“I wish. I’d kill for some bling and a good pair of bell-bottoms right now,” Lawrence answers. Beside me he looks right out of The Matrix in his black pants, black sparkle T-shirt with a hot pink “L” on it, trench coat, and Blade Runner black boots. “You don’t want them to instantly recognize you on surveillance, do you?”
I glance around. “Who is them?”
Lawrence shrugs. “The police. Your boyfriend. The drug dealers.”
We’re standing just outside the alcove. It looks less mysterious and sexy tonight and more . . . trashy, filthy, and it smells like urine. I miss Matteo’s strong presence and his Kevlar vest.
“So tell me again why we’re here.” Lawrence glances around.
I rattle the door and find that it’s locked, as I expected. “We’re looking for a way inside.” I pull at the window to find it’s fixed shut. “The journal said the White Rabbit was going to be here at eleven, and to follow the arrows.” I pull the journal out of my pocket, and hand it to him so he can read the message.
While Lawrence is overjoyed to have his journal back, he’s also beyond pissed that someone scribbled in it. Not just anyone. The Golden Arrow intentionally left evidence on my person that the police are looking for. Either our hero wants to help me find the White Rabbit, or the Golden Arrow wants me off the case. I’ve chosen to see this as an olive branch, but standing in the dark outside a warehouse makes me realize that it very well could be hemlock.
The sound of breaking glass has me whirling around to face Lawrence. His paisley head scarf is wrapped around his hand, and he’s leaning against the building with a forced expression of innocence.
“What did you just do?”
“I slipped.”
I peer around him. “Did you break that window?”
“It was already broken.” He turns and studies it. “But yes, when I slipped, I did happen to make the hole bigger. Big enough that half of a crime-fighting duo can get in there and go let the bigger half in through the door.”
“I thought you said I was in charge.”
He shrugs. “I’m helping. My guess is since this one was already broken, they’ve turned the alarms off. Thank God it’s not safety glass, or I would have broken my hand.”
“Yeah, we’ll see about that.” I turn and study the window. I’m grateful now for the thicker material of my jumpsuit. “Okay, help me up.” I ignore my pulse pounding in my ears and how my knees are knocking together. I’m about to commit a real crime.
Lawrence grunts as he cradles me in a basket hold, and I work to balance myself to get my feet through the hole without catching on the broken glass. My butt poses a bit of a problem now that my feet are dangling inside the building and my upper body is supported by L. “You’re going to have to essentially throw me through this window.”
“That doesn’t sound like a good idea.”
“It’s either that or my back drags across broken glass. I need to go straight through.” And nothing at all could go wrong with that. Right? “Okay, on three. One, two—”
Before I get to three, Lawrence tosses me as best he can through the broken portion of the window. Jagged glass grabs at my back, the shoulders of the suit, and a section of the wig. A sting on my cheek says something scratched my face. All told, the worst part of the entire trip is the landing. I wish I could say that, like my hero counterparts in the comics, I do a neat tuck-and-roll and shoot to my feet ready for action. Instead, the heel of my left boot skids to the side, I land hard on my right foot, my ankle rolls, and I end up spread-eagle on my stomach, my face inches from a wooden pallet.
“You okay? That sounded bad!” Lawrence’s voice is an exaggerated stage whisper.
I peel myself off the floor and test my weight on my turned ankle. “It’s not life-threatening,” I announce in a similar whisper, limping my way over to the door. This door isn’t locked on the inside, and I simply push open the panic bar. Though I’m cringing, no alarm sounds.
“Let’s make this quick,” Lawrence says, ducking in. The door closes behind us, and we’re left in semidarkness. He clicks on a flashlight, hands it to me, then clicks one on for him.
The warehouse looks exactly like it did when I was here last week with Matteo, Rideout, and Agent Sosa, minus the fifty-odd police officers who were there that day. Everything is neat and orderly. I don’t see anything or anyone who would indicate the White Rabbit is here, or any arrows to follow. I limp through the stacks of boxes and pallets to the general area where I stood with Matteo before. The floor is empty of the big crates, instead filled with towering plastic-wrapped boxes. “Stuff has moved.”
It doesn’t help that I don’t know what I’m looking for, if anything.
“But you said you saw the guys were unloading boxes? Boxes, not crates of drugs? If they were with the drug ring, wouldn’t they be picking up the crates to sell or loading them into a boat like you said?”
“That’s what Matteo said too. I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure this out too.” I trail off as I walk around the plastic-wrapped tower and spot something down the large row of boxes. It’s a large black arrow drawn onto the side. Usually I wouldn’t have paid it any mind, but it’s the first arrow I’ve seen. “I see an arrow.”
There’s a second arrow farther down the row, and a third that points halfway down another plastic-wrapped tower at a smaller stack of boxes.
“Don’t touch anything,” Lawrence warns as I use my flashlight to pick my way across to the boxes. “Especially if the DEA uses this as a sting to catch the person who comes for these.”
“I can’t tell, but I think these are the same kinds of boxes I saw the guys loading out of the truck the night of the explosion.” I turn and sweep my light to the left. No more arrows to be seen. “But if the trucking company wasn’t picking up the drugs from the bust and was just dropping off boxes, why was the Golden Arrow here?” I sigh and run a hand over my head, which skews the wig. The sound of a door shutting comes from another part of the building, and I freeze, a cold sweat forming on my brow. Lawrence and I both click off our flashlights.
When the sound doesn’t repeat, a sneaking suspicion dawns. I whisper frantically to L, “What if this is a setup by the Golden Arrow? What if he called the police to tell them we’re here? I don’t want to get caught for nothing.” It could be so much worse than the Golden Arrow planting evidence on me in the hopes of Matteo discovering it. The Golden Arrow could be out-and-out framing me for the crimes.
Lawrence has ducked and is fiddling with the nearest box. We don’t have time for fiddling. We need to get out. There’s the sound of tape ripping away from cardboard, as loud as a gunshot in the silence.
“Are you opening boxes? I thought you said we shouldn’t touch anything.”
“This box says ‘Genius Comics.’” Or I think that’s what he says, given the flashlight clutched in his teeth.
“What?” I crouch beside him and take in the pile of boxes, all neatly marked with Genius Comics packing tape and form shipping labels.
“Did you know Genius uses this warehouse?” L asks.
“No. But this can’t be a coincidence, right?”
This time I definitely hear something from within the warehouse, and we freeze again after clicking off our lights.
“Do you think someone’s here?” I hate that my voice quavers. The police? Matteo? I should have thought twice about following some stupid scribble in a notebook. I rushed in full bore, per my usual, which is probably just what the Golden Arrow wanted me to do.
“Could be a night guard,” Lawrence says, though I can tell he’s placating me. His eyes are worried too. “We probably should leave.” He looks briefly at his phone before shoving it into his pocket. “Shift probably starts at ten, and it’s nine forty-nine.”
I’ve stopped listening. I’m too busy leaning around Lawrence and peering at the box he opened. I click on the flashlight but keep my hand over the top to stop it from lighting up our area of the warehouse. “They
’re Hooded Falcon comics.”
I reach in, expecting to meet the resistance of stapled spines, but they’re loose pages. “What the heck? It’s just the covers of the comics.” Old-school tear sheets—the ones bookstores send back to prove they haven’t sold the comics. Returning the whole comic is too costly, so they just send back the cover torn off for a refund. I reach down to see if the whole box is made up of the single-page covers of The Hooded Falcon or if there are full comics at the bottom. My fingers encounter a different type of paper, or not really paper at all. I press harder, and it gives ever so slightly. A brick? Why would you put a brick at the bottom of a comic book tear-sheet box?
“I thought I said we needed to go, MG.” The stack of boxes blocks us from the main aisle, but that doesn’t stop a fidgety Lawrence from peering around them repeatedly.
Each time he looks, I’m sure we’ll be discovered, but I can’t stop now. “In a second. Give me your phone.” I’m frantically pulling the tag off the box Lawrence opened.
“Use yours.”
“Mine slid down my boot, and it’s at my ankle. Give me yours.”
“MG—”
I’m positively frantic now, and I have weird tremors running through my legs. I’m panting like I’ve just run an Iron Man. “I need to take a picture. I think this is it. This is the thing we’re going to find,” I hiss at him. Finally I feel the weight of his phone in my hand. “Are we clear? No one is around?”
“Well, not that I can see, but, MG, I worked security for years. I think we need to go. Now. Before the shift for the guards starts.”
I flick up the camera icon on his screen and start madly fiddling with the functions of the camera. “Okay. I need five seconds, and then we can get out of here.”
“Five seconds to what?” he asks as I take pictures of everything around us in rapid succession, the flash on the phone blinding us in the process. “Oh shit, girl. Warn a queen before you do something like that and get us caught.”
I blink tears from my eyes as I blindly snap one more picture. We pause as a door closes somewhere. Footsteps.
I want to pee my pants the way I did when I got stage fright in my third-grade musical. I don’t deal with stressful situations well at all. “Oh my God, do you think they saw the light?”
“MG, the Martians saw the flash from that phone.” His head swings frantically side to side, gauging the boxes around us.
The squawk of a radio and heavier footsteps approach. Oh no, oh no, oh no. I am going to jail. We are going to jail. And that’s if this is a cop. If it’s the White Rabbit . . . well, it’s curtains for us.
I must have said that last part out loud because L answers, “Not if I can help it. Up.”
“Up?”
“Up.” He puts his hands under my butt and boosts me up. I scramble as quietly as possible on top of the towering stack of boxes wrapped in plastic and go still. Beside me I don’t hear anything but a grunt, and suddenly L is on top of a taller stack of boxes.
Immobility is the name of the game. I’m an icicle. I’m a statue. I’m a box. I’m Trogdor’s Halloween costume. I’m sitting on top of a stack of plastic, and if the guard below us looks up, what am I going to say? “Oh, uh . . . hi. Lovely day for warehouse tanning.” The wig on my head is stifling, and I fight every urge in my body to scratch the itch on my nose.
Outside the warehouse, I hear a car backfire and tires screech, and a bright flash of headlights beams through the window as the car pulls a U-turn. I look over at L. We’re completely exposed, lit up as bright as daylight. I can’t breathe. My muscles feel weak and stiff at the same time. And the bridge of my nose itches something fierce, impossible to ignore.
Directly below the stack I’m sitting on, someone coughs. Then the radio crackles to life again. “It’s just kids spinning doughnuts outside again. Maybe call patrol and have them cruise by.”
I feel like I’ve heard that voice before. I chance a look down. The guard looks an awful lot like the cop who took Casey Junior’s statement. What is his name? Officer James?
Why would Officer James be working guard duty on a building the police aren’t supposed to be watching anymore?
We sit there as he walks around the boxes, scuffing his feet. My heart is in my throat, my ears rushing and ringing with my pulse. My drink from the party threatens to make a repeat appearance.
Several long minutes pass, and just as I’m getting ready to break, a phone rings below us. Officer James answers with a clipped hello, then silence.
“Yes, sir, the boxes are here. Pickup at eleven o’clock.” A pause. “No, sir, nothing out of the ordinary.” A third pause, and this time the voice is lower and shaky when it replies. “I took care of it, sir. Made it look like he hung himself in jail. I don’t think he’ll be making his plea bargain anymore. I would say his father has been adequately warned about the dangers of discussing this matter with the police.”
A fresh wave of nausea crashes over me. My fingers clench in reaction, and it’s everything I can do to keep still and quiet. Lawrence must read it on my face because his eyes narrow to slits, and he shakes his head as forcefully as he can while lying on a pile of teetering boxes.
“Yes, sir, wire it to my offshore. Thank you.” A click.
Oh my God. Officer James has killed someone. Someone in custody. Someone whose father needed warning about working with the police, and someone whose plea bargain was to trade information about the White Rabbit. It must have been Huong Yee. Son of the printing press owner. The kid who was going to out a cop and testify about the White Rabbit. Bastard.
Footfalls slowly fade, and I begin to breathe again. Feeling comes back to my fingers and toes as my oxygen reaches normal levels. After a few moments of intense silence, I hear Lawrence slide down, then feel a hand on my leg.
I step into his palms and, like some sort of ill-trained acrobat, manage to turn my ankle again, landing with my stomach on his head, then fall halfway down his back before he can catch me and right us both.
“You are a terrible cat burglar,” L says as he pulls me toward the illuminated exit sign.
“I like to think of myself as a corgi burglar. I don’t like cats.” Corgis aren’t graceful either.
He uses his phone to look at the door, then pushes through, pulling me after him, and we spill out into the night air. It’s thick with the smell of burning rubber and exhaust. Somewhere inside the building, a sound rings out of the dark. An impossibly loud beeping.
“Come on, we need to go. Now. That must have been a fire exit. We just set off an alarm.”
In the distance, a police siren wails to life.
I’m already limping down the street toward the car when L spins me around, grabs my hand, and starts running the opposite way. “Never lead them directly to your car! We’ll go two blocks up and then two over, and then double back.”
I’m out of breath already as we dash down side streets and through alleys. I’m sure we make as much noise as two bulls in a china shop, but we don’t stop.
“Is that something you learned as a security guard?” I ask.
“No, it’s something I learned from breaking up with dramatic men.”
Lawrence huffs and puffs too as we sprint across the main street.
Twenty minutes later, I’m drenched in sweat, I have insta-blisters all over both feet, my ankle is on fire, my wig is tucked into the top of my shirt, and we finally circle back around to the car. It’s untouched behind the dumpster, and truth be told, I’m glad we parked several blocks from the warehouse in question. It would have taken either a stroke of genius or a large police force to have searched this well already.
I slide into the driver’s seat and coax the engine to life. Sputtering, the Millennium Turd makes a less-than-spectacular exit from the alley, and soon we’re on our way home.
Lawrence slumps against the passenger window, already stripped down to his sparkly black T-shirt. I can tell he’s not impressed with my sleuthing skills. More than unimpress
ed. He seems out and out ticked. “We’re in trouble. I want you to take me home.”
“I know. Lawrence, that guard is a cop. I saw him at the station with Matteo. He’s got access to all of Matteo’s stuff. He’s going to know you worked for Casey. He’s going to hear your interview. I . . . I think he killed a suspect, a kid, Lawrence. He killed a kid to keep him from talking.”
“What you found in there had better be worth it, girl. This is bad.”
I flip his phone to him as I skid around a curve. “Here, look through what I took. There’s something in the bottom of that box. Those are tear sheets. They come back to Genius when comics are unsold as proof that the books have been destroyed. They’re trash. They’re counted, then discarded. There shouldn’t be anything else in those boxes.”
Lawrence flicks through his phone, scanning the pictures. He stops on one, then sits back. “That’s cash. That’s a big brick of cash.”
“In a box of comics?”
“This has to be how they’re moving the drugs around. MG, they’re using your comics. My guess is they pack their product in these boxes after the comics are printed, send the boxes to China, sell the drugs, then send back the tear sheets with the cash. It’s brilliant, really.” The Yees are a part of this. They bought into the printing press so they could package the drugs with the comics bound for Asia. Didn’t Ryan say just the other week that the comic was selling gangbusters overseas? Maybe not quite as well as heroin.
I nod slowly. “I need a name. I need proof, because if I show up at the LAPD with these pictures, guaranteed you and I are dead. Officer James isn’t working alone. I need the other journals. Casey Junior thinks that his father named his murderer in them. You told me Casey Senior was amassing evidence against someone. I need it to prove that he was going to unmask the White Rabbit. It’s got to have his name on it.”
The journals. Everything comes down to a dead man’s journals that have been missing for thirty years. And given the fact that I came face-to-face with our mystery man in Casey Senior’s office, the Golden Arrow is looking for the evidence too. I wasn’t sure what the Golden Arrow’s game plan was upon finding them, but given the fact that he or she set fire to a building, I’m not sure murder is off the table. Either way, I need those journals first.
The Frame-Up (The Golden Arrow Mysteries Book 1) Page 25