The men watched and waited while the children ate. It took a while because the children were wiping and licking every last drop of sauce out of the cans. A few of them cut their fingers on the edges, as Livia had done, or even their tongues, but none seemed to care very much beyond a momentary wince. Livia showed Nason to be careful, then handed over her can when she had finished eating from it so Nason could lick it clean, keeping the top for herself.
One of the men walked around with one of the buckets, indicating to the children that they were to throw their empty cans in it. Livia finished licking the top and was ready to throw it in the bucket when she realized—the edge of the top was so sharp, it could be useful as a weapon. She glanced at the men, saw that no one was watching, and quickly slid the top into the back pocket of her pants.
Just in case.
5—NOW
In a little under an hour and a half, she was in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood, once a thriving center of manufacturing, now an unlikely amalgam of small industry, hipster eateries, and container shipping yards wedged between Interstate 5 to the east and the Duwamish Waterway to the west.
She rode in along the overpass above the Union Pacific rail yard, cut across to Airport Way, and drifted into the gravel parking lot of the office trailer park at Corson Avenue, where she killed the engine and dismounted. Tentative yellowish light seeped over from the sodium-vapor streetlamps nearby, but beyond that, the area was pooled in shadows. She raised the helmet visor and tasted a morning moisture in the air, heard the whoosh of the earliest commuter vehicles on the freeway overpass above and behind her. Beneath the overpass, at the bases of the giant support columns, were a few cardboard shelters, their inhabitants silent, doubtless sleeping.
She unlocked her trailer, which she rented under a fictitious name and paid for in cash, rolled in the bike, and removed the magnetically attached stolen license plate. Then she pulled off the backpack, shoved the plate and the florescent vest into it, re-shouldered the pack, secured the trailer, and headed south along the sidewalk.
Thirty yards down, she paused to remove the helmet. She shook out her hair and glanced back. Nothing stirred. She put the helmet in the pack and moved off again.
Five minutes later, she reached her building, a three-story brick colossus dominating the western half of her fantastically misnamed dead-end street—South Garden. Built a hundred years earlier as a can and bottle manufacturer, it was now shared by an auto-wrecking operation, a metal recycling plant, and a machine shop run by the guy who owned the building. The guy had been there for decades, and had suffered enough break-ins that a few years earlier he had been thrilled to rent the third-floor storage space over his operation as a loft to the investigating SPD officer. The space—three thousand square feet cluttered with unused machine tools, featuring a kitchenette so spare it might embarrass a college student and a bathroom not much bigger than what you could find on an airplane—wasn’t well suited to human habitation, but it was perfect for Livia. She liked being on the border of the polluted Duwamish, with its crumbling brick warehouses, their windows shattered, corrugated eaves rusting like dried blood, smokestacks inert and anachronistic. And the area’s solitude, particularly late at night, was unmatched. Best of all was the access to tools she could use for motorcycle maintenance and repairs. The property developers were working with city hall to turn the warehouses into condos and upscale offices with views of the Duwamish, and one day, she knew, she would be sad to see her ghostly, brooding neighbors blazing with light and life. Well, nothing lasted forever. She knew that better than most.
There were multiple CCTV cameras installed around the building, trained on the doors, garage bays, and ground-floor windows, all of which were also alarmed. Ordinarily, the security wasn’t a problem, but after killing someone like Barnett, she didn’t want to be recorded entering at an odd hour. Late-night coming and going could be explained, of course, if it ever came to that, but it was always safer to have nothing to explain to begin with.