I lunge toward him, grab his collar. “I need you to focus.” I nod to the stairs on the side of the store, behind neat aisles of Campbell’s Soup and olive oil. “Do those stairs lead to a roof?”
He nods quickly, gasps, “Please, don’t hurt me.”
I release him, stumble up the staircase, dart across a dingy, cluttered second floor. I climb another staircase until the steps dead-end into a door. I heave my shoulder against it—one, two, three—and stumble out onto the roof of the grocery.
The brilliant colors of the oncoming sunset blind me for a second, but I get my bearings, dash to the edge of the store’s blacktop roof, and peer out to the main drag of 14th Street. Win and his men are shouting, cursing, firing bullets into the alley, peering around every corner.
“Check the stores,” Win’s steely voice echoes through the abandoned alley. “Every one. We can’t lose him.”
As they stop to catch a breath in the front of the grocery, Dawson points to a drop of my blood that must have smeared across the window.
“Blood,” Win says, then surveys the grocery’s door. “In. Open it.”
Panic starts to thrum again, my short burst of relief pinching out like a flame. I hear the breaking of glass, the smack of a door underneath me, then hurried footsteps echoing through the grocery’s thin walls and shoddy floors.
They’re coming.
Surrounding me is a smattering of rooftops, a patchwork of three-story town homes and squat two-story stores. And then an idea starts to take hold.
They need me dead. They’re not going to rest until I’m dead.
I limp to the edge of the building, take a look below. There’s a three-story drop-off, but about ten feet away, there’s a building with a dangling fire escape on its second floor. My ribs, sore and bruised from the fall, are now aching, maybe broken. This is the only way out, I tell myself. You need to jump. I look across the alleyway, to the fire escape that shines like a beacon in the sun. And they need to think you fell.
I take a few steps back, close my eyes, and wait for them, and when I hear the trapdoor to the ceiling flap open, hear Win shout, “There he is, fire!” I dig in and run as fast as I can toward the edge of the building. I don’t falter. I don’t stutter-step, and I jump, my legs propelling me like a windmill, up around up around—
I reach, lurch in midair for the base of the fire escape, desperate to reach it, to hang on . . .
My fingers find the steel, whiplash shoots through my shoulders, the heady rush of jumping causing my nose to gush blood. Move, Alex, before they reach the roof’s edge. I scramble onto the fire-escape landing, whisper, “Replicate and conceal.” A force field, a replica of the scene behind me—the brick wall, and the zigzag cut of the fire escape—appears like a flat wall of camouflage in front of me.
I peer down at the alley two stories below and complete the ruse. On the ground of the alley, emerging just as Win and his men sprint to the edge of the roof one floor above me on the other side, is a facedown replica of Alex Danfrey, splayed out and broken on the alleyway ground.
“Son of a bitch tried to jump,” Howie says, his voice cracking a bit as he studies my body from the third-floor roof.
“Make sure he’s really gone,” Win says quietly.
Howie and Dawson and Win’s other thug, they pause only for a moment. Then, one after the other, they take their pistols from their pockets, aim at my replica, fire three floors down, the cold, hard bursts of gunfire rattling me, POP POP POP, as I watch from above. I need to match their gunfire with magic. This needs to look real. So I focus on my replica on the alley floor, say the words of power. And then three deep, black marks of blood bloom like nightmarish roses across my replica below.
The gunfire stops.
“That was close. Too close,” Win sighs out. “Come on, we need to get back. Tell Gunn it’s done.”
I wait until they back away from the edge of the building across the alley. I take a minute, and then another, to collect myself on the cramped landing of the fire escape, to revel in being alive, as Win and his goons climb into their car and drive themselves back to the Red Den.
I was part of the deal. I was always part of the D Street deal. Boss McEvoy and me, Gunn’s thoughtful little deal sweeteners for D Street. His loose ends.
My body is cut and bruised and pleading for rest, but I limp down from the fire escape, through the back alley to 14th Street, hobble over to the corner where a large streetcar is about to pull away from the curb. I flag the driver down, shove a few coins from my pocket into his hand, and slide onto a seat near the front. The crowd of middle-aged women and flustered mothers with small children angles away from me, but I just tilt my head back and close my eyes.
I need the next stop and a phone—Frain needs to be at the Den by eight and has no idea how all of this has just imploded. But this can’t be over, we need to salvage this, and Joan—
I need to get to Joan. I promised her. I have to save her.
We have to save each other.
CHANGE OF PLANS
JOAN