“Anytime!”
Dinkins’s cab drives off. Nomi makes a call.
She jogs over to the next cab in the rank, pushing aside a young guy with George Michael hair, who calls out, “Fucking bitch!”—Nomi takes it as a compliment. Her cab driver is a twentysomething Black guy with a high forehead, and when she tells him to follow the other cab, he looks over with his eyebrows raised almost into his hairline.
“Really? Like something out of a movie?”
“Really. Stay close, but not too close.”
He’s not too bad at tailing, actually. They follow Dinkins’s circuitous route, make it all the way to West Seventeenth and Tenth Avenue before Dinkins’s cab makes a turn into a street that Nomi thinks might be a dead end, so she tells her guy to turn right onto Tenth near a closed parking lot and let her out farther down the block.
“Okay, here—drop me here.” Nomi points, and he pulls up near a street sign for West Nineteenth.
“You sure?” The cab driver peers through the window at the shadowed corners and listing street poles. Wind blows trash along the line of a wall on the other side of the street. “This place looks sketchy as hell.”
“Just drop me. It’ll be fine.”
“Okay.” He clearly thinks this is dubious. “I hope I don’t hear about no white lady getting murdered here on the news tomorrow.”
But he takes her money just the same, drives away. Nomi zips her jacket against the cold, checks around the corner: The red glow of the taillights from Dinkins’s cab recedes up ahead. She turns and quicksteps down the street, trying to stick to patches of dark.
The cab driver was right; the whole area is sketchy as hell and largely deserted. She can smell brine and rust; they’re near the Chelsea Piers and the West Side Highway, and wind is blowing in off the bay. There’s an Anywheels car and van repair place, closed for the night. Rats scurry along the side of a curling chain-link fence; most of the industrial buildings are crumbling, with chipped bricks and flaking paint. If this is the area that Galetti wants to buy up and refurbish, it might actually be an improvement? All she knows is that she’s out here in the dark in the middle of nowhere with no weapon. Not ideal.
But that’s not her problem right now: Dinkins’s cab has slowed to a crawl and stopped near a decommissioned mariners’ hotel. Hanging back, she watches as Dinkins somehow manages to totter his way out of the cab, which takes off like it’s glad to get out. Nomi creeps to match Dinkins as he makes his way along a brick wall with a series of garage doors. Then he turns left into an alley, and she nearly loses him.
Shit shit shit.Nomi jogs closer, trying not to break an ankle on the cracked, weedy sidewalk, or accidentally kick a brick and alert Dinkins to her presence. Okay, she’s got him again. He’s nearly at West Nineteenth and he’s coming up on an old two-story warehouse behind a tall plywood fence smeared with graffiti. Beside a rolling garage shutter, there’s a door in the fence; Dinkins uses a key, staggers through, locks up behind himself.
Nomi grimaces: It’s a place she probably can’t access without blowing that she’s here. She does a little recon, but the plywood turns into brick fence farther on the left, and a horribly exposed chain-link arrangement on the right. She’s not climbing that. Is that it? Looks like that’s it.
Unless she’s prepared to wait.
Nomi finds a dark place with an overhang, between a broken-down car with melted tires and a burned-out streetlamp. It’s not the greatest spot, and now the wind is sweeping a fine mist into the street, but it’ll have to do. She pulls her beanie down low, hunkers into her jacket and scarf, settles in.
The first half hour, she catalogs all the features of the street and the building; the second half hour is when the wind picks up and the cold starts to creep into her legs. It’s a lot easier doing surveillance when you’re sitting in an unmarked with a hot coffee, she’s willing to admit. But this cold is something she signed up for, and like she told Simon once, she has a high pain threshold.
A storm’s coming in, wind gusting like it’s being exhaled by a giant; at least the buildings around her provide some protection. What if this warehouse is the place where they’re holding Brittany? Nomi chews a nail, thinking about it. She feels the pull of the idea like a strong magnet. The girl could be in there, awaiting rescue ... But plunging in without proper reconnaissance would be incredibly stupid. Nomi has to remind herself of this over and over.
A tomcat prowls by the plywood fence she’s watching, and Nomi gets a hankering for a cigarette; but even if she had one, she wouldn’t be able to smoke it without the red ember giving her away. She’s also itchingly aware of the Valium she just bought, sitting inside the key pocket of her jeans, and has to turn her mind toward something else. Something not Simon Noone and all his accompanying mess.
By the end of the second hour, just as she’s almost solidified into a block of ice and is ready to call it, there’s a rattle from the garage shutter. Nomi scooches deeper into her hiding place.
The shutter rolls up with a complaining clatter, and a car drifts out. When the headlights flick on, Nomi has to duck: She’s way more exposed here than she thought. But nobody shoots at her, or calls out, and the car doesn’t stop, just revs a little and slides up the street.
Nomi registers the people inside when the driver lights his smoke: Dinkins and Gino Hart are illuminated by the flame of Hart’s Bic. Then the car picks up speed and guns away.
It’s nearly 2:20 a.m. by her watch; another growl of incoming thunder sounds in the distance. Nomi makes her way out of the dark streets toward a more populated area, and hopefully a cab. Her fingers feel ready to snap off, her nose is numb, her toes have ceased to exist, and her knees are creaking, but all she can think is,Now I got you, Lamonte, you sick son of a bitch, and that pilot flame keeps her warm all the way home.
Chapter Twenty-Three
October 1987, Saturday
It’s 2:45 a.m., and there’s a storm building in the night air outside. Simon puts on dark-brown trousers, tugs a black Henley over his head, adds a pilled burgundy wool vest—even if it doesn’t rain, it’s getting much colder in the mornings—then sits down on his bed and shifts his cigarette to the corner of his mouth to pull on his socks and boots.
He’s feeling better. He’s groggy from lack of sleep, and he probably needs a shave, but overall, he’s somewhat improved. Working through tiredness is doable; the first week of work at Gennaro’s, he was basically a zombie for every shift. What matters is that his state of mind has leveled out, and somehow that seems to count for way more.
Simon’s just swigging the rest of his espresso when there’s a quiet knock on his door, which is not something that typically happens at this time of day. It’s Nomi: She’s shivering, but she looks happy.
He keeps his voice low in deference to other residents. “It’s quarter to three in the morning.”
