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He started moving toward the door, pistol up and ready.

He came to the doorframe of 909—the side where the door had its hinges—and stopped just shy of it.

He leaned forward, in the direction of the knob, and tried to get a look through the crack.

All he could see, though, was some furniture and a window with its curtain wide open.

He listened and heard a woman weeping, then the strange man asking, “Which pocket is it in?”

Pocket? Koch thought.

Then he heard another man’s voice grunt something. It was mostly unintelligible, but clearly it was Bayer’s—and he sounded under duress.

I have no idea how many people are in there…

He pushed on the door gently. It moved, opening another two inches.

He waited to see if there was any reaction to that from the inside.

There wasn’t, and so he took another look through the now-larger crack between the door and its frame.

What he saw horrified him.

It was Bayer’s hooker, standing naked—and brutally bruised from head to toe.

She held Bayer’s coat.

What the hell did Kurt do to her? And why?

And is that her pimp here to settle the score?

Bayer said he had a problem…said that we had a problem.

Stupid son of a whore!

I told him something like this could happen.

Koch took a deep breath, stayed low, and started pushing open the door very slowly.

[ THREE ]

Christopher “the Enforcer” Salerno took great pride in his street name, and in the fact that he had earned it by being good at what he did—“debt collection,” he called it.

The thirty-one-year-old had been settling scores for almost ten years, not counting his teenage years, when he had dropped out of high school in Hoboken and hustled on the streets for whoever would hire him to do whatever.

Having worked nearly a decade exclusively for Donnie “the Ape” Paselli, he considered himself not only a professional—but the professional. He trained to keep his skills sharp. He worked out daily to stay in top shape. And he never took anything for granted, particularly in the middle of a collection.

Right now, his adrenaline was rushing. He knew that he had to keep it under control while at the same time using it to get the job done quickly and efficiently.

So far, everything had gone pretty much as planned.

After Mary had not paid Paselli his cut and Salerno had had to have her beaten—during which she had babbled some nonsense that her trick, “Kurt,” claimed to be a German agent responsible for all the bombings that were in the news—they had tailed the stupid hooker right back to the hotel, right back to her stupid trick.

Then Paselli had waited down the hall to get an idea of what they were up against to get his money. Then he had sent Salerno to complete the transaction.

Salerno had his Colt Model 1908 .25 caliber semiautomatic pistol pointed at Bayer’s forehead. It was a small, cold-blue-steel vest-pocket model barely as big as his left hand that held it—but it got the job done. He had his right hand firmly squeezing Bayer’s throat.

A head taller and some thirty pounds heavier, Salerno had no trouble keeping control of the guy.