the attention of Detective Malyssa Alafogiannis​, and not the police, but surely they had hours, even days before Fog would catch their carefully laid scent and follow them here, giving them lots of time to brainstorm how to move Paul.

The tricky part was doing so without botching the next phase of the plan: abducting Nick. The dirty work had to be done by the two of them and no one else. It was important that no one below Jack's rank and no one outside the little inner circle required for plotting this play know what was happening. They would read about it in the newspapers, but none of Sigler's mafia would know how or why in the hell Nick Minardos or Paul Aniston were knocked off. The smart ones could put two and two together.

Turning the Atom down Twentieth, Jason didn't see much action. A lot of this turf near the bay was abandoned. Fences warned to keep out, claiming electrocution, almost all false admonitions. Redbrick factory buildings told the story of another time, a time no one wanted any more, which was why they sat empty and were slowly reclaimed, one after the other, by carefully organized criminals in need of space for one job or the other.

The police headquarters down the street only managed to dissuade the disorganized.

Jason turned into Dendron Systems' driveway and continued past the building where he planned to hold Paul for up to a couple of days. He took a tour of the parking lot with an eye out for any workers out for a stroll, any moving cars, and went around the "block," which was all private property, all appropriated by Hugo Zane for mornings such as this one.

"You see anyone?" Jason asked Jack.

"No," said Jack, but he hadn't been locking. He'd been playing with his Glock's safety like the dumb child he was, spending the quiet part of the trip staring at Paul and waiting for him to move so much as a cheek muscle, at which point Jason sincerely hoped he wouldn't shoot Paul in the cheek.

​"This may sound crazy, but I'm thinking of moving him in plain sight of Twentieth. If we do it down behind the build and someone comes out and sees us from ten, twenty feet away, they'll know exactly what they're looking at. Traffic is sparse, no one's passing by. Let's just do it fast and conspicuous."

He pulled the car around and brought it back out into the street, pulling up right in front of the warehouse's main door.

The two men got out of the car. Jack went around to the passenger seat side and gripped the door handle before Jason said, "Wait," with his hand out and gave Jack a panicked look that said he was stupid. "Let me unlock the warehouse first," he said.

One key on a ring came out of his pocket, and he skipped up the steps to place it in the heavy iron lock of a gate of iron bars, swinging the door open ominously like the door to a cell. Impatient Jack didn't wait for him to get back before getting Paul out of the passenger seat, slinging the limp young man over his shoulder. He climbed the steps as if enjoying a few seconds of exercise, displaying perfect form and pushing from his glutes.

Jason had anticipated helping him carry the body, but Jack's method was quick enough. He had no problem letting Jack do the heavy lifting by himself.

Without looking back, Jason entered the building ahead of Jack and Paul, scanning and listening, checking for lights on or shadows in the other rooms beyond glass windows off this main hallway or up the steel staircase ahead or on the landing above.

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