As she came to the walk-up she was looking for, she glanced around again. Then she went up the chipped and stained concrete steps. No reason to knock. Mickie had guards all over the place. He already knew she was here.
Pulling open the pitted door, a waft of dank-and-dreadful hit her square in the face. There were two apartments on each floor, with a central staircase lacing up the center of the building, and as she hit the carpeted steps, the ascent put so much pressure on whatever was going on in her left leg that she ended up having to use the sticky banister. At every new level, she paused to make sure she had the bead on her surroundings right: No one behind her. No one in front. Nobody coming out at her from the abandoned flats, the doors of which were all open.
That last one was the big danger. The light of the stairwell bled into the main living spaces of the dirty apartments, but there were rooms she couldn’t see into, spaces that could hide all kinds of threats. The only thing she could count on was that if she weren’t allowed here, she wouldn’t have gotten this far.
Besides, Mickie knew that she was on his level. Which meant if anyone aggressed on her, and she were hurt? Mickie would have to deal with their boss, and nobody wanted to do that.
When she got to the topmost floor, the door on the left was closed.
So Mickie was in.
“It’s me, Rio,” she called out.
She did not go over and stand directly in front of the wooden panels. She put her back to the wall, reached past the jamb, and knocked hard with her left hand. Her right stayed deep inside her pocket, on the butt of her weapon.
“Mickie. It’s Rio.”
As she waited, she looked into the apartment across the way. Its living room had a sofa and three mismatched armchairs, the furniture arranged around an oil drum that burned wood in the winter when security had to camp out.
“Come on, Mick.” She knocked again. “Don’t fuck with me.”
There was no chance that he’d evac’d because of the police presence down by the river. Too far away. And there hadn’t been a raid scheduled. She would have known about that whether it was by ATF, FBI, or CPD, and would have put a stop to it through regular channels.
“Mickie!” She knocked again. “C’mon.”
No answer. Fine. Three . . . two . . . one—
Rio gunned up and threw open the door. The second she got a look inside, she muttered, “Sonofabitch.”
Across the messy living area, in the glow of the ceiling fixtures, Mickie was sitting on his couch, his head back, his body on a sprawl, his feet flopped to the sides. But he wasn’t chilling. He had a massive abdominal wound, his blood seeping out to stain his dirty t-shirt a bright, Fourth of July red.
And that wasn’t the only new-and-interesting in the place.
There was a hole in the roof of the building, the dwindling rain falling through the ragged aperture to turn an Archie Bunker armchair into a sponge.
Keeping her gun in her hand, she went over and pulled another two-finger on a wrist. And just like the shooter by the dumpster in the alley, Mickie had flatlined—but was still warm.
The murder was recent, maybe thirty or forty minutes ago. Not that she was a coroner.
“Great. Just fucking great.”
Rio muttered all kinds of things to herself as she took out her phone, and with her left hand, texted the shooting in. Then she snapped a picture of the body as well as another of the worktable where a couple of scales, some powder residue, and a boatload of empty two-inch-square baggies were a loud-and-clear on what had been happening in the apartment.
Not that anybody would assume Mickie hosted cooking classes here.
After she scraped some of the had-to-be-cocaine off the table with her Swiss Army knife—
“I’m just going to use one of these baggies, Mick,” she said. “You don’t need ’em anymore, do you.”
She took a picture of the sample and then put it in her pocket.
Then she went back over to the body. As she stared into the frozen face, the waxy, pale skin transfixed her, taking her back to another time she had seen a human being dead . . . back to the first time she had seen remains. Her memories of the moment she had walked into her younger brother’s bedroom were so vivid that she became inanimate herself, suspended between the past and the present. And once that recollection was unleashed, there was no stopping the deluge of what she so capably kept under wraps during normal circumstances.
“Stop it,” she whispered.
But the nightmare wouldn’t recede. Then again, tonight she had almost died. Twice. No wonder the longest and worst evening of her life, as well as everything that had happened afterward, was dogging her.
It was a while before she could think properly again.
“You deserve worse, you sick bastard,” she said.
For everything Mickie had done to Spaz—and so many others. And that was why she had come here, to warn the dealer that he was going to lay off her street friend or the consequences were going to land on his head: Even though Mickie was—er, had been—a sadistic piece of work, there were levers she could pull, ones that were within the bounds of the law, but that would cause him problems with Mozart.
Of course, all that strong-arm stuff was a moot point now.
And the sad reality was that Spaz was likely to find another source for what he needed. Still, no one had been as bad as Mickie.
“Rest in Hell, you piece of shit,” she said. “I hope you roast—”
The soft squeak behind her brought her around—and her gun.
The Black Dagger Brotherhood mansion had been built at the turn of the twentieth century by Darius, a brother who had had a big heart, a strong dagger hand, and a treacherous hope that one day, the fighters for the race would live under a single roof with their families and loved ones.
As Vishous shoved his goatee’d mug into the vestibule’s security camera and waited for the copper lock to be released, he had a thought that that male would have approved of where they had all ended up.
Damn shame the brother hadn’t lived long enough to see it himself—