by Nick Petrie
“You take it.” Peter picked up the same three-foot crowbar from earlier in the day. “This is more my speed.”
He slid the chisel end up the sleeve of his coat and held the cold bend of the hook in his hand. He didn’t know if he would need it, but he didn’t want to have to come back for it. He really didn’t want a passing cop to see it and hit the lights. If a patrolman spotted the pistol on Peter’s hip, things would go sideways in a hurry.
The building was pale, flaking brick, at least a century old, with four floors and eight unlabeled buzzers inside the front vestibule. Spark was in 4B, which would be the top floor. The vestibule’s inner door hadn’t been painted in decades, but it had good locks and the glass was protected by a beautiful wrought-iron grille, the original security measure.
Peter left Lewis at the front with the electric pick buzzing, and jogged around to the back. The building was on an alley, with a wrought-iron stairway column that rose up the center and fed long balconies that doubled as rear entrances for each unit. The windows and doors that faced the balconies had modern steel security grates over them. Across the alley were single-family houses.
Peter called Lewis from the shadow of a neighbor’s garage and described what he saw. “Are you in?”
“Not yet. Give me a minute.”
Peter dropped the crowbar from his sleeve. “I’m going up. Keep in touch.”
Neither of them mentioned the market shooter with his assault rifle and his martial arts moves.
The steps were crusted with paint and thrummed underfoot. Peter took them three at a time, pulling himself up with one hand on the rail, the other carrying the bar at the balance point. As he swung his weight around the outer landings, he felt the whole stairway shimmy slightly. Either the bolts had loosened over the years, or rust was weakening the steel. Or both.
The balconies stretched out maybe twenty feet on either side of the central stairs. The layouts appeared to be mirror images, with the apartment doors closest to the central stairs, then a bank of three windows.
On the fourth floor, the balcony on the right was crowded with a long cedar garden bench and two matching chairs, all in a line. Planter boxes hung off the outside of the railing, with fall flowers still blooming despite the cooling weather. Through the window grates, Peter saw a tidy kitchen with red-checked curtains and dishes drying in a rack by the sink.
Somehow, Peter didn’t think Spark was the red-checked curtain type.
The balcony on the left seemed more her speed, with a single vinyl patio chair and a small low table made by bolting a rusted steel plate to an upside-down milk crate. The lights were on inside the apartment, but the shades were down over the windows. The Latin polka rhythm of a Mexican corrido seeped softly through the glass.
Peter loosened the Colt in the holster, then stood against the weathered brick and watched for moving shadows behind the shades. Lewis would go in the front door while Peter went in the back. The hum in his head revved higher at the prospect.
Best case, Spark was alone and willing to talk. It didn’t seem likely. Worst case, the shooter had heard Peter coming up the stairs and waited inside with his AK at the ready and Spark as a human shield. Peter wished he knew something—anything—about the shooter’s motives, about his relationship with Spark.
If the police were here, they’d have men in unmarked cars watching the alley and the street, waiting for Kiko to call Spark and spook her. When she ran, they’d grab her. If she stayed put, they’d strap on body armor and helmets, evacuate the building, and break down the door. They’d have badges to explain themselves to anyone watching. It was a better way to go.
If Peter wasn’t a wanted man with his face all over the feed from the gunman’s video glasses, he’d have called the cops himself. Instead, he was just a selfish prick who didn’t want to go to jail.
Although maybe not completely selfish. He didn’t want June to go to jail, either. Or Lewis, whose veneer over his criminal past could only withstand so much scrutiny. What would that do to Dinah and the boys? Peter wasn’t going to ruin their lives, not if he could help it.
His phone lit up with a text from Lewis. I’m in. Coming up.
Peter texted back. Wait in the stairwell. If she runs, grab her. If it gets loud, shoot the locks and save my sorry ass.
The security screen was like a storm door but beefier, with heavy metal mesh and its own lock. But however substantial it looked, it was meant to be affordable protection against neighborhood thieves, not a motivated Marine with a three-foot crowbar. As he worked the chisel tip into the gap between the door and its metal jamb, Peter thought about the outrage he and June had felt after someone had broken into their house the night before. Which made him both a selfish prick and a hypocrite.
He seated the tip and pulled, putting his back into it. The narrow jamb gave a soft scream as he peeled it away from the deadbolt, tearing the metal. The security screen swung free.
Behind it was a plain wooden entry door, a cheap modern retrofit. He tried the knob. It turned freely but the door didn’t open. There were two other locks. He wiggled the crowbar’s chisel end behind the stop and levered the jamb back against the frame to free the deadbolts from the strike plates, then pushed the door open slightly with his foot.
The whole operation was over in under a minute and made no more noise than clearing his throat.
He laid the crowbar down on the balcony, pulled the Colt from its holster, took the weapon off safe, and stepped inside. His motor revved higher.
He stood in a dark hallway. On the right wall, bare coat hooks. On the left, an opening to the empty kitchen. Painted cabinets and cheap appliances, with a ratty upholstered chair in the little eating nook instead of a table. A coffee cup on the floor beside it and a book on the seat. The music came from down the hall. He followed it.
Doorways ahead to the left. The hall floor squeaked underfoot.
A small bedroom with a single mattress on the floor under a tangle of blankets. Black plastic garbage bags were duct-taped over the windows. Nobody behind the door, nobody in the closet.
A compact bathroom with hexagonal floor tiles and a recently washed jog-bra hung to dry on the shower bar with the plastic curtain pushed back. Nobody in the tub.
A dining room with a pair of folding banquet tables arranged into an L-shaped desk, with a scatter of papers, and textbooks in a stack. The Mexican corrido came from an ancient clock radio with a speaker that sounded far better than it should. Then a living room that held only a faded wingback armchair with no footstool. An open coat closet held nothing but a broom. Nobody home.
It felt like the apartment of a scholarship student with no savings, no family support, and no backup plan. All the living was done in the future. For now, it was work and study with breaks to eat and sleep. A lonely life.
Then he turned and saw the pair of rectangular paper targets taped to the opposite wall. Black silhouettes with concentric circles across the chest, identical to those in a thousand local gun ranges. Except for the holes in the paper. A single hole in the center of each bull’s-eye, torn and ragged at the edges and several times larger than the opening made by one bullet.
On the bottom of the paper, someone had written “AKSM. New barrel. Thirty rounds, two hundred yards.”
Something wasn’t right, Peter thought.
He holstered the Colt, then pulled out his phone and texted Lewis. It’s clear. Don’t shoot. He threw the bolts on the front door, then undid the pair of heavy chains, one at knee level and the other at Peter’s shoulder. Someone was serious about home security. Even with the locks open, Lewis would have had a hell of a time making his way past the chains without a battering ram.
Peter pulled the door ajar, but he’d already turned away to retrace his steps through the apartment, trying to understand what he was seeing. Or maybe what he’d missed, aside from the partial case of 7.62 x
39 rounds he found under the sweatshirt on the floor of the bedroom closet. But he was still scratching his head when Lewis sauntered down the hallway.
“I don’t think the boyfriend lives here,” Peter said. “She’s got a single bed, a single toothbrush, just one person’s clothes in the closet. Only one chair. But that doesn’t account for those damn targets.” He waved at the silhouettes in the living room. “You see those groupings?”
“Jarhead, you overthinking this.” Lewis gave Peter a wide, tilted smile. “It’s a four-story walkup, right? Take a look at the main stairwell.”
Peter walked to the front of the apartment where Lewis had left the door open.
The black electric getaway bike was chained to the ornate oak railing, silver rectangles and red wires still strapped to its elegant geometry. A black charging cord ran from a socket in the oversized rear hub to another one of those strange shoeboxes.
“Wait.” Peter blinked, then looked at Lewis. “Spark is the shooter?”
Lewis raised his shoulders in an elaborate shrug. “You got a better explanation?”
“What about the boyfriend? What about that beard?”
“Gotta say, it looked a little weird, right? Kinda shiny?”
“It was fake?” Peter sighed. “It was a damn mask. The hat, sunglasses, everything.”
Lewis looked past him to the target silhouettes taped to the wall. He bent to pull a small cardboard box from under the wingback chair. It had a picture of the video sunglasses on the front. He tapped the box. “Jarhead, there ain’t no boyfriend. We been outclassed from the start.”
Peter shook his head. “Who the hell is this woman?”
31
SPARK
Spark stood frozen on her skateboard in the alley behind her building. She had takeout from the Vientiane Noodle Shop in a plastic bag and her eyes locked on to her fourth-floor balcony. The bright rectangle of light told her the door was standing open. Which meant that someone was inside her apartment.
Kiko Tomczak was the only person who knew where she lived, and he didn’t have a key. Even if he did, there was no way he could get up all those stairs. And she hadn’t talked to him for almost two years.
It had to be those two pendejos from the Public Market. She had no idea how they’d found her, first at the MakerSpace, now here. Although her plan at the market had almost gone horribly wrong, she was sure she’d done almost everything right afterward.
Young Maria Evangelina, with her judo classes and her secondhand textbooks, would never have recognized her older self, a grown woman standing firm with a handmade rifle pointed at the terrible man’s chest.
For three years, she’d fought the fear and anger and pain. She’d learned to contain it, first to pack it tight like a snowball, then to compact it further until it became a glittering sphere of ice that lived just behind her breastbone. It functioned like a prism, focusing the strength of her will and intellect into this meticulous plan. To ruin him the way he had ruined her.
She’d built the gun. She’d written the code. She’d learned how to move the money. She’d called in the bomb threats to distract the police. She’d gotten him to hand over his unlocked phone. Her laptop was busy downloading every file, link, app, and password. She recorded everything with the video glasses, to play back his reaction. She was on the brink of the revenge she needed so badly.
The rifle was there just to control him, to keep her safe.
She hadn’t planned for what had happened at the market. For three years of discipline to vanish in an instant. For her tight sphere of ice to flash into bright red rage.
It started as a scald in her stomach, the urge to murder that boiled up hot like oil in a pot. It rose through her chest and shoulders, then spread into her arms, the rage expanding to overfill the vessel. It felt inevitable, out of her control, her muscles making the decisions as her mind simply watched. She was an observer in her own body. She didn’t think about the bystanders. When the boil reached her fingers, she would pull the trigger.
What would happen, she wondered, when her bullets blew him apart?
Would the fear and anger and pain fade away? She didn’t know. She suspected not. But she would kill him anyway. She would kill him now and deal with the consequences later.
Then the tall man in the cowboy hat had thrown an apple at her.
The pain of it hitting her chest had jolted her back into her mind. She hadn’t counted on the nice weather bringing so many people to the market. She certainly hadn’t counted on the children. Or some pendejo throwing fruit and thinking he was a hero.
The next apple glanced off her cheekbone. The countless hours on the gun range and at the dojo took over. She regained her focus and reverted to the plan.
She had what she needed. She could still find the terrible man another time, in a more private place.
So she left them all behind, hopped on her bike, and hauled ass across the river to the boat storage yard a mile away, where she’d coasted into the shadow of a rusting cabin cruiser and peeled off the red jacket and the bulky ballistic vest she’d worn underneath.
When she removed the hat and the itchy costume-shop beard and dropped them into a trash barrel, she was a different person entirely. Rolling the leftover spirit gum off her jawline reminded her of peeling Elmer’s off the back of her hand when she was four, after making popsicle-stick paddleboats for the bathtub. The skin of super glue on her fingertips would wear off in a few days.
She dumped the vest in the trash, too. She was supposed to leave the jacket with it, but she couldn’t. It had belonged to her father, a proud Cardinals fan, and it turned out she wasn’t ready to let go of that yet. So she stuffed it into her backpack beside her laptop, which was still harvesting data over the cell network. At the speeds she’d clocked, she could get a hundred gigs in under five minutes.
The next step of the plan was to throw the gun into the river, but Spark couldn’t bring herself to do that, either. Holding the rifle made her feel safe, armored, and strong, like nothing could stop her. Even though she knew that feeling was a lie, or at best an illusion. That gun could land her in jail, or make a cop pull the trigger until his own gun was empty. She was hanging out on the edge now, with nothing to catch her if she fell. If she was going to see this thing through, she needed every scrap of hope she could find.
If she’d just bought the rifle complete at some gun show, she wouldn’t have hesitated. But she’d fabbed the receiver from scratch, bent the steel and tapped the holes, then put the rest of it together with her own two hands. When you make a thing, it’s truly yours.
So she pulled out the magazine and cycled the round from the chamber and jammed the gun into her backpack. It was just over two feet long with the stock folded, so she could barely zip the bag shut. But she made it work. Just like she’d made everything else work.
* * *
—
Standing in the alley now, she looked up at the open door of her apartment again, knowing they were inside, feeling the sense of violation and loss. The thought of starting over in a new place was exhausting. She reminded herself that it was just an inconvenience. There was nothing she really cared about in that apartment. It was a shame about the MakerSpace, but she didn’t need it anymore. With nothing but the laptop in her backpack, she could go anywhere she wanted. She’d disappear.
Although she’d miss her rocket bike. She’d made that herself, too, everything but the frame, and that had been a gift from Kiko. Still, she could always make another one.
And her electric longboard would get her where she needed to go.
Now she had a new problem to solve. The terrible man’s phone had only carried the passwords to a single account, one with less than four hundred thousand dollars, not the tens of millions she’d hoped for. But it had an encrypted link to a cloud drive with some crazy stuff on it. She’d copied the contents to her o
wn encrypted drive, then inserted a little custom code of her own.
He’d pay what she wanted, all right. He’d pay everything.
She turned away from the apartment, leaned forward slightly to let the longboard’s synaptic controls kick in, and silently accelerated into the dark maze of streets that ran through Silver City like a secret circuit.
32
JUNE
As Jerry the night guard thanked her for the leftover pizza, June wondered how safe she might be at the paper.
She hadn’t given much thought to news organizations’ security procedures until the killings at the Capitol Gazette in 2018. The Journal Sentinel wasn’t as secure as most large office buildings. You needed a key card to get into the parking lot, through the loading dock gate, or into the side entrance, but the street entrance was unlocked day and night unless the security guard stepped away from his desk, in which case he’d throw the deadbolt.
The night guard wasn’t even armed, and Jerry wasn’t exactly athletic. He often brought a homemade calzone and a thermos of coffee for his dinner. Plus most of his attention was on the soccer game playing on the big lobby television.
June didn’t blame him. He wasn’t getting combat pay. She told herself that Peter had driven across town and back to make sure they weren’t followed.
Although she was pretty sure Mr. Cheerful already knew where she worked.
* * *
—
As June walked to her desk in the far corner of the newsroom, she looked across the tops of the cubicle partitions. She didn’t see Dean Zedler, and was grateful. She didn’t want to know what he’d found looking at security footage outside the market.
She liked being at the paper at night. The building was almost empty, just the night editors and reporters working on late-breaking stories. It reminded her of her first job working the cops desk in Chicago all those years ago, when the action rarely started until well after everyone else had gone home.