After Death(65)

Specialty Products is as big as Whole Fruit, but it has a second floor. No windows here on the ground level. From outside, Michael saw windows upstairs. The big roll-up is missing at the back, but the gable wall at the front has no large opening. He is convinced Aleem isn’t sheltering here; he would have run farther from where he saw all his homeboys meet their maker. Yet Michael proceeds with caution, the AR-15 in his right hand, the buttstock pressed between his arm and his side. The flashlight in his left hand emits a blade-thin beam between his masking fingers, the light momentarily fanning away the darkness to reveal the inflow of the storm in which wallows a miscellany of colorless debris, small shapes not readily named.

To the right is a large shaft, open at one end. The gate and cab are missing, but dangling hoist cables and roller-guide shoes and a pile of counterweights tumbled on the floor confirm a freight elevator once occupied this space. The steel rungs of an emergency ladder are embedded in the right-hand wall, though there has to be another and easier access to the upper floor.

He turns away from the shaft and wades through the ankle-deep lakelet, sliding his feet along the concrete floor to minimize the water noise. When a hampering length coils around his left foot, he thinks snake, but it’s only a cable from which he is able to free himself quickly. In the right front corner of the building, beyond a doorless opening, an enclosed staircase with wide treads offers him the second floor. Michael switches off the light and stands blinded, listening for anything other than his breathing and his thudding heart and the ceaseless rustling of the rain. He climbs slowly in the vertical dark, and although he should be heavy with exhaustion and dread, he feels all but weightless, like black smoke rising in a soot-lined flue, as if the new life he’s had for five days, since waking from death or something like it, is evaporating from him.





Moving from tree to tree, Orlando Fiske passes along the flank of a building on his left, and then he comes to an open area around which other structures loom. Two flashlights lay bright cones across the ground. All about lie shapeless forms that might be mistaken for mounds of black-plastic trash bags if one beam didn’t terminate in a face and conjure from the unblinking stare twin amber radiances with red coronas, like the animal eyeshine of a coyote eternally caught in headlight beams as it traverses a highway. The other cone reveals a beseeching hand and a gold watch encircling its wrist.

Orlando keeps moving along the screen of trees, away from the killing ground and toward a building bearing the word OFFICES above its front door. He has the SIG P245 in a two-handed grip, alert for any moving shape in the shapeless night, wondering who has taken down those four homeys and why. Nina is said to have a trey eight; but the reports he heard were too loud and sharp and rapid-fire to be from a handgun. No one in Aleem’s circle of ace kools would turn on him or on each other. Orlando hears rumors about Antoine scheming for a coup, but that fool doesn’t know they came two counties south in pursuit of Nina and the kid. When he’s past Offices, he leaves the trees, hurries across open ground, and presses against the back wall of that building.

Studying the darkness, he waits for intuition to guide him, but his usually reliable intuition has lost its voice. Although he tries to puzzle together what he’s heard and seen into a coherent picture, he can make no sense of the situation. This is the worst—knowing he needs to kill someone but having no idea whom.

Then Orlando moves just because it’s his nature to feel safer in motion, always to choose action over inaction. When he arrives at the missing roll-up door at the back of the third building, he glimpses a dim radiance in that otherwise unilluminated, cavernous space. The pale emanation sweeps left to right, then right to left. The beam is so constrained as to produce no backwash, and it isn’t possible to make out a figure, let alone to determine if he’s friend or foe. The light is near the far end of the building, but Orlando can’t deduce if the carrier has proceeded from this west entrance or has just stepped inside from the east end. The beam turns directly to the right, and holds still for a moment, fixed on something. When it switches off, Orlando drops to one knee, his left side against the frame of the big doorway, presenting as minimal a profile as possible while maintaining a shooting position, in case the light winks on again and the man with it makes his way in this direction.





Michael comes off the top of the stairs and steps to one side.

Whatever chamber he’s in, the air moves in cool currents and carries the scent of rain, evidently entering by certain broken windows and exiting by others. Even a night without moon and stars is less dark than a lightless enclosed space; soon he begins to discern the vague rectangles by which the night breathes through the room. As he moves toward the front of the building, the window glass that litters the floor crackles underfoot.

A rustling startles him, but before he can click on his light, a soft who-who-whooo defines the noise as the fluttered wings of a resident owl annoyed to have an uninvited visitor and adjusting to its roost. This nocturnal raptor will wait until the rain stops to venture into the night in search of prey, but if it becomes too disturbed, by noise or light, it might soar out a window with a cry of protest. If it’s a great horned owl with a four-foot wingspan, its sudden flight will be something of a spectacle; Aleem and the one other remaining gangbanger will likely suspect that the location of the mystery gunman has been revealed.

Michael moves cautiously forward and stops a foot from a window that looks down on the common area and at three structures arrayed east of it. He’s directly opposite a single-story building that might be a garage. To the left of that is Special Accounts. In the open ground between Special Accounts and Whole Fruit, four dead men sprawl around the crossed flashlight beams, like black-robed satanic priests prostrating themselves in expectation of a demonic presence soon to appear at the intersection of lights, in answer to their invocation.