Chapter 726 | The Woman in the Blue Smock

Chapter 726: 726 | The Woman in the Blue Smock

I slid my phone out of my inner pocket, braced my elbows on the wet brick of the parapet, and zoomed the lens all the way in.

The camera caught the PACIFIC COAST COLD STORAGE sign first. Then I panned down and got six clean shots of the van backed into Bay Four, the fake paper tag in its rear window, and the heavyset driver wiping his forehead with his sleeve beside the blue pallet. Then I zoomed in on the woman in the medical smock as she took a stainless steel box cutter from her pocket, sliced the fiberglass tape on the top carton, and reached inside with both gloved hands to check the merchandise before she signed the clipboard the driver held out.

Click. Click. Click. The silent shutter ate every detail, down to the red three-sliced circle stenciled on the cardboard and the yellow biohazard disposal bin just inside the bay door behind her legs.

Beside me, Lamia had gone rigid. Her toxic green eyes were locked on that open box like she was trying to set the woman’s hairnet on fire with her mind. Her scaled thighs had tensed so hard under the cut-out neoprene that the muscle looked like braided steel cable, and her weight was creeping forward onto her palms. She was five seconds from doing something that would put us both on the six o’clock news and give Dralun a stroke.

I reached over without taking my eyes off the screen and clapped a hand on the back of her neck, right over the knot of her hair. I pinned her to the roof with just enough of my hundred Strength to tell her that if she jumped, she was taking the parapet with her.

"Don’t," I whispered. The Veil’s modulator turned the word into a flat iron promise against her ear.

She flinched under my palm, breath hissing through her fangs.

"She’s opening it," Lamia whispered back, her voice shaking so hard the lisp came out full force. "Lukas, she’th opening it right there, that’th Mateo’th—"

"It’s a cold storage warehouse with four bays and a clean-room crew inside," I said. I kept my hand heavy on her nape while my thumb hit record, and the video caught the woman lifting a vacuum-sealed plastic bag of pale, curved bone fragments up to the overhead light to check the clarity. "We bust in there right now, they dump the rest down an incinerator chute before we clear the street, and whoever’s paying for the truck rents a different warehouse on Tuesday. Dralun said watch the boxes and get the address. We got the address, we got the face, and we got the stamp."

"I can take her," Lamia hissed. She didn’t try to pull out from under my hand, though. She pushed up into my palm by about half an inch, her shoulders trembling under the wet rubber of her suit like she needed something solid to push against so she wouldn’t fly apart. "I can slide across the street in three seconds, I’ll wrap her up before the fat guy even drops his clipboard—"

"And then the buyer disappears, and next month another guy in a windbreaker shows up at the clinic on Eighth Street."

Down in Bay Four, the woman dropped the bag back into the peanuts, folded the flaps shut, and waved toward the dark interior behind her. A second man in a matching blue smock rolled out on a manual pallet jack, slid the forks under the pallet, and wheeled the whole load back into the building.

The woman hit a switch beside the frame. The steel bay door rattled down on its chains and slammed against the concrete apron, cutting off the white light and leaving the dock empty except for the dirty white van.

Thirty seconds later the Transit pulled off the bumpers, turned west toward the highway on-ramp with its headlights off, and vanished into the fog.

I stopped recording, waited three seconds for the file to save to my encrypted folder, and put the phone back in my jacket. Only then did I take my hand off Lamia’s neck.

She stayed flat on her stomach on the wet tar paper, forehead resting on her crossed forearms, while the morning drizzle soaked into the back of her cropped jacket. The theatrical master thief was gone again. What was left was the nineteen-year-old who dropped envelopes of cash through her neighbors’ mail slots, lying on a freezing roof in the industrial district and staring at a closed steel door.

"Hey," I said, and nudged her safety-pinned boot with the steel toe of my nephew boot. "You good?"

She let out a ragged breath that fogged against the tar paper. Then she pushed up onto her knees and wiped the back of her hand across her nose. Her green eyes were still slit thin when she looked at me, and there was a pink smudge on her lower lip where her fang had nicked the skin, but she forced her chin up anyway and gave me a crooked little grin that was ten times more real than the ones she rehearsed in the mirror.

"Yeah," she said, voice rough. "Yeah, I’m good. I just really wanted to choke somebody with my thighs this morning, you know? Wasted a whole good outfit."

"The night’s still young. It’s only six-thirty." I stood and offered her a hand. "Come on. I have to write seven sentences on a piece of yellow paper for your dragon before I go sit through homeroom for a woman who hates me, and you smell like a grease trap."

She took my hand. For once she kept her frictionless field all the way off, and her small fingers were warm through the calluses she’d built climbing fire escapes as I hauled her up at the edge of the roof.

"It was a deli," she muttered, bumping her hip against my thigh before she turned toward the ladder.

"And it was pastrami. Show some respect."