The door groaned open easily. I blinked into the dim warehouse. It smelled like rust and wet fur. The hot, stale air rolled that stink across my sweaty skin in slow, nauseating waves.
Several broken second-story windows circling the width of the warehouse allowed enough light inside to see about three feet in front of me. The lower-story windows were smudged with black paint. That didn’t make me feel any better about being here. Neither did allowing the door behind me to close, sealing me in.
Darkness pressed into my eyeballs. I toed the ground carefully with my arms outstretched in case I bumped into something or the concrete floor had buckled into a gaping hole. Hey, stranger things have happened. I wasn’t about to kill myself by falling down some rabbit hole designed to catch anyone who dared outwit Hill.
My ears burned for a hint of sound other than the wind creaking across the ceiling, dirt crunching under my boots, my heart drilling a heavy metal beat into my rib cage. Each footstep echoed loudly between the metal walls.Step-step. Step-step.
Or was someone following me?
I stopped. Something shuffled to my left, deeper into the warehouse that was buried under shadows. Blood roared between my ears. When I didn’t hear anything else, I kept moving along the wall, hoping I would find a light and I would see them before they saw me. Them or it or whatever.
On the other side of a shelf stacked with long steel beams, I heard voices. Two men, neither of their voices as slithery as Hill’s.
“...of July,” one of the men was saying. “Great tits. Rockin’ ass.”
“Yeah?” the other man urged.
Something told me they weren’t talking about me, so they must’ve not known I was here. Not yet. So did I spring out of the dark at them and announce my presence that way or whistle a song so they would know I was here? Hill was expecting me, but were they?
“But her feet, man...” the first guy started.
“What about them?” the other guy asked.
At the end of the steel beam shelf, a faint light glowed from around a corner of the building about fifteen feet away. I inched forward, pulling the boxy camera from my pocket, and crouched low.
“Worse than mine. Some people should just not be allowed to go shoeless. We’re talking mangy toenails, cracked skin. It was unbelievable.”
This camera was meant for Major’s head. The cat hated the sound of Velcro, so it fastened with reusable, much more silent, tape. Quietly, I wound the sticky ends around one of the lower columns on the steel shelf so the lens faced the direction of the two men.
To my left, just inches away, two shiny black eyes met mine. I reared back. The camera slipped from my grasp before I’d securely attached it. The shit storm called my life braked into slow-mo. The steel beams on the shelf above my head shifted. Too much. The top one slanted toward the concrete floor. My brain sent the message to flash my arm out and catch it and the camera, but it seemed to take forever for it to receive that message.
My stomach dropped to my knees. Maybe that was where all my sense had gathered. But I caught the beam one-handed before it hit the floor. On my other hand, the sticky end on the camera dangled from the end of a finger.
“She’d never heard of a pedi?”
My whole body shuddered with the effort of holding the heavy beam off the floor and not shouting at the top of my lungs for these men to grow some fucking balls.
The gray furry rat with a worm-like tail and black eyes glared down its long nose, then four sets of claws scratched over metal while it scurried away. Fucking rat.
“I suggested one to her. You know the pedi girl who took good care of me before my sixth wedding? And she totally went ballistic. Said I was too picky.”
“Noooo.”
I grimaced at the weight and slowly lowered one end to the ground. But I couldn’t see the other end of it. Even if I did put this end down, it could still have a loud smashup meeting with the ground. If the conversation that was so many degrees of fascinating didn’t end soon, I was going to drop it anyway. Then the camera would fall. Before I could scramble after it, my head would go boom.
With one last bit of stored-up energy or desperation or whatever it was, I stretched my muscles to their brink and finally repositioned and secured the camera. Done. Maybe.
“The thing is, I’m not picky. I just know what I like, and skanky feet ain’t what I like.”
“Yeah, I feel you. It’s like that skinny waitress I poked a while back.”
I slowly lowered my arm while pins and needles zapped to the ends of my fingers. With both hands, I lowered the beam to the ground silently, the muscles in my back straining. I held my breath, waiting for something else to go wrong. For now, crisis averted. I switched on the camera and peered through the lens.
Seated at a long table under a bright light sat two men sorting through stacks and stacks of money. Two guns lay on top, hopefully forgotten. No wonder Hill had me doing all his dirty work. These two sat around gossiping like perverted old ladies the whole time.
“Alex?” a new male voice shouted from the same direction I’d already come.
I searched the darkness behind me. The two men instantly quieted. Footsteps shuffled off to their left, away from the voice. Who else had Hill summoned here?
