Maelstrom

Chapter 26: All Quiet ...

Tuesday, 10 days later

I sighed as I looked down at my pathetically brief weekly report.

Last week I'd had the meeting with Alejandro Castillo and Morales – both referred to only by file numbers, as instructed – to report. I'd decided to just pretend I'd never left the main bar that night and simply noted the time of their arrival, the guessed-at time of Castillo's departure, and the time of Alkaev and Morales's relocation to the back office. I finished the report with a brief speculation that Morales and his security had left through the alley door (technically they had, though they had left feet first), a note of Alkaev's briefly observed presence on Friday night, and the admission that he had not been seen on Saturday.

I had no doubt that Morales was probably classified as "missing, presumed dead" shortly after his meeting with Alkaev, and it might be speculated in the bureau that the new-mobster-in-town had had some role in his disappearance, but I couldn't be the one to confirm it. Surely the Castillo family had surmised what had happened and were probably now treading a bit more carefully around the Santiago cartel and their new local representative.

This week's report, though, only included three lines. I'd thought I'd spotted a quick glimpse of Alkaev on Wednesday night at his usual spot at the rail of the balcony, staring down at me (I'd left that last part out of the report), but the box lights had been left off so it was difficult for me to see for sure; I was going on the feeling that he was up there as much as on any actual sighting.

On Friday and Saturday nights he'd come in through the front door, both times strolling the length of the bar and making white-hot eye contact with me (again, I left that bit out) before disappearing into the back, not to be seen again for the rest of the night.

That wasn't much for DiMarco, but it was something. I had heard from the other bartenders that the bouncers were being much more aggressive lately about clearing indigents from the area around Asylum. I didn't know if that was because Alkaev knew that some of them might be NYPD undercovers or whether he thought a homeless presence was bad for business; either way, with that surveillance angle gone, he had inadvertently made my legitimate placement in the club more valuable and, consequently, more secure.

I stuffed the report in an envelope addressed to the PO box my lieutenant kept for this purpose, jammed a clean bra, panties, and socks in my backpack, and grabbed my coat from the closet. Though I always wore my workout gear under my clothes to go to the gym and always came home to shower, I couldn't stand wearing the sweaty cotton/spandex out on the street for the inevitable market detour and long walk home.

Checking that the lobby of my building and the stairwell was empty, I dropped the envelope into the old-fashioned mail slot in the wall designated for outgoing post and headed out the door, earbuds pumping for my pre-gym walking warm-up.

I had already worked up a light sheen from the free weights by the time I dragged myself onto the treadmill and punched in the "hill climber" program.

I sighed. The small neighborhood gym I had joined when I had moved into the area was starting to lose its novelty. As Lärke I took both classes and private lessons at the New Amsterdam Fencing Academy on Broadway and practiced krav maga at a studio near my condo to keep in shape, but I needed to keep everything about my two lives as separate as possible, hence the local gym membership. Unfortunately, working out without the mental stimulation that fencing and fighting provided was leaving me bored. Really bored.

Maybe I could get into parkour, I mused. I certainly lived in the right environment for practicing it, and who knows, it might even come in handy in my career as a cop. I made a mental note to check out nearby studios; it was bound to be better than just slogging away on this stupid machine.

I sighed and turned around on the treadmill to start climbing backwards, imagining myself leaping around the urban landscape in pursuit of an agile fugitive, and found myself staring into the storm-blue eyes of Ivan Alkaev.