They walked the street in the dark, Lewis carrying the 10-gauge down along his leg. The wind was up, whistling across the rooftops, and tree branches clacked overhead. The single functional streetlight had a halo around it from the damp in the air.
They bypassed the main entrance and the truck loading dock and stepped into the shelter of the rail siding, where the rusting steel-framed roof and a screen of tall weeds helped hide them from prying eyes. The cracked concrete loading platform would have been the same height as the boxcar doors.
In another neighborhood, the building would have been renovated. Peter imagined loft apartments on the upper floors and a decent restaurant on the main with tables set up under this shelter in nicer weather. He hoped the old building would be brought back to life. Although at the current rate of decay, there might be little left to restore.
The big sliding forklift doors had been boarded up years before, and a man-door was cobbed into one of the bays. The key was broken off in the rusty deadbolt, and two heavy padlocked hasps held the door shut at top and bottom.
Peter opened the tool bag and took a penlight from his pocket to peer inside. Vertical compartments lined the interior for easy organization, with a central well for the heavy gear. “Your tools, you decide,” he said in a low voice. “Sledgehammer or crowbar?”
Lewis clucked his tongue softly. “Finesse, jarhead, finesse.” Reaching in, he plucked an orange-handled tool from a padded interior pocket. It looked like a cheap electric screwdriver, but with a cap covering two slender tangs of bent metal where the driver head would be.
“Lock pick,” he explained quietly, plugging the twin wires into a padlock’s keyhole and pulling the trigger. “If they don’t know you got in, they don’t know to look for you.”
Usually Peter had gotten into a building by using two large Marines with a steel battering ram. That or C-4. “So you’re a burglar,” he said as the first padlock popped open.
“Do I look like a guy sneaks around for a living?”
“You’re sneaking around right now.”
Lewis’s teeth gleamed in the dim glow of the penlight. “You’re just dying to know, aren’t you?”
The pick hummed again and the second lock opened. Lewis stowed the tool in the bag and removed two tactical flashlights, bright but small enough to hold along the barrel of a pistol. Handed one to Peter and picked up his shotgun again, holding his own light along the shotgun’s slide to point where the barrel pointed. Looked at Peter and nodded.
Peter took the Sig Sauer from his pocket, opened the door a crack, and listened. No sound, no light. He turned on his flashlight and stepped inside, rising white static making a frictive buzz in the back of his head. His chest tightened immediately.
Breathe in, breathe out.
It was stale and musty. His flashlight beam picked out the corners of a big, empty chamber with walls of stained yellow brick and sixteen-foot ceilings. The floor above them was held up by giant oak timbers that had twisted and cracked as the green lumber dried. They stood on worn wood planks designed to support draft horses and the freight they had once moved.
Dust covered everything. Several sets of footprints walked away from them toward the dark gap in the wall opening to the next chamber. They followed the footprints. Everything silent but for the soft sound of their feet and the roar of the static in his head.
There would be a basement below, as well as a freight elevator to the floors above that was probably broken. Peter was not looking forward to the stairs. To do this right, Peter would have wanted at least a squad, if not the whole platoon.
The second chamber was as empty as the first. The dust equally undisturbed, save the footprints that led them forward. But the smell was changing, a low chemical funk that got more intense as they moved deeper into the warehouse.
The white static flared higher. This was too much like the industrial buildings they had searched in Iraq, where the Baathists would pop up and fire on them from cover before scuttling deeper into the maze. Peter felt the sweat begin to pop on his forehead and neck, despite the deep cold of this place. In another few minutes he’d be sweating through his shirt.
He pushed it down and kept walking.
The third chamber wasn’t empty. It held a neat row of ten big white plastic drums beside the roll-up door to the truck loading dock. The door was brown with rust, but the rollers and tracks gleamed with fresh grease.
Peter walked to the plastic drums. With his bright flashlight shining behind the drums, they became translucent. A liquid darkness filled the bottom third of each drum. The drum covers were threaded, and screwed off like a jar lid. Peter found a cover that would move and spun it counterclockwise.
When he cracked the seal, a petroleum stink rose like poison perfume.
He bumped the drum with his toe and watched the languid ripples in the heavy black liquid. “Fuel oil,” he said. “Ten drums of fuel oil.”
He thought of several reasons somebody would stockpile partial drums of fuel oil in an abandoned warehouse.