24. Kat
twenty-four
Kat
The gym smells like old sweat and floor cleaner losing a war against it. Somebody mopped, hours ago, the ammonia gave up somewhere around the second row of heavy bags.
Those bags hang in a crooked line, four of them, patched with silver tape in strips that overlap like scales.
One has a split near the bottom seam, sand crusted around the tear.
The ring in the corner sits under a single fluorescent tube, canvas gone the color of weak tea, stains soaked in so deep they've stopped being accidents and started being history.
I like it here. That's the part I'd never explain to anyone. A place that has taken this many hits and still opens at six in the morning has more integrity than most people I interview.
The man waiting by the lockers has not taken a hit yet. That's obvious in how he's standing.
Mid-forties, windbreaker zipped to his throat, hands jammed in the pockets and jumping anyway. He keeps checking the door behind me, like a man doing inventory on his own escape.
"You came alone."
"I did."
"People usually say that but don't follow through."
I stop six feet out. Close enough to hear him, far enough that he doesn't feel worked.
"I'm alone. Nobody followed me in." Nobody followed me in because I peeled off my own protection detail like a fool, I am not putting that on the table right now. "You want to sit?"
I should be more frightened than I am, standing in an unlit gym with a shaking stranger and not one soul on this earth knowing where I am.
I slipped three trained men an hour ago, it did not feel only like defiance.
For the first time in a long time I breathe.
Six weeks of being cuddled, every route cleared for me, every exit counted before I reached it, I had forgotten this: the dangerous clarity of standing somewhere I could die and having walked in on my own.
I keep choosing the room with a single exit and call it the work.
On nights like tonight, I am not sure the work is the reason.
"No." He laughs, one short scrape of sound. "No, I don't want to sit."
A dented locker door hangs half open behind him, someone's hand wraps looped over the hook, gray and stiff. The radiator under the window ticks.
"Then talk to me. I'm listening."
He pulls a hand out of his pocket and rubs it across his mouth. His wedding ring catches the light.
"I did logistics. Freight forwarding, that's it, that's my whole life. Containers in, containers out." His voice drops even though the building is empty. "Then the insurance claims started coming through on cargo that never got damaged. Same broker every time. Same three consignees."
"Names."
"I can't give you the whole thing. I have kids." His eyes meet mine for the first time since he's been talking to me. "You understand that? I have kids, and the last guy who talked to a reporter about this got a call at his house. A birthday reminder. For his daughter."
Cold moves down my arms.
"Give me what you can carry."
He breathes out. "There's a name on the routing authorizations. Not the company. The person who signs off on the reroutes."
"Tell me."
"Haddad signs the security side. But the reroutes come from higher. Somebody they call the Steward. That's not a nickname, it's a title. It's on the paperwork like it's a job."
Steward. My heartbeat trips.
"Do you have…"
The lights go out.
All of them. Ring, lockers, the exit sign over the far door.
Everything.
The dark isn't total. There's a gray smear of streetlight through the high window, enough to see shapes, not enough to see faces.
"Run," the source says, his shoe squeaks and he's gone toward the back, a door banging somewhere I can't see.
I don't run. Running means a hallway I don't know.
My thumb finds the recorder in my coat pocket, already there, always there. I press it and drop into a crouch behind the heavy bags, the split one, sand grit under my palm.
Two steps. Somebody's on the mats near the entrance, and the mats give a person away, that soft rubber give under weight.
Count them. One set of steps. Slow. Patient. Not searching, sweeping.
My heart hammers so loud I'm sure he can hear it. I press my back against the bag and breathe through my mouth because nose-breathing is louder, a thing Naveed said once while checking a stairwell and I tucked it away without knowing I'd need it.
The steps stop. A phone light snaps on, thin and blue, and swings across the ring.
I move while the light is pointed away.
Low, along the row of bags, fingers dragging the floor for anything. Tape. A jump rope. Then something cold and round, a dumbbell, five pounds maybe, and I take it in my left hand because my right is the recorder hand and I'm not letting go of that either.
The light swings back. I freeze behind the last bag and the beam goes past my shoulder by a foot.
"Ms. Romero."
Polite. That's the part that turns my stomach. Nobody polite says your name in the dark.
I don't answer. Answering gives him my position, and I want his instead.
He walks toward the lockers, and metal scrapes, and I understand he's checking the row I was standing in two minutes ago. His back is to me now, phone light aimed into the locker bay.
I could go for the front door. Thirty feet of open floor and he'd hear me at ten.
He's between me and out. So don't go out. Go through.
I take the dumbbell and throw it hard at the far corner. It cracks against the radiator, and the sound explodes in the empty room, and he pivots fast toward it.
I'm already moving the other way, three fast steps, and I hit him from behind low and to the side, shoulder into the back of his knee, all my weight in it.
He goes down harder than I expected. The phone skids. He grabs my coat and I let him have the coat, twisting out of the sleeve, and I plant my heel on the hand that's holding the fabric and grind it, and he makes a sound like an animal.
Then his other hand catches my ankle.
The floor comes up and my elbow takes it. Pain white and immediate.
I kick with my free foot, no aim, just heel and hate, I hit something soft and he lets go.
Somewhere under the terror is a thing I will be ashamed of tomorrow.
Right now it feels good to fight back. Weeks of being the thing other people stand in front of, the shape to be moved and covered and kept behind glass, and here, on a filthy mat in the dark, I am not the package anyone is guarding.
I am the one grinding my heel into a stranger's hand until he screams. I don't have Naveed's training or a tenth of his size, but I have twenty-three years of rage that never had anywhere to go, and it turns out rage is its own kind of weapon once you stop apologizing for it.
My mother took it to a supervisor. My father mailed out résumés into a silence that had already decided about him.
They died being reasonable, both of them, doing everything the right way.
Right now with my teeth bared, my heel down and no aim but hate is the part of the bloodline that would not go quietly, and God help me, I’m glad to finally have somewhere to put it.
The front door bangs open, and a shape fills it that I would know in any light there is.
He doesn't come for me first.
Even flat on the floor with my elbow screaming: he goes past me.
Along the wall, low, checking the corner where the light was, then the ring, then the locker bay, moving so quietly the mats don't give him away at all.
The man on the ground scrambles up and out the back door and Naveed lets him go, because letting him go means not leaving the room.
Only when the room is his does he crouch in front of me.
"Where."
"Elbow. That's all."
His hands run over me anyway, shoulder, ribs, the back of my skull, the gentleness does not match his face.
His jaw could crack teeth. He helps me to stand and steers me into the locker room.
The fluorescent tube in here works, buzzing, throwing that green-white light over the tile and the rows of dented metal.
He shuts the door. Checks it. Turns.
"You left the route."
"I did."
"What the hell were you thinking Romero? Are you trying to get yourself killed?" His voice doesn't rise but it's laced with venom. "There were three ways into that building and you picked the one with no visual."
"I picked the one where the source would show up."
He stares at me. His hands are in fists at his sides, knuckles pale, he isn't looking at my face anymore. He's looking at my sleeve, the one that isn't there, torn away with the coat, my bare forearm scraped raw from wrist to elbow.
I can tell from his shallow breathing how angry he is. His chest stops working right for a second, and he fixes it right there in front of me, like a man resetting a bone.
He's terrified, and furious is the only shape he has for it.
"Naveed."
"Don't." He shuts his eyes. Opens them. "Do not say my name gently right now."
"Then look at me."
He does. And whatever was holding him together lets go.
He crosses to me in two strides, his hands cup my face. Those enormous scarred hands that have never once been unsteady around me are trembling against my jaw, and he touches me like I'm made of glass.
"You could have," he starts, and doesn't finish.
Heat floods through me so fast it's almost sickening, want and leftover terror braided into the same rope. My whole body is still screaming that I nearly died and the only argument against it is him, solid and warm and here, and I need proof the way I need air.
I grab the front of his shirt with my good hand and pull.
His mouth falls on mine, it isn't careful at all, it's a man checking for a pulse with his teeth, I make a sound against him. His palm slides to the back of my neck. Mine goes under his shirt, flat against his ribs, over the scar, feeling his heart slam.
He lifts me. The locker at my back, cold metal through my shirt, my legs wrap around him without asking permission.
Then his phone starts ringing against my thigh.