Say the Word(93)

Work on Monday flew by and as soon as the clock struck five, I was on the elevator, heading down to the lobby with my black backpack in hand. I didn’t know what “plans” Bash had in mind, and I had no intention of sticking around to find out.

When I finally reached the waterfront, plucking my way across the dilapidated pier as I approached the warehouse, I was having serious doubts about my plans for espionage. Armed only with my total lack of experience, Fae’s borrowed binoculars, and the disposable camera I’d picked up at Swagat yesterday as a backup in case my cellphone ran out of battery, I grew increasingly nervous as the brewery came into sight. I snapped a few pictures from a safe distance, leaning around the corner of an adjacent warehouse to keep my body out of sight from any lookouts — as I’d seen any number of Hollywood-manufactured spies do. Instead of approaching the brewery directly, like I had last week, I slipped down an alleyway on the far side of the abandoned building next door. The adjacent warehouse was a cannery, long fallen into disrepair, and not somewhere I’d normally want to explore. But, unlike the neighboring brewery, this cannery was special.

Its windows weren’t boarded up.

It had come to me last night as I tossed and turned in bed, mulling over possibilities for breaking into the brewery. I wasn’t a complete idiot — I knew a petite blonde woman with no covert training would never be able to sneak into such a place, especially with thugs like Smash-Nose and the Neanderthal patrolling the grounds. In a face-to-face altercation, I wouldn’t be able to overpower or evade them and — even on the off chance that I did — there was nothing to stop them from calling their friend Santos, who could issue a warrant for my arrest faster than I could say “in over my head.”

But then, as I conjured an image of the brewery in my mind, I had a realization.

I didn’t need to get inside. I just needed to see inside.

While the ground level windows were thoroughly boarded up to keep out prying eyes and looters, the upper floors’ panes had been left unbarred. If I could get into one of the adjacent buildings, climb to the third floor, and see through the windows, I’d have an all access pass to whatever was happening inside the brewery.

So here I was, spending my happy hour climbing a termite-eaten stairwell to reach the third floor of a dusty, decaying cannery. Simon and Fae had each called me twice already. Either they were pissed I’d been avoiding them all weekend, or they’d finally caught on to the fact that I’d shut them out of my investigation after our Santos surveillance run last week. They may’ve let the presence of the sex-trafficking storyboard in my apartment slide the other night, because I was in the midst of a Sebastian meltdown, but now that they’d had time to reflect, their worries about my sanity had probably reached DEFCON 1 levels.

After everything I’d learned, I didn’t want them involved. If something went wrong, I was going to land in a world of trouble. Plus, if I were trapped in a car with those two for any amount of time, the saga of Sebastian would inevitably come up — and for that conversation I’d need to fortify myself with at least a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. Possibly two.

I froze as a loose floorboard creaked loudly underfoot — I’d reached the top of the stairs. Stepping onto the third floor of the cannery, I tried to be light-footed as I crossed to the bank of windows that faced the brewery. There were faint signs of life here on the upper floors — a candle burnt down to a stub, a dusty blanket riddled with holes, a discarded book. Remnants of squatters long gone from here, if the thick coating of dust was any indication. My sneakers left a trail of footprints in the grime, like walking through a fall of snow on an early December morning.

When I came to the windows, I spent several minutes using the cuff of my sweatshirt to wipe the dusty residue off one of the panes at eye level. Peering out, I could just discern the building across the street through the smudged glass. From what I could see at this distance, the room directly across from me inside the brewery appeared to be an office. There was a wooden desk stacked high with papers, a laptop computer, and a small lamp that helped to light up the gloomy room.

About twenty minutes passed without any activity inside the brewery. I was about to head down to the second floor, to test my view from there, when the office door swung inward and two people entered, the dim lighting illuminating their figures in shadowy profiles. As they walked closer to the window, I strained my eyes to make out their faces.

I lifted my phone to eye-level, made sure the camera flash function was switched off, and snapped a few pictures through the dirty glass. Pulling back, I used my fingers to zoom in on the photos I’d just taken. As I zoomed, the resolution blurred and the images became grainy and useless. I couldn’t make out much of the figures inside the room, though I thought one of them might be a woman — the smaller stature was apparent despite the fuzzy quality.

Reaching into my backpack, I rummaged around until my fingers grazed Fae’s mini-binoculars. I popped off the lens caps, raised them to my face, and leaned closer to the pane. They were poorly crafted out of cheap plastic — I think Fae had purchased them at Duane Reade as a spontaneous two-dollar add-on item— but they magnified the room enough to see the larger of the two figures, who was standing closest to the window. It was definitely a man — a hulking one at that. It could easily be the Neanderthal I’d seen the other day or another like him.

I cupped my hands around my eyes to block the light and pressed the binoculars to the glass, squinting to bring him into better focus. His shirt was black, but there was something written in bold green script across the back of the garment.