Kalif probably wasn’t thrilled with that plan, but he didn’t argue further.
I hurried up the ramp and reached the top just in time to see a man with Reuben’s shoes climbing into a dark green Suburban across the street.
“You still there?” I asked Kalif.
“Here,” Kalif said. “Headed toward you now.”
“Slow down,” I said. “He’s climbing into a car. We don’t want to pass him.”
“Slowing,” Kalif said.
I waited behind one of the concrete pillars until I heard the Suburban start, and then peered out to watch as it drove away, making a mental note of the license plate. A second later, our rental pulled up at the top of the ramp.
I walked to our car as quickly as I dared and climbed into the passenger seat. Ahead, Reuben’s car stopped at a light. We were separated by five or six cars, but could still see him well enough. At least his vehicle was tall.
I pushed my seatback down far enough that the headrest hit the back seat. If we needed to follow him again, we’d need new faces. I noted Kalif had already changed his—he must have had a good opportunity while he was driving around.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” Kalif asked. “Reuben might have seen you get into the car.”
I righted my seat. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “Good point.”
Kalif tailed Reuben from a distance, and only had to run one red light to do it. After about four blocks, he pulled into another parking garage—this one above ground.
“This has got to be your dad,” I said. “Only a shifter would have these places memorized.”
“We can’t just watch the exits,” Kalif said. “Not if he means to shift inside. But I’m going after him then. Not you.”
My fingers twitched. “I shift better than you.”
“Sure,” Kalif said. “But he may have already seen us following him, and if he has, he’ll kill you.”
“He might kill you, too.”
Kalif pulled the car over and climbed out, leaving the keys in the ignition. “I’m his son. If he does decide to kill me, he won’t do it on sight.”
I couldn’t be sure that was true, of course, and neither could Kalif. He wasn’t wearing his home face, and even if he was, Mel might kill first and identify the body later. But it was plausible, and that was the best we were going to get.
Plus, if Kalif followed him now, it would be my turn later, when it was time to case Mel’s apartment.
I moved into the driver’s seat.
“I’m going to circle,” I said. “Please be careful.”
Kalif nodded and headed into the parking garage. I hoped I hadn’t delayed him too long by arguing.
Next time, we definitely had to choose a point man. And if I wanted to emerge with my sanity intact, I had better make sure it was me.
As I circled, I counted four exits to the garage—two driveways and two stairwells. I cut through an alley along the back side of the garage, and there I changed my hair to a pixie cut and tightened my frame, altering all my features so they were smaller and daintier. I flipped down the mirror on the sunshade to check myself, and had to make my jaw more square and my nose more hooked to avoid being too beautiful; it was always my impulse to be pretty, which was probably social conditioning.
My phone rang as I hit the alley the second time, and I answered.
“Hello?” I said.
I could hear Kalif’s voice but not make out his words.
“You’re breaking up,” I said. My heart pounded. Damn garages. This hadn’t felt as horrifying when it had been Kalif on the outside, not me.
This time I caught the words "street" and "gone.”
I sped up, driving faster than was safe to the end of the alley, and pulled out onto the street. Ahead, I could see someone descending the stairway from the second floor of the garage. I passed by, looking up at him. This man looked younger—maybe mid-twenties—and wore baggy sweats and a hoodie.
He was white, now, but he was wearing the same work boots Reuben had been wearing. That might mean he was unprepared, or that he didn’t think anyone was following, or that he just couldn’t find anyone at the moment to bribe to swap shoes with him.
Even better, he was limping
I put the phone back to my ear. “I see him,” I said. “He’s on the staircase, and he’s definitely shifted.”
“Good,” Kalif said. “I’m on the east side of the building.”
I pulled around the building and found Kalif on the sidewalk. Now it was my turn to park the car and leave the keys.
“I’m going to follow,” I said. “You take the car.”
Kalif didn’t argue with me, which saved me from having to point out that he’d just lost his mark in a contained space, or try to find out if he was absolutely sure he hadn’t been seen.
I ran to the corner, then corrected myself to a casual walk before I moved out into view of the staircase.
The man in Reuben’s boots had already hit the street, and was waiting for cars to pass so he could jaywalk. I was already at the corner, so I punched the crosswalk button. By the time the light chirped for me, my mark was already ahead of me. He didn’t look back over his shoulder, but sauntered down the street away from the hospital like he didn’t have a care in the world. Besides his bum knee, at least.
I followed, matching his meandering pace. I pulled out my phone and fiddled with it, sending Kalif a text message about the direction we were going. Park and wait, I wrote. I’ll tell you where to come when you follow.
K, Kalif texted back.
I only had to follow Reuben four blocks before he walked into an apartment complex. As I cruised by, I saw him slip a key into the lock of a basement apartment and disappear inside.
“Gotcha,” I whispered, and texted Kalif the address.
I walked around the complex, studying the exits. The apartments were lined up in rows, so the doors all faced one direction, and the back windows another. The windows to the basement apartments were set deep into window wells, which would make them easy to climb into, but possibly noisy to open, since debris tended to settle in the bottom of the wells. But the entire back part of the complex was lined with a chain-link fence, so unless Mel felt the need to jump the fence, the only way out was the way he’d come in.
Our rental car pulled up on the street, and I joined Kalif in the front seat.
“If you pull back a little, we’ll be able to see his back window,” I said. “Or we can watch his door from the corner. But if we want to watch both, we’ll have to split up.”
Kalif surveyed the apartment building. “We need to watch both, if we want to be sure he’s gone before we go in.”
Which we did. “Okay,” I said. “You stay here and watch the window. I’ll scope out the corner and find an inconspicuous place to hide. When he leaves, I’ll call you on the headset before I go in.”
Kalif put a hand on my arm. “I should do it.”
I cringed. I couldn’t wait outside while he walked into that apartment alone. I could not.
“It’s my turn,” I said. “I took point, then you did, so . . .”
Kalif glared at me. “You set me up for that,” he said. “But you followed him to the apartment, so technically it’s my turn.”
Damn it. I had, and it was. “Let me do it,” I said. “I have more field experience than you.”
“Barely,” he said. “And that excuse isn’t going to hold up for much longer.”
He was right, it wasn’t. I forced a smile and elbowed him in the arm. “Don’t tell me you’re not going to let me go into danger because I’m a girl. I put up with the chauvinism, but that’s taking it too far.”
Kalif didn’t return my smile. “You know that’s not what this is about.”
I took that for a concession, even though it wasn’t one. I kissed him on the cheek. “I love you. Call if you see anything.”
And then I got out of the car and moved toward the corner, to case the apartment of just one of Ka
lif’s relatives who would most definitely kill me if I gave him the chance.
Thirteen
I camped out in the bus stop down the street from the apartment building, waiting for a bus that never came. I kept up appearances by checking the schedule, and growing increasingly fidgety and restless as time went on.
That wasn’t hard to fake. Forty-five minutes and three grumpy bus drivers later, it occurred to me that Mel might not leave his apartment again today. He might have cameras mounted on the building. He might be watching me wait for him right now.
I stood up, looking at the bus schedule again, and started down the street in a huff. At the very least, I needed to change my clothes and my persona before continuing the stake out. And I needed a better excuse than hanging out on the corner.
I had almost passed the apartment building when I saw a door open out of the corner of my eye.
My heartbeat quickened. The open door was Mel’s. The person who stepped out didn’t look like Mel or like Reuben or like the man I’d tailed out of the parking garage—he was tall and dark, with his hair slicked back against his scalp. He might have been a roommate or a partner of whoever lived there.
Except that he, too, was limping.
I didn’t take too good of a look beyond that, though. I kept walking down the street, past the car where Kalif was watching. I made eye contact with him without making any other physical sign that I recognized him, and passed him by.
Kalif was behind me now, between me and the man who had to be Mel. Sure, Mel had gone in the other direction, but if he doubled around, at least Kalif had my back.
I allowed myself one glance over my shoulder, and found that Kalif had climbed out of the car and was jogging after me.
It was the speed with which he approached that made my heart hammer. Stop, I told myself. There was no way Mel had stolen—or matched—Kalif’s clothes that quickly. This wasn’t him. I didn’t see Mel at all.
The prickling on my neck intensified. That meant he might be anywhere.
“Jory,” Kalif said. Then, before waiting for a response, he held out his hand.
I didn’t relax, even after I received his signal.
“Was that him?” he asked. “The guy with the dark hair?”
I nodded. Kalif pointed down the street. “He went the other way. We should move. We don’t know how long he’ll be gone.”
The man who might be Mel had kept going in the other direction.
He wasn’t coming after me at all.
I took deep breaths, and tried to stop acting like a psycho. “Okay,” I said. “Pretend I wasn’t running away like an idiot.”
Kalif rested a hand on my shoulder. “We can leave if you want.”
But we couldn’t. Not really. Aida hadn’t asked us to find more leads to Mel. She’d asked us to find him.
If we were going to turn him over to her, we had to get into the apartment, to verify his identity. And then, once we’d done that, we could camp out, wait for him to come back, and then call her and tell her we had him. Giving him over to the Carmines would require the same steps.
A lump formed in my throat. Once we had the verification we’d come here for, Kalif and I had a decision to make.
One I wasn’t sure I was ready for.
But first things first. We had to get into the apartment.
“I’m going in,” I said. I paced back to the car. I had my phone and headset in my pocket, but I didn’t put it in. I didn’t want to talk inside if it wasn’t absolutely necessary, in case Mel was recording. “From here you can see him if he comes back, right? So watch the front of the building.”
Kalif hesitated. “I really think I should—"
“Don’t argue,” I said. “Arguing costs us time. Besides—"
Kalif shook his head. “Besides, you just can’t stand being the one watching while someone else does the point work. I get it. Now finish it before he comes back. But if my father kills you, I’m never going to forgive either of you for it.”
That should have been a joke. I wanted to laugh, and bump shoulders with him, and remember what life felt like when I wasn’t being constantly strangled by panic and fear.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, and Kalif didn’t look like he was joking, either.
“I’ll be careful,” I said.
Kalif opened the door to climb back into the car. “If I thought you wouldn’t,” he said, “I’d argue some more. No matter how much time it cost us.”
I shivered as I paced up the sidewalk toward Mel’s apartment. The trouble with the approach was that it was wide open to the street, which meant that without a plausible cover that would physically screen me, I couldn’t pick the lock without risking a neighbor calling the police. Between my loitering at the bus stop and our discussion on the street, we were already risking attention, even if Mel didn’t have a camera pointed at us.
I searched the building as I walked up, but I didn’t see any evidence of security cameras. The ones that were installed at the corners of the buildings had birds’ nests obscuring their lenses, and had probably always been for show.
I had to make this fast. Get in, get the evidence, make it look like a regular break in instead of a shifter after him, and get out before he could come back for me. I gave myself two or three minutes, tops.
But first I had to be sure that the apartment was empty, so I didn’t encounter any nasty surprises.
For that I used one of the easiest tricks of home invasion—one so basic, it was employed even by teenage thieves. I knocked once on the door, and then tapped my nails on my jeans, waiting. I listened carefully for footsteps, but heard only silence.
If there was someone else inside, they might come to the door, or they might ignore it. So I knocked twice more, and then pounded on the door with all my might.
Unless someone was purposefully lurking in there, the apartment was empty.
I stood in front of the doorknob to block it from view of the street, and then tried it.
It was locked.
I walked around back and lowered myself into the window well of Mel’s apartment. My feet crunched on the bed of leaves collected in the bottom, and I crouched down, out of sight of the street.
The blinds were closed, so I couldn’t see into the room without getting the window open. The frame was old and rusting at the corners, so I applied force to the pane, pushing it upward to jam it off of its track. The metal popped, and the sliding pane came free. I moved it an inch to the side and rested it against the other half of the window. Then I slid my fingers through the crack, reached under the corner of the blinds, grabbed the cord, and hauled them up.
No alarms sounded, but if I’d triggered one, it would almost certainly be silent, meant to alert Mel rather than deter me. I didn’t see any wires around the window frame, but the alarm sensor might be motion-sensitive, which meant it could be planted anywhere in the room that faced the window.
From the window I could see a shoe sticking out from beneath a leather jacket that lay rumpled near the end of the bed. A red patent-leather high heel. The bed was a twin, but now that I looked closer, about half of the clothes on the floor would fit a woman—including something draped over the back of a chair that I was pretty sure was a muumuu the size of a tent.
My chest tightened. This looked very much like a shifter horde—a collection of clothes that would fit many different people, all piled up in one room like they’d been worn recently.
I’d always thought that Mel was as fastidious as Aida—their house had always been bare and immaculate, hardly lived in, all necessary objects kept in their places. But this room looked like a tornado had ripped through. Clothing coated the floor. Empty paper coffee cups and soda cans collected on the nightstand. Blankets piled up on the bed in a disorderly heap.
I tried to imagine Mel keeping his room like this, and failed. Besides the mess, the room was tiny. Mel must have come on hard times if he’d settled on an apartment this small—even smaller than t
he one I’d been sharing with Mom. I kind of wished I could rub that in, except the idea of being face to face with him made my arms break out in hives.
Also, Mel didn’t drink drive-thru coffee—not if he could help it. And I’d never seen soda in his house. Was that Aida’s thing? I hadn’t thought so. Mel liked expensive things—I’d always thought it was because they fed into his delusions that he was better than other people.
I worried for a moment that I’d gotten the wrong apartment, but there, in the corner, lay the boots Reuben had been wearing. I paused. Maybe we had the wrong guy.
But how many shifters could there be in the Bay Area with gunshot wounds to the knee?
No. This was more likely an elaborate cover. A persona Mel used, even for his apartment, so if one of us came here, we’d dismiss the lead.
Still, it was enough of a discrepancy that I needed further proof.
Which meant I had to go inside.
Fourteen
I braced myself against the back of the window well. I’d probably passed a minute since I’d forced the window open—I could afford one more. I moved the window pane the rest of the way to the side and lowered my feet past the sill and dropped down onto a pile of t-shirts.
Something crunched underneath, and I hoped it was a soda can and not an alarm plate. No matter, though. If there was a motion sensor alarm in this room, I’d already triggered it.
Now was the time to move fast. I dropped the blinds again, so the open window wouldn’t be as obvious.
The contents of the closet confirmed my suspicions about the apartment’s occupant. Only a few pieces of clothing still hung in it, but at the back was a shelving unit stocked with handcuffs, disposable phones, a cell phone jammer, a Taser, and a bin of lock picks.
My eyes caught on a metal cylinder—the kind for compressed gas. I gently lifted it off the shelf and brought it toward my face, looking at the label in the light.
Sevoflurane, the label said.
A Million Shadows Page 12
