Chapter 722 | The Unmarked Driver at Dawn

Chapter 722: 722 | The Unmarked Driver at Dawn

She was right on the money. At five-fifty-two, twin headlights swung wide around the corner of Fifth Street and threw pale cones into the fog and Mrs. Okafor’s bread steam.

The Ford Transit rolled into the alley with its parking lights on and the engine rumbling low. It was a tall-roof panel model, dirty white, with rust eating into the wheel wells and a big dent in the rear driver-side bumper where somebody had backed into a bollard. Just like Alya had said on the water tower, there were no metal plates front or back. A crooked piece of printer paper was taped inside the rear window, pretending to be a temporary registration tag so the automated city cameras on the main avenues wouldn’t flag it inside of four blocks.

Lamia went totally still beside me. The fidgeting and the fake purr were gone in the same instant, and her vertical pupils shrank to black needles behind the domino mask. Her hand drifted down to grip the edge of the brick parapet, and I watched the scales on her hip ripple once as the muscle underneath locked into place.

"Stay on the roof," I whispered, low enough that the modulator barely had to work. "Dralun said we watch the boxes and get the address. If you drop down there and wrap your thighs around somebody’s neck, I’m leaving you to do the paperwork."

"I am a professional," she hissed back, without taking her eyes off the van. "I know how to do recon, Golden Boy. Shut up and watch."

The van backed up to the recessed fire door and stopped six inches from the concrete step without needing a spotter. The brake lights flashed red against the wet brick. Then the passenger door clicked open.

The guy who climbed out wasn’t the creep in the navy windbreaker from the Eighth Street clinic. This one was twenty years older and fifty pounds heavier, built like a warehouse foreman who’d retired from lifting and gone full-time on beer. He wore a stained grey work jacket over a flannel shirt, thick cargo pants and steel-toed boots that clanked on the asphalt as he walked around to the rear doors. He had a receding hairline of salt-and-pepper stubble and a face like an unmade bed. When he hauled a heavy aluminum hand truck out of the back of the van, he moved with the stiff grunt of a guy who had a bad lower back and zero emotional investment in his job.

I flicked Residue Sight on for two seconds.

He was completely clean. There was no Core glow in his chest, and his hands left no colored film on the handle of the dolly. He was Unmarked, just a regular guy getting fifty bucks an hour to drive a van before sunrise and not ask why the boxes rattled. That was smart. If the IHC or a patrolling Hero ever pulled the van over on the highway, an Unmarked driver with a commercial bill of lading looked like a guy delivering restaurant supplies, not like an Aspect-trafficking ring.

He wheeled the hand truck up to the steel door and banged twice on the metal with the side of his fist.

Three seconds later the deadbolt threw from the inside, and the door swung inward. Leonard Kask didn’t come out into the cold, because fifty-seven-year-old pawnbrokers who bought baby horns didn’t like getting their shoes wet. I saw the dense black-violet cloud of his Aspect pooled in the hallway like oil smoke, though. The loader tipped the hand truck over the threshold, disappeared into the back office, and let the heavy door swing shut until the latch clicked.

"Nine minutes," Lamia breathed, her fingers flexing against the wet brick. "They always take between eight and twelve. Kask makes him sign a clipboard."

"A paper trail," I said, pulling my phone out of my utility jacket. "I love when criminals are organized. It saves me so much legwork."

I opened the camera app and braced my elbows on the parapet so my hundred-point Dexterity could work as a tripod, then slid the zoom all the way up until the caged yellow light over the steel door filled my screen. The fog made the image a little grainy, but the lens held on the concrete step with zero shake.

We waited. Six blocks west a city bus hissed its air brakes at a stop, and down on Fifth a delivery truck banged its liftgate shut outside Mrs. Okafor’s shop. Beside me, Lamia’s breathing stayed shallow, her shoulder pressed tight against my arm. The flirting was gone. She was a nineteen-year-old kid from the Eastside watching the back door of a shop she’d walked past thirty times, while a man inside boxed up pieces of her neighbors.

At six-oh-one the steel door kicked open from the inside.

The heavyset loader backed out onto the step and eased the loaded hand truck down over the concrete lip with a heavy metallic thud. He had two big cardboard shipping boxes stacked on the blade, both of them brown double-walled corrugated stock wrapped three times around the seams with reinforced fiberglass tape. They weren’t huge, maybe two feet square, the kind of boxes you use to move books when you don’t want the bottoms falling out.

I turned on Residue Sight and looked through the phone screen, which didn’t pick up the colors at all, and then looked over the top of the phone with my actual eyes.

The cardboard was all but bleeding through the fog. Kask’s oily black-violet was smeared over the packing tape where he’d smoothed it down with his palms, but what was inside the boxes pushed right through the double walls. I saw a jagged flare of bone-white that looked a hell of a lot like the spur stuck in Carmen’s apartment door on Moss Street. Under that sat a scaly green and a bright electric blue, and four or five muddier glows fading at the edges like old bruises. None of it was warm. It all looked dead, packed cold in styrofoam peanuts.

Then I looked at the side of the top box under the yellow porch light, and everything in me went still.