“Let go,” she hissed. The dog didn’t budge.
And then, on the other side of the building, beyond the thin wood shell, a car door slammed. Dol dropped Sydney’s arm as his head snapped toward the sound. The noise, sharp and metallic, reminded Sydney of a gunshot, and sent her pulse spiking, the word safe safe safe safe pounding with the blood in her ears. She sprinted for the building, for the sheets and the steel and the shelter, tripping over a stray iron bar before reaching the hollow high-rise frame. Dol followed, and the two vanished into the Falcon Price as, somewhere, on the opposite side, someone dragged the front gate open.
*
MITCH slammed the car door, and watched Victor and Dominic drive away. He’d planned to circle around to the back of the high-rise, pry open the loose wooden panel, and get in that way, but when he stepped up to the front gate, he saw it wasn’t necessary. The chains had been cut, the snaking metal coiled on the ground at his feet. Someone was already inside.
“Great,” whispered Mitch, withdrawing the gun Victor had given him.
Incidentally, Mitch had always hated guns, and the events of the evening hadn’t made him any fonder. He pushed open the gate, wincing as the hinges screwed into the wood responded with a metallic whine. The yard was dark and, as far as he could tell, empty. He ejected the magazine on the gun, checked it, put it back, and rapped the barrel of the weapon nervously against his palm as he made his way to the center of the yard, halfway between the wooden shell of the fence and the steel skeleton of the high-rise, to a patch of dirt that was as open as possible.
A faint glow coming from the high-rise did little to illuminate him, but given his size and the sheer lack of other people, Mitch felt painfully confident he would be noticed, and soon. A stack of wooden beams, tarped against the weather, sat a few feet away, and Mitch sank onto them, checked his gun a second time, and waited.
*
SERENA’S phone rang again as she crossed the street, making her way down the now nearly deserted block toward the Falcon Price high-rise.
“Serena,” said the caller. It wasn’t Eli’s voice.
“Detective Stell,” she replied. She could hear the open and close of a car door.
“We’re on our way now,” he said. The line was muffled for a moment while the phone’s speaker was covered and orders were given.
“Remember,” she said, “you’re to stay outside the fence—”
“I know the orders,” he said. “That’s not why I called.”
Serena saw the signage of the abandoned high-rise, and slowed her pace. “Then what is it?”
“Mr. Ever had me send officers to a bar to clean up after an incident. There was supposed to be a body.”
“Yeah, Mitchell Turner’s,” she said.
“Only I get a call from the officers just now. There was no body. No signs of a body, either.” Serena’s boots slowed, and stopped. “I don’t know what’s going on,” said Stell, “but that’s the second time things haven’t lined up and—”
“And you didn’t call Eli,” she cut in softly.
“I’m sorry if that was wrong…”
“Why did you call me instead?”
“I trust you,” he answered, without hesitation.
“And Eli?”
“I trust you,” he said again, and Serena’s heart fluttered a little, both at the officer’s small display of evasion, the defiance of it, and at her own control over him. She started walking again.
“You did well,” she said as she reached the wooden walls of the construction site. And there, through the gap in the broken gate, she saw Mitch’s hulking form. “I’ll take care of it,” she whispered, “trust me.”
“I do,” said Detective Stell.
Serena hung up, and pushed the metal gate open.
XXXIV
TEN MINUTES UNTIL MIDNIGHT
THE FALCON PRICE PROJECT
MITCH thought he heard something from the building behind him, but when he strained to listen, the sounds that made it into the yard were so broken and faint that they could have been wind through the plastic sheeting, or a loose pipe. He might have gone to see, but Victor’s orders had been explicit, and even if he felt like challenging them, it was at that moment that the front gate that surrounded the bones of the high-rise groaned inward again, and a girl stepped into the yard.
She looked like Sydney, thought Mitch. If Sydney had grown a foot taller and several years older. The same blond hair curled down into eyes that were somehow bright and blue, even in the dark. It had to be Serena.
When she saw Mitch waiting, she crossed her arms.
“Mr. Turner,” she said, stepping forward, her black boots weaving effortlessly through the debris of the construction yard. “You have an impressive resilience to death. Is this Sydney’s work?”