Chapter Twenty-Two
Nomi wishes Simon were more annoying so she’d feel more justified being irritated and angry, but the truth is that he’s only annoying occasionally, so she can’t sustain it. She curses herself for becoming too accustomed to him: her goddamn serial-killer neighbor.
Now he’s here with useful information, and it’s not as if she can afford to throw it back in his face. She’s like a shrimp lured in by a deep-sea anglerfish, compelled by the tiny light . . .
She leaves her key in the door to come closer, grab the newspaper. “Well, shit.”
“David Jeremy Axedale.” Simon nods toward the picture she’s examining. “It’s right there, in the caption.”
“Well, shit.”
“Did you visit Solange?”
Nomi pulls off her beanie and shoves it in her jacket pocket, still peering at the photo in the dim yellow light of the tenement corridor. “Her roommate said she hasn’t been home for three days, that she’s at Jeremy’s apartment. How did you find this?”
“Cevolatti’s newspapers, from the post office box. I took them with me by mistake when I grabbed my file.” Simon takes another step down the stairs; she appreciates that he’s no longer towering over her. “You said you got a list of Galetti’s properties?”
“I went to Tenth to make a report, and Captain Balter made himself feel good by giving me a nice bawling out in his office.”
Simon frowns. “Doesn’t sound great.”
“Show me the other articles,” Nomi says, and she sits down on the second-bottom riser.
Simon sits to match her, hands over another news article.
She squints at it as she talks. “Yeah, Balter—what a jerk. He called me a bunch of names, then directed me to Calvin Gaffney to file the report. Calvin wasn’t at his desk when I rocked up, but he had a pile of paperwork just sitting there, including a photocopied list of Galetti’s properties—I mean, my ex-partner said there was a list floating around.
Anyway, I took it and walked out of the station. ”
“You stole from a police station.”
“I stole from Calvin.” Nomi closes the broadsheet momentarily and dips into her inside jacket pocket, flashes Noone a glimpse of a folded photocopy, before opening the newspaper again. “If he even realizes it’s missing, he’ll just go get another copy. He really shouldn’t leave shit lying around.”
Simon looks like he’s trying very hard to keep a straight face. “Should I feel bad about pouring coffee down Calvin Gaffney’s shirt?”
“You should not. Calvin’s an asshole.”
“And disorganized with his paperwork.”
“Every now and then, you get a win.” Nomi finishes with the newspaper and sets it in her lap.
“All I had to do for this one was to humiliate myself in front of my old police captain for twenty minutes. As far as cost-benefit ratios go, it was worth it. So now we have a list of potential locations, and we know who Jeremy is.”
“‘We’?” Simon is being painfully nonchalant.
“I said what I said.” She stands up—she’s not going to clarify beyond that, she doesn’t have time—and gestures for the newspapers he’s still holding. “Give me that stuff.”
“What do we do now?”
“We get moving on everything first thing tomorrow. I’m just putting it all inside before I go out again.
” She returns to the key she left in the door, opens up enough to dump the pile of newspapers and the photocopy from her jacket pocket inside the entryway to her apartment, closes up the door and relocks it.
“You’re going out again?” Simon has stood up as well.
“Just to the Riverview. Mischa will be there, and he said he’d look for info for me on the dealer delivery angle. If we can find out the name of the new dealer, and where they’re collecting their supplies from, it might help narrow those properties down.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“Nope.” She softens the refusal. “You have a shift at Gennaro’s in a few hours.”
“Yes, but—”
“I’ll be fine.”
Simon’s brows knit. “Be careful.”
“I’m always careful.” Nomi retrieves her beanie, jams it back on her head, studying his face. It hasn’t escaped her attention, how haggard he looks. “You should get some sleep before work. You look like shit.”
“Wow, thanks.” But this interaction has been less antagonistic than when they last spoke, a few hours ago, and he seems faintly relieved. He turns to head upstairs, turns back. “I finish at eleven. Don’t go exploring Galetti’s properties without me.”
“You got it.” She checks her watch. “I’ve gotta go. It’s nearly midnight.”
“Nomi?”
“What?” She’s at the top of the stairs to the ground floor.
He gestures toward his own head. “You, uh, need your stitches out. They’ve been in nearly six days.”
“Tomorrow,” she promises, and then she’s gone.
There’s nothing like Gansevoort Street in all its chaotic, nasty, lewd, bustling glory in the middle of the night.
Refrigerated trucks are humming, traffic and people trundle around, lights cut through the dark.
The scents of meat and diesel strike up through her nose, and there’s a breeze starting to whip up the sidewalk.
Huddled deep in her jacket, Nomi marches briskly past puddles of standing water near the drains.
The temperature is crisp, and the cobblestones are slippery.
She’s feeling good, and it’s not just because she’s cut recently: Tonight has been a seesaw of disaster and triumph, but it looks like things might actually be tipping toward triumph, and when does that ever happen?
When she gets to the Riverview and Mischa’s not there, it still doesn’t spoil Nomi’s mood.
“You just missed him, hon,” Cherie calls out. “He’s gone up to the corner.”
“Thanks, Cherie.” Nomi reverses course.
The corner is the Triangle building. She follows Greenwich until it turns into Ninth Avenue, finally arrives at the pink slice of nightclub heaven.
Friday night, the outside curb is absolutely pumping, and it takes her a minute to weave between patrons and pimps and dealers and tourists before she finds Mischa near the entrance to Hellfire.
“Well, hello!” He’s in leather pants again, which now makes more sense on this cold night, and a voluminous purple parka along with his regular Day-Glo headband. “How are you, sweetie?”
“Good,” Nomi says. “Great. Any word on that thing I asked you about?”
“No-thing,” Mischa enunciates. “No damn thing at all. I’m real sorry. I asked everyone I know.”
“That’s okay, man. Don’t worry about it. You did your best.” She can’t help being disappointed, though.
Mischa makes a face. “Ugh, I feel bad about it. Is there anything else you need, maybe?”
She considers. She still hasn’t taken any Valium, and she’s only got the one tab left—but perhaps tonight she can stand to relax a little. “Actually, yeah. You wanna help me out with my usual?”
“Of course!”
Mischa has secret pockets everywhere for his various products—he roots inside his jacket. They make the exchange. High above, a quiet grumble of thunder, maybe some bad weather coming in. Nomi’s about to thank Mischa and walk off when she sees it.
Farther ahead, outside the entrance to Big Mouth, Lamonte’s flunky Ray Dinkins is making a performative farewell with one of the hookers from the club.
She’s hanging on his arm. He’s laughing and waving her off.
He looks pretty drunk—he’s having trouble pouring himself into the back seat of a cab—and he’s alone; Nomi clocked that immediately.
No Gino, no Claude, no Eric Lamonte, just Ray in his orange satin shirt and ugly pants and leather tie.
And here she is, without a ticket to the ball.
Nomi keeps her eyes on Dinkins as she speaks in an undertone to Mischa. “Meesh, are you carrying right now?”
Mischa shakes his head. “Baby, you know that’s not my scene.”
Dinkins finally manages to get himself into a cab, closes the door.
“Okay, no problem,” Nomi says. “Thanks for the help tonight.”
“Anytime!”
Dinkins’s cab drives off. Nomi makes a call.
She jogs over to the next cab in the rank, pushing aside a young guy with George Michael hair, who calls out, “Fucking bitch!”—Nomi takes it as a compliment.
Her cab driver is a twentysomething Black guy with a high forehead, and when she tells him to follow the other cab, he looks over with his eyebrows raised almost into his hairline.
“Really? Like something out of a movie?”
“Really. Stay close, but not too close.”
He’s not too bad at tailing, actually. They follow Dinkins’s circuitous route, make it all the way to West Seventeenth and Tenth Avenue before Dinkins’s cab makes a turn into a street that Nomi thinks might be a dead end, so she tells her guy to turn right onto Tenth near a closed parking lot and let her out farther down the block.
“Okay, here—drop me here.” Nomi points, and he pulls up near a street sign for West Nineteenth.
“You sure?” The cab driver peers through the window at the shadowed corners and listing street poles. Wind blows trash along the line of a wall on the other side of the street. “This place looks sketchy as hell.”
“Just drop me. It’ll be fine.”
“Okay.” He clearly thinks this is dubious. “I hope I don’t hear about no white lady getting murdered here on the news tomorrow.”
But he takes her money just the same, drives away. Nomi zips her jacket against the cold, checks around the corner: The red glow of the taillights from Dinkins’s cab recedes up ahead. She turns and quicksteps down the street, trying to stick to patches of dark.
The cab driver was right; the whole area is sketchy as hell and largely deserted.
She can smell brine and rust; they’re near the Chelsea Piers and the West Side Highway, and wind is blowing in off the bay.
There’s an Anywheels car and van repair place, closed for the night.
Rats scurry along the side of a curling chain-link fence; most of the industrial buildings are crumbling, with chipped bricks and flaking paint.
If this is the area that Galetti wants to buy up and refurbish, it might actually be an improvement?
All she knows is that she’s out here in the dark in the middle of nowhere with no weapon. Not ideal.
But that’s not her problem right now: Dinkins’s cab has slowed to a crawl and stopped near a decommissioned mariners’ hotel.
Hanging back, she watches as Dinkins somehow manages to totter his way out of the cab, which takes off like it’s glad to get out.
Nomi creeps to match Dinkins as he makes his way along a brick wall with a series of garage doors.
Then he turns left into an alley, and she nearly loses him.
Shit shit shit. Nomi jogs closer, trying not to break an ankle on the cracked, weedy sidewalk, or accidentally kick a brick and alert Dinkins to her presence.
Okay, she’s got him again. He’s nearly at West Nineteenth and he’s coming up on an old two-story warehouse behind a tall plywood fence smeared with graffiti.
Beside a rolling garage shutter, there’s a door in the fence; Dinkins uses a key, staggers through, locks up behind himself.
Nomi grimaces: It’s a place she probably can’t access without blowing that she’s here. She does a little recon, but the plywood turns into brick fence farther on the left, and a horribly exposed chain-link arrangement on the right. She’s not climbing that. Is that it? Looks like that’s it.
Unless she’s prepared to wait.
Nomi finds a dark place with an overhang, between a broken-down car with melted tires and a burned-out streetlamp.
It’s not the greatest spot, and now the wind is sweeping a fine mist into the street, but it’ll have to do.
She pulls her beanie down low, hunkers into her jacket and scarf, settles in.
The first half hour, she catalogs all the features of the street and the building; the second half hour is when the wind picks up and the cold starts to creep into her legs.
It’s a lot easier doing surveillance when you’re sitting in an unmarked with a hot coffee, she’s willing to admit.
But this cold is something she signed up for, and like she told Simon once, she has a high pain threshold.
A storm’s coming in, wind gusting like it’s being exhaled by a giant; at least the buildings around her provide some protection.
What if this warehouse is the place where they’re holding Brittany?
Nomi chews a nail, thinking about it. She feels the pull of the idea like a strong magnet.
The girl could be in there, awaiting rescue .
. . But plunging in without proper reconnaissance would be incredibly stupid.
Nomi has to remind herself of this over and over.
A tomcat prowls by the plywood fence she’s watching, and Nomi gets a hankering for a cigarette; but even if she had one, she wouldn’t be able to smoke it without the red ember giving her away.
She’s also itchingly aware of the Valium she just bought, sitting inside the key pocket of her jeans, and has to turn her mind toward something else.
Something not Simon Noone and all his accompanying mess.
By the end of the second hour, just as she’s almost solidified into a block of ice and is ready to call it, there’s a rattle from the garage shutter. Nomi scooches deeper into her hiding place.
The shutter rolls up with a complaining clatter, and a car drifts out. When the headlights flick on, Nomi has to duck: She’s way more exposed here than she thought. But nobody shoots at her, or calls out, and the car doesn’t stop, just revs a little and slides up the street.
Nomi registers the people inside when the driver lights his smoke: Dinkins and Gino Hart are illuminated by the flame of Hart’s Bic. Then the car picks up speed and guns away.
It’s nearly 2:20 a.m. by her watch; another growl of incoming thunder sounds in the distance.
Nomi makes her way out of the dark streets toward a more populated area, and hopefully a cab.
Her fingers feel ready to snap off, her nose is numb, her toes have ceased to exist, and her knees are creaking, but all she can think is, Now I got you, Lamonte, you sick son of a bitch, and that pilot flame keeps her warm all the way home.