Hidden in the long shadow of a building across the street from the Runners’ warehouse, a man in a ratty, logoless baseball cap sat in a VW Beetle doing a crossword puzzle by the low light of a nearby lamppost. The tip of his cheap pen was chewed like a dog’s toy. The cigarette dangling from his lips was unlit.
On the passenger seat beside him sat a small spiral-bound notepad filled with the night’s scribbling.
When James Kendul walked out the front entrance of the darkened warehouse toward his beat-up old jeep parked on the street, the man in the car put his puzzle aside, reached inside his fake leather jacket, pulled out a crappy ninety-nine-cent lighter, and lit his cigarette. The ember glowed bright in the dark interior of the car when he inhaled, illuminating the steering wheel, the man’s lap, and part of the passenger seat.
He started the engine, put the car into gear, and rolled out of the shadows, snow crunching under the tires. The heater in the man’s car was broken, so every once in a while he lifted his hands from the wheel and breathed on them.
As Kendul pulled away, the chrome on the back bumper of his jeep flashed, momentarily blinding the man. Every time this happened, he had to refocus his mind, remind himself what he was looking at, or else, he knew from experience, the memory would fade and he would simply drive home, forget about the warehouse, forget about Kendul, Palermo. The whole evening would become a blank, with only his scrawled notes an account of what he’d been doing. But even those would soon cease to make any real sense to him.
The decaying warehouse seemed to lean in at the man as he drove by it, tilting down toward him, its roof slanted at a curious angle. The rumble of his car’s engine lulled him, made his eyelids heavy. Fifty feet. A hundred. Flash of chrome. Refocus. Flash of chrome. Refocus. Concentrate. Remember…
A dream within a dream within the darkness – then suddenly jolted awake when two loud pops split the stillness. The man lost control of his car, tires spinning, careening to one side. He barreled into a parked station wagon. Metal crumpled, glass shattered. His car tilted onto two wheels – the other two useless, flapping strips of rubber on warped rims – then flipped over onto its roof not two hundred feet from where he’d started. Crashed against the side of a red-brick bank building. The tires spun. Snow fell, dusting the little car’s undercarriage. A beetle on its back, legs in the air, trying but unable to right itself.
Glass tinkled, then silence crept in as the wheels slowed down, stopped.
Kendul’s jeep disappeared around a corner up ahead.
The man in the car hung upside down, suspended from his seat belt, unconscious – and unaware that two of the men he’d been spying on earlier that night were approaching his car. One smiled; the other did not. One wore heavy winter clothing; the other did not.
Both were visibly upset about something. And each carried a smoking Magnum at his side.
E I G H T
Pitch dark. Absolute. Save for the tiniest sliver of light wriggling in under the back door of the warehouse.
The man’s baseball cap still sat on his head, though skewed – like the chair he was tied to, tilted at an uncomfortable angle. The man felt sweat drip from the band of his hat, trickle into the corner of his open eyes, stinging. He clamped them shut.
All around him, breathing; some of it short and quick, some deep and slow. Sounded so close, he thought maybe it was just in his mind. Until someone coughed lightly. Someone else wheezed.
The man moved his head around, looking for any sign of where he was, any shape in the darkness. To his left, he caught a glimpse of light, someone moving behind stacks of… stacks of what? He watched the light move closer, intermittent. Brighter, dimmer, brighter, dimmer. Crates of something. Warehouse, he thought. I’m inside.
Footsteps now, echoing around his head, mixing with the chorus of uneven breathing, and the light flitting closer, nearly upon him. A face swam out of the darkness. Round, pitted. Acne-scarred. Breath like sulfur, puffing on him. The candle in this man’s hand was tall and thick, like its carrier. Built for war.
A voice from one of the crates: “Cleve, step back. Give him some fucking breathing room.”
Cleve grimaced, bared crooked, tombstone teeth. “Breathin’ room, yeah,” he said, and leaned back out of the candle’s light. Stood up straight.
His eyes adjusting a little more to the gloom, the man in the chair saw that the chorus of breathing he heard was made up of twenty-five, maybe thirty men sitting on large wooden crates of various heights – some stacked two, three high – in a rough circle.