“Is he gone?” I whispered, ignoring his teasing. And the effect his grin had on my stomach.
Wyatt flicked his gaze toward the passenger-side window. “Nope. He slowed down. I think he likes my car.”
I groaned. “I was afraid of that.”
My left leg threatened to cramp as I waited for Hoffman to peer in the window and catch me hiding in the footwell. That would have been so on-brand for my life at the moment.
Instead, something actually went right for a change.
“He’s gone,” Wyatt said.
I wriggled my way back onto the passenger seat and twisted around until I spotted Hoffman disappearing around the corner.
“Let’s go,” I said.
I had the presence of mind to grab the box of Milk Duds and shove it in my hoodie pocket before scrambling out of the car.
Wyatt and I jogged to the end of the street and peered around the brick building on the corner. Hoffman was still in sight. We followed him at a brisk walk, me with the hood of my sweatshirt pulled up. An unnecessary precaution, as it turned out, because Hoffman never looked back.
We followed him to the nearest subway station and hung backwhile he waited on the platform. I noticed that he had wireless earbuds in his ears, probably playing music. Hopefully that made him less likely to realize we were tailing him.
“How many bottles of booze do you think he could have in that bag?” I asked.
“One or two.”
The train pulled into the station, and Wyatt and I hurried through the crowd of bodies to board the same car as Hoffman, but through a different door. I had a panicky moment when he turned my way, but I managed to put my back to him. Wyatt assured me seconds later that Hoffman remained oblivious to our presence.
We nearly lost him when he changed trains a while later, but we managed to get him back in our sights. Wyatt and I didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves, so we mostly stayed quiet. Boredom set in quickly, and the trip seemed to stretch on forever, but Hoffman finally left the train in the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn and hoofed it toward the waterfront.
“Any idea why he’d be in this area?” Wyatt asked as we followed at a safe distance behind Hoffman’s loping form.
“Not a clue.”
As we drew closer to the waterfront, the area changed from a mix of residential and commercial to mainly industrial, with warehouses on both sides of the street. Aside from parked cars and some slightly recessed doorways, we didn’t have much cover. Fortunately, Hoffman kept up his trend of not looking back.
We passed a warehouse-turned-gym, which triggered flashbacks to my time at Ultimate Beast. I suppressed a shudder and kept walking, ready to dart behind a parked car at any moment if our target glanced back.
When Hoffman stopped, my heart took a leap, and I crouched down behind a dark sedan. Wyatt stepped into a recessed doorway. I peeked around the car to see Hoffman open the door to a brick warehouse and disappear inside.
I straightened up, and Wyatt and I approached the building. I swept the hood of my sweatshirt off my head on the way.
“What the heck is he doing here?” I wondered.
I scrutinized the building. It had a brick exterior, with graffiti-splattered, corrugated metal doors over the loading bays and bars over the second-story windows. The only windows. So much for peeking inside to see what Hoffman was up to. Nothing on the outside of the building gave any clue as to what might be going on inside.
“Is there an alley?” I asked, wondering if there might be lower windows around back.
Wyatt pulled out his phone and typed the building’s address into a map app.
“No alley,” he said as he zoomed in on a satellite map. “And all the entrances are out here in the front.”
“Great.” I crossed my arms and sized up the distance from the ground to the high windows.
Was I ready to channel Spider-Man?
Chapter
Forty-Seven
