Chapter 631 | Embarrassed For Everyone Involved

Chapter 631: 631 | Embarrassed For Everyone Involved

At 9:47 PM I was still at my desk, hunched over the cursed laptop with its frozen apple, typing the two hundred and twelfth incident report of my short and stupid career.

The radiator banged against the wall every few minutes, and Grandma Lin’s last pot of broth sent five-spice up through the floorboards until my stomach started filing complaints of its own.

The report was about Boris, the orange cat who had bitten Dralun four times on Saturday and me twice. I had written a hundred and ninety words about Boris already, and I was trying to find ten more that did not include the phrase "small domestic terrorist."

Dralun had left forty minutes earlier for a gas smell on Ninth Street. He took his vest and left his mug, which told me he expected to be back before the coffee went cold, an outcome that no coffee in this building had ever achieved.

Ophelia had gone upstairs to her grandmother’s apartment around nine, announcing that the soap opera on channel forty-two had more emotional range than my writing and better lighting than my face.

That left me alone with the scanner, which sat on the filing cabinet and hissed static at me like an old man with opinions.

Then it stopped hissing and started talking.

"Dispatch to Eastside units, alarm activation at Eastside Pawn, eight-twelve Rourke Street. Front window reported broken by a caller. No licensed units currently available."

I looked at the scanner, and the scanner looked back at me with its one red light.

Eastside Pawn on Rourke was the second shop owned by Leonard Kask, the same charming businessman who owned Delancey Gold and Loan.

I knew this because his name appeared eleven times in Dralun’s green ledger, usually next to words like "refused buyback" and "lied to her face." Grandma Lin had drawn a little knife next to it in red pen, and nobody in the office had ever asked her to explain the knife.

I grabbed my phone and called Dralun. He picked up on the second ring, and behind him I could hear a woman yelling in Tagalog and something hissing far louder than the scanner.

"I heard the call, and I’m stuck evacuating a building. Do not move from that chair."

"I’m just going to look at it. I won’t touch anything."

"Belmont, you are a provisional student, and I am telling you to sit down."

"I’m a provisional student who can run four blocks in about forty seconds. I’ll stand on the sidewalk and point at things for you."

He growled something that made the phone vibrate in my hand, and then the line went dead because somebody behind him screamed about a stove.

I sat there for exactly two seconds and gave the responsible version of myself a fair hearing. He made very compelling points about vigilantism charges, Director Park’s observation flag, Petra’s family name on my federal paperwork, and the thirty-six pages Percy had written to keep my file breathing.

Then the other version of me pointed out that a second robbery in one week at a Kask shop had exactly one likely suspect, and that suspect owed me a conversation about using me as a delivery boy.

I took the stairs three at a time and slid out past the dark kitchen. Grandma Lin’s cleaver hung on its hook above the cutting board, and I swear it watched me leave.

The Eastside at ten at night belonged to the people who had nowhere better to be. Two guys smoked outside the barbershop under a dead streetlight, and one of them called out something in Spanish about my jacket that I was too busy running to answer. A cat yelled at me from a dumpster on Ninth, and I hoped very much that it was not related to Boris.

I hit Rourke Street at a speed that would have made Steele write a note on her tablet. Eastside Pawn sat between a closed nail salon and a church with a hand-painted sign, and its front window lay in pieces across the sidewalk.

The alarm screamed at a pitch designed to make dogs reconsider their lives, and a red strobe inside the shop turned every shard of glass into a little warning light.

A woman in a bathrobe stood across the street holding her phone up to film, and she lowered it when she saw my Halloran crest.

"Are you the gold boy? Are they finally sending somebody?"

"I’m the somebody until the real somebody arrives. Please stay over there for me, ma’am."

The front door had a steel gate pulled down over it, still locked, so whoever had smashed the window had done it for noise and gone in another way. That was a thief who wanted the whole block looking at the wrong side of the building. I respected the craft while hating it on principle.

The side alley ran along the shop’s left wall, narrow enough that I had to turn sideways past a stack of soggy cardboard. It smelled of wet garbage and a faint sweet note that did not belong in any alley. Strawberry. Of course it was strawberry.

The side door stood open about four inches, propped by a wad of pink gum pressed into the latch.

I stared at the gum for a second and seriously considered whether this girl was a criminal genius or a nineteen-year-old who had watched too many heist movies. The interface offered its own opinion before I could decide.

〘 Heroine Proximity Detected: Unregistered (Lamia). Temptation Gauge: 6%. 〙

〘 Note: The latch is held closed with chewing gum. The host should be embarrassed for everyone involved. 〙

I pushed the door open with one finger and stepped into a storage room full of shelves crammed with guitars, power drills, and a taxidermied fox wearing a tiny cowboy hat.

The red strobe from the front of the store pulsed through a doorway on my right. A strip of warm light leaked from a second door at the back, where someone had flipped on a desk lamp and closed the door most of the way.

Over the screaming alarm, I heard a soft voice inside that office humming a song, off-key and badly, while metal clicked against metal.

I eased the office door open with my shoulder.

The back office was a little bigger than a closet, and it held a desk covered in invoices, a filing cabinet with a dent kicked into one side, and a squat black safe that had probably been bolted to the floor since the Reagan administration. The safe door stood open about halfway. A girl knelt in front of it with her back to me, pulling velvet jewelry trays out one at a time and dumping their contents into a canvas bag.

She was dressed exactly as I remembered, which meant she was dressed in a modified diving suit that somebody had taken scissors to and then made several brave choices about.

The neoprene clung to her body from her neck to her thighs, slick and black under the desk lamp, and it was cut away at the hips so that her scales showed through.

In the lamplight they shifted from emerald to black and back again every time she moved, running down the outside of her thighs in neat overlapping rows.

She was kneeling with her weight back on her heels, which meant the cut of the suit across her hips was pulled tight over a very generous amount of girl. I made a mental note to never describe this moment to Sloane in any detail whatsoever.

The left boot still had its safety pins, and I counted four of them now instead of three. Her black bob swung forward over her goggles every time she leaned into the safe, and every few seconds she blew a puff of air upward to move it out of her eyes.

She held up a silver pocket watch to the lamp, read something engraved on the back, and set it down in the bag much more gently than the rest.

Then she froze, because the alarm had a gap of half a second between screams and my boot creaked on the floorboard right in the middle of it.

She turned her head slowly over one shoulder. The aviator goggles caught the lamp and flashed white, and behind them her eyes went wide and green with those thin slit pupils. For about a second, I watched her face run through panic, recognition, and a mild existential crisis.

Then the smile arrived, and her fangs pressed into her lower lip.

"Oh, golden boy. Did you miss me already? That’s so sweet of you."