But whether he’s a danger—to herself, or to other people in the community—she honestly doesn’t know. She’s not sure where she stands on it all.
Still turning the problem over, she reaches the third-floor landing and realizes that the door to Noone’s apartment is wide open.
Nomi’s skin prickles instantly. Slipping into cop mode, she moves on swift feet to flatten herself at the wall by the side of the doorway.Pushes the door fully open with one hand so she can see inside. Nobody’s home. Nobody’s hiding behind the door. She can see a spill of blue fabric—Simon’s cashmere scarf—on the floor. Outside the apartment’s windows, rain spatters against the metal fire escape.
“Simon?” she calls into the apartment while maintaining position by the door. “Noone, you here?”
No answer. When she steps inside, she sees Simon’s keys on the linoleum, and also blood spatter.Shit.She looks in the kitchen and bathroom, then the fire escape. No dice. The blood on the floor isn’t copious, and the drops haven’t dried yet; she’s probably only missed this by an hour or so. If she’d been here on time, it wouldn’t have happened.
Dread rises up, black dye seeping through the fabric of her brain. This is bad. If Ameche has dragged Simon away to exact a little payback for the incident at Big Mouth, Simon may be in serious trouble.
Where could they have taken him? She chews at a nail. The most obvious location is the warehouse she scoped out last night, where she thinks Lamonte has stashed Brittany. But that could be all wrong—there could be another place on the list of Galetti’s properties where they take their abductees and potential torture victims ...
Goddammit.It’s impossible to be sure, but all she can do is start with the likeliest option and work from there. Looks like she’s hitting the warehouse on her own after all. She’s not in love with the idea—storming the barricades solo seems ill-advised. But what choice does she have?
Nomi grabs Noone’s keys, exits the room and pulls the door closed, jogs back down to her own apartment. Inside, she strides to her office. Another burst of lightning above the tenement. It’s not until the office blind blows back, exposing the puddle of rainwater on the floor, that she remembers the glass is still gone from the window.Dammit.No time for this. She hurries to the bathroom, grabs a towel, returns and stuffs it carefully into the hole—best she can do for now. Then she grabs the phone and calls a number she hasn’t rung in person for nearly two years.
The call picks up as she’s scrounging for more ammunition in her drawer.
“Hey, Dez Rosado speaking.” A male voice, warm and casual.
Nomi tucks the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she unholsters her weapon and opens the chamber. “Dezi, good to hear your voice. It’s Nomi Pace.”
“Nomi? Oh man, it’s been way too long! So good to hear you. What you doing now?”
“Lots of stuff, but I can’t get into it this minute.” Nomi tips out and reloads the .35 Magnum shells, confirming that she won’t have a problem with misfires. “Can you do me a solid and put Irma on? I’m kinda racin’ here, Dez.”
“Ah shit, okay, one sec.” But Dezi understands emergencies, both because his wife is a cop and because he himself is a firefighter. Nomi hears him calling, “Irma! Irma—phone!” in a muffled way, like he’s got the receiver against his shirt.
Irma takes about ten seconds to arrive on the line. “Nomes, is that you? What the hell you doing, calling me at home? I thought we said—”
“Irma, listen. I’m about to do something really stupid, and I wanted to tell someone I trust about it.” Nomi finishes the reload, clicks the chamber back into position, reholsters the gun under her armpit. Explain to Irma about Simon Noone? Now may not be the time. “Lamonte has a warehouse off West Nineteenth—I think he’s stashed my client’s daughter there, and I’m gonna go get her back.”
“Nomi—”
“The warehouse should be on the list of properties that Galetti is trying to have rezoned.” Nomi’s holding the receiver in her hand again as she opens another drawer and scratches for her can of Mace. “Ask Calvin Gaffney to check. And listen, Galetti’s leverage over Gloria Axedale is her son, David Jeremy Axedale. Lamonte’s keeping the kid thoroughly doped and holed up in one of those cheap apartments on the West Street side of Perry Street, where my client is supposed to be keeping tabs on him.”
“Jesus, Nomes—did you tell Balter about all this?”
“I tried,” Nomi admits, “but I only found out about the warehouse last night, and either way, nothing I say carries weight. You probably have more pull with Balter than me. So if you want to alert the cavalry, that would be fantastic, but I’m running out of time here—I gotta go. Wish me luck.”
“Wait! Hold on a second!” Irma sounds worried. “Nomi, don’t you run off on this alone—”
“Sorry, hon—you’re breaking up in this storm!” Nomi hangs up, grabs a knuckle-duster along with the Mace, bundles everything into her pockets and herself back out the door.
Out on the street, rain is flying into her face. She squints and endures as she jogs to Greenwich—but she only needs to do one quick scan to decide there’s no point trying to flag a cab here, so she jogs onward to Hudson. It takes more than five minutes of frantic waving to get a Checker that’ll stop for her. Finally, she gets lucky.
She gives the driver directions for West Nineteenth.
Chapter Twenty-Five
October 1987, Saturday
So here he is, in this tiny storage room with the gray metal shelving and brown walls and thirty-gallon-drum Tic Tacs, and the sound of Lamonte’s men in the area beyond the door. He’s patting Brittany on the shoulder—this girl whose missing baby teeth are in a small box in Nomi’s refrigerator—and telling the most appalling lies about how there’s no need to worry, that he has a plan, when the reality is that there’s no plan, and he and Brittany are both most probably going to die in painful, creatively horrible ways thought up by losers like Gino Hart and Claude Ameche, and there’s very little they can do about it ...
I am a fraud. I am a fraud and a serial murderer, and I lie to children.Simon rubs at his temple like he can rub guilt away, rub his headache away, make his vision focus and stop wobbling. Around them, the storm beats against the brick of the warehouse. Brittany is looking up at him, her big eyes wide, short braids trembling, her small hands clutched in the fabric of his coat.
“Have you got a gun?” Brittany whispers.
