Big Bad Wolf (Third Shift #1) - Suleikha Snyder Page 0,1

case, that didn’t add up quite right. Like Peluso’s heavily redacted military files. Like how he had only gotten caught because, of all things, he’d called in a tip after his hit. A two-minute, forty-second phone call telling the cops about a shipping container full of “goods” scheduled to arrive later in the week. While one set of law-enforcement officials had tried to trace the burner-phone call and cross-referenced the security cameras and drone footage from nearby, another had intercepted the drop. The shipping container in question hadn’t been full of drugs or bootlegs or weapons. It had been full of people—mostly human women—slated for sex trafficking.

Joe Peluso had cut down six criminals without blinking…but spared one thought to save dozens of lives. A man who’d clearly done his homework about the security drones that circled the city, he’d figured out their patterns. Even though they were supposedly on a randomizer and changed circuits every day, he had chucked all of that—risked being recorded—to make a call. What she didn’t know, and didn’t remotely understand, was why. And she hoped that the why would help them win their day in court, despite all the odds that were stacked against them. Not the least of which was the fact that this guy had taken out a bunch of Russian nationals, and all of the current president’s New York-based cronies were calling for Peluso’s head. So that the Russian government didn’t retaliate. So they didn’t lose all their cushy connections. Add in the supernatural factor—which called into question rights and personhood and whether he was even entitled to a new trial—and it was a mess.

There was buzz around the firm that the rest of the senior partners had balked at Nate taking this case, fearing public backlash. “Sanctuary fucking City,” he’d reportedly said in response. “Last I checked, mobsters, pimps, and white supremacists were still the bad guys, and all Americans are still entitled to due process. No matter what’s going on in Washington with birthright citizenship and humanity verification legislation, Joseph Peluso is still a citizen.” And that was that. As long as the mayor and the governor kept fighting the dark curtain that had dropped across the United States over the past few years, the legal firm of Dickenson, Gould, and Smythe would keep holding the line.

How Nate managed the other partners so efficiently was a secret well above Neha’s pay grade. And, frankly, she didn’t want to know. The enigma sitting across from them was more than enough to deal with. She just had to trust that both Nate and Dustin knew their shit. As for herself…? She’d come into law after doing a doctorate in behavioral psych. It was her job to know Joe Peluso’s shit.

“Get him talking, Neha. Find out what his public defender missed. We don’t want to repeat those mistakes.”

Too bad the man across the table didn’t seem particularly inclined to talk at the moment. His posture was closed-off, sullen. He answered questions in monosyllables. It was no wonder that first trial had been an epic disaster. Peluso screaming he did it. Gavels banging. Everybody and their mother shitting their legal briefs. The presidential cronies and right-of-center government officials calling for oversight on sanctuary-city legal procedure. That made the governors and mayors who were part of the nationwide Sanctuary Alliance push back and cite the Sanctuary Autonomy Act of 2019. All of it had kept Peluso on ice in prison for months without even a question of retrial. Nobody at DGS wanted a repeat of that three-ring circus.

And on a more local level, nobody really wanted to mess with Aleksei Vasiliev, the Russian mafia vor whose underlings Peluso had eliminated so ruthlessly. Vasiliev owned a string of clubs and bars in the old-school Russian enclaves across Brooklyn and Queens, but it was fairly common knowledge that (a) they were a cover for drugs and sex trafficking and (b) he was just one cog in a larger operation run by a criminal network that both local authorities and Interpol had been watching for years. Plus (c) his potential supernatural affiliation—there was no confirmation in the legal community, but rumors had him as everything from werewolf to sorcerer. Oh, and there were also (d) his ties to several Aryan militia groups. The overlap between white supremacy and organized crime was such that the Venn diagram was practically one circle.

Aleksei Vasiliev was a nightmare. It was just Neha’s luck that Joe Peluso had messed with him—and then some—by