There’s a flash of headlights. She ducks lower.
A white Ford Escort enters the alley, parks by the graffitied plywood fence on the West Nineteenth side; Gino Hart gets out, a raincoat over his head. Hart collects a black toolbox out of the car’s back seat, locks up. He walks past the rolling garage shutter to the door in the fence, uses his key, closes the door behind him.
Okay, she’s definitely in the right place. And thinking about that toolbox, Nomi knows she needs to be inside.
She exhales, stands and walks forward with a casual confidence she doesn’t feel until she’s at the door. Her lockpicks are already in her hands. The door lock is garbage, about as secure as a bathroom stall; it takes her less than five seconds to get the lock open. She unholsters her gun and swaps it to her left hand, twists the doorknob with her right; then she’s inside, moving low.
This is just an apron of frontage before the main facade of the warehouse: Stacked pallets are to the right, then clear driveway space, then barrels and other detritus near the left brick fence. The warehouse itself is vintage and has an arched front entry—two giant riveted doors are pulled open on either side. The entry is dark as the inside of a mouth.
Nomi holds her weapon with both hands in a low-ready position and creeps quickly past the pallet stacks until she’s pressed up against the right-hand door. Rain is sheeting down, and she’s soaked; she alternates hands and wipes her palms on her combat pants, which doesn’t really help much. Then she firms her grip on the gun and slips through the entry to the inside.
No more rain, which is good. Hella gloomy in here though; Nomi takes off her beanie and uses it to wipe her eyes, lets them adjust as she stuffs the beanie in her pocket. It’s a garage, this front section. A couple partitioned offices on this side. Two cars are parked here under cover; she’s willing to bet money that one of them is Lamonte’s, probably the Audi Quattro.
There’s a small forklift, maybe broken, over against the left-side wall. This garage anteroom is backed by another wall, with a large metal door on rollers, all ready for someone to grip the iron handle and slide it sideways to enter the warehouse.
Beside that door on the left, above a stack of wooden crates, is an extremely dirty multipaneled window.
In the lull of the rain, Nomi can hear voices coming from inside the warehouse. The metal door could be slid open at any moment. But she’s exposed either way, and she needs to see what’s going on—and it’s better to move as soon as you’ve decided on a course of action. So she moves, running fast at a diagonal over the concrete floor of the garage. Reaching the crates, eyeballing the wood, pressing hard on the top of the nearest crate to test whether it’ll hold her weight. Should be okay.
Staying low, low, she scrambles up and off an old bag of cement onto the first crate, then the next. The third crate is about a foot below the bottom sill of the window—she hunkers down. The gloom of thegarage is helping her here, and the storm gusts are muffling the sounds she’s making.
Her jacket is dripping, making the knees of her combat pants soggy. Under her layers, she’s all over with sweat; her bra feels like two clammy hands cupping her boobs. Pressed up against the topmost crate, she takes off her scarf, swipes it along the top of the wooden sill, clearing dirt off the bottom inch of the window so she can peer inside.
Through cloudy glass, she sees down into a large brick room, big as a theater, high ceilinged. Partitioned storage areas or offices at both left and right, and the whole place is dotted with thick roof pylons. The center of the room is open. Furniture is sparse: a couple wooden tables, a workbench, a bunch of metal chairs. Near a right-hand pylon, a card table.
Four men caught mid-action: Eric Lamonte, in chinos and a white shirt and brown sweater, wool coat, is smoking a cigarette and leaning against a table. Ray Dinkins is yelling, gray coat shifting at his shoulders as he talks with large hand gestures, his face active beneath gel-smoothed hair. Gino Hart, in a Henley and jeans, raincoat abandoned and looking as if cold means nothing to him, is unpacking his toolbox onto the workbench.
And Claude Ameche, craggy and workmanlike, is pulling Simon Noone out of a left-side storage office, into the room’s empty center.
Nomi hears her breathing hitch.Fuck.This is bad; this is so very, very bad.
Ameche’s bandaged hand grips Simon’s right wrist, and Ameche’s pistol—a dark, snub-nosed Colt Special—is close by Simon’s temple. Simon has to crouch to accommodate the height difference as he stumbles reluctantly forward. Nomi can’t see Simon’s face, but she imagines he’s feeling pretty alive to the fact that the metal mouth of Ameche’s gun is pressing against the scar where he was last shot in the head.
Thunder booms outside, making the warehouse shake. Nomi’s heart is hammering, clogging up her throat, and her skin feels hypersensitive.
How is she going to work this? Five players on the floor, herself on the outside. Maybe Irma will get the guys from the Tenth here, but how long will that take? Will they arrive before or after Simon’s had his head blown off? And where’s Brittany? They’re going to need a distraction, but Nomi can’t do shit until she knows where the girl is. Is she even here? Maybe she’s not here.
Ameche raises his bandaged hand to show off the damage, talks to Lamonte over his shoulder, keeping his weapon trained on Simon. Muffled words, and a muffled reply from Lamonte. Nomi winces—goddammit, she can’t hear a fucking thing from here, with the thick brick walls and the buffeting rain.
But she can watch facial expressions, actions. Ameche looks displeased. He makes Simon sit in a chair, makes him take off his black peacoat and toss it away. Nomi can see splotches of red on Simon’s face. A hot bright thread of fear pulls her nerve endings tight. She needs to get Simon and Brittany out of there. But Simon is exposed.Think, think.
Ray returns to the door that Simon was dragged out of, pokes his head into the storage room, reemerges looking pained. More muffled shouting and gesticulation. Ameche seems rattled. What the hell is going on down there?
Lamonte looks up at the ceiling and takes a drag of his cigarette. Gino Hart seems unbothered as he continues to methodically unpack whatever nasty shit he’s carried in from the toolbox.
Ameche, watching Simon like you’d watch a black mamba curled on your front doormat, suddenly stands back and aims the gun at Simon’s forehead. Lamonte barks an order. Nomi finds her heart is trying to slam its way right out of her rib cage, and she has the same feeling as when she started her first year of policing: the sense that whatever insane scenario you’ve found yourself in—domestic arguments, dog fights, porno-theater altercations, car accidents—it can’t possibly be real. But it was real then, and it’s real now, and there are armed men inthe room below her who are preparing to kill in a brutal fashion to get what they want.
It’s not until the metal door nearby starts shifting sideways that she realizes she’s lost sight of Dinkins.
“... fuckingcut me—I mean, he’s fuckingcrazy,” Dinkins is grousing to himself, his voice making a chorus with the sliding door’s iron grind as it opens. He steps through into the garage; he’s got one hand wrapped around his other forearm, and Nomi can see bloodstains on his shirt, which jump out from the loud pattern.
As Dinkins turns to close the door, he spots her.
Dinkins squints. “What the fuck?”
Nomi shoots him.
She knows straightaway it’s an error of judgment, and she also knows it’s a bad shot. Even as the boom echoes, she’s cataloging the reasons why it’s bad: high angle, poor light, moving target, her hand wobbling with adrenaline. The bullet has only clipped Dinkins, but she’s got no choice now; she’s committed—the shot has given her away.
