Chapter 19: Chapter 19 - The Albanian Hit
Chapter 19 - The Albanian Hit
He had been on the floor since eight o'clock and it was now eleven forty-three.
The time had been running in four-minute intervals in his head since he arrived, counted between the slow loops of his circuit around the main floor. The Saturday crowd was the densest of the week. The bar ran three deep and the late arrivals were standing two rows back from the runway because the chairs were taken. The dembow moved through the floor in its low steady pressure, forty minutes into the first set, the bass sitting in the chest at fifteen feet and becoming a wall past ten. The stage lights threw yellow warmth across the front rows. The light did not reach the east wall. Teo stood in the shadow at the edge of the room and preferred it there.
Teo saw the room in positions first.
Ricky was in the back corridor near the office. The move had happened at eleven-fifteen, away from his usual post at the bar's far end, which was a small deviation from the Saturday pattern. His phone had shown him something and he was processing it. The glass in his hand had not gone to his mouth in the last forty minutes. Teo had watched it.
Two soldiers worked the front. Vaca was one of them, the other a man named Pito who had been with the organization since before Teo arrived, both of them holding the door with the bored competence of men who had done this on a hundred Saturdays, their eyes tracking the entrance and the customers coming through.
Cris was on the south side of the bar, talking to a man in a Knicks jersey who was spending at the rail. Cris had pulled his jacket off at nine o'clock. The jacket was hanging on the break-room hook with the carabiner clipped to the inside zipper loop, spare car keys on it. Teo's own jacket was zipped.
The kitchen exit sat behind the bar, the door marked STAFF, forty feet from where Teo was standing. The alarm panel mounted above the handle had not worked since February.
The distances had been measured again at nine, then at ten-thirty. They had not changed.
His eyes had been on the stage for thirty seconds when he made himself stop.
She was in the third number of the set, moving with the precision that was hers alone on this stage, the precision of someone doing something correctly without being inside it. He knew her set by length now: thirteen minutes remaining, then a break, then the close-out set at one. The close-out set she would not finish. Her locker combination sat in his head, 14-31-09, given to him in September in the Honda. Bag packed since Tuesday. The single character "sí" had come back to his prepaid six days ago and he had not texted back and had not needed to.
The route from the bar to the STAFF door ran forty feet on a walk. Eight steps past the threshold put a hand on the kitchen exit. The whole crossing went nine seconds clean and could go faster if it had to.
His circuit moved to the north wall and kept moving.
At eleven forty-seven the side entrance opened.
Teo felt it before he saw it. The room's air pressure shifted with the wrong kind of door opening at the wrong end of it. His head turned before his body did.
Three men came through. Their jackets were wrong for the weather, heavier than November required, the chest-thickness moving wrong on the body. The single file spread into a triangle in four steps, eight feet between them before anyone had fully seen it. These were men who had done this in other rooms and had kept what worked.
The first shot cracked against every wall at once. The bar mirror went first. A long diagonal crack opened across it and then the whole panel fell in two pieces. A woman near the stage screamed. The room became something else entirely.
The stage lights cut.
The main board killed, all at once. The room went to emergency backup fluorescents, harsh and institutional, the wrong color for what a Saturday was supposed to be. In that flat white light the club revealed itself. The stage stood empty and lit from wrong angles. The bar mirror caught the fluorescent and threw it back cold. The faces in the audience were specific now, and afraid. People moved in every direction at once, screaming bodies pressing toward the street exit and the side entrance and anywhere that was not where the three men were standing. The bar went down, Vaca behind it or under it, glass finding the floor in a wave. A second shot went into the ceiling.
Teo was already moving.
Running was the thing people noticed in chaos even when everything else was unreadable, so he did not run. He moved fast and without friction, threading the bodies as the room required, past the bar's far end and past the man in the Knicks jersey flat on the floor with his hands over his head. His eyes were on the corridor entrance.
Ricky had moved. Of course he had. That was exactly the point.
The office door waited at the end of the corridor, fifteen feet past the dressing room. Behind the dressing room door the compressed sound of women deciding whether to open it or barricade it ran under everything else, and his pace did not slow for it. No one stood between him and the office. Vaca and Pito were at the front entrance where the Albanians had come through, and where the soldiers were supposed to be. Every soldier in the room was being pulled toward the threat. The back of the building was unguarded for thirty seconds.
Thirty seconds was also all Teo needed.
The office door swung open under his hand.
The room smelled like nothing. The desk lamp threw its circle of light over the desk and the two chairs. The Punta Cana print sat on the wall, beach and palm and the blue of a photograph taken somewhere neither of them had ever been.
The print held to its hinge at the left side, framed in lightweight aluminum. Teo crossed to it in four steps and swung it left. The safe was built into the concrete behind it: gray steel, combination dial, the model number stamped above the dial.
His hands were steady. They were always steady when it counted.
Six digits sat in his head. Ricky had opened this safe on a Thursday in September and a Tuesday in October, both times from the visitor's chair, both times under the assumption that the kid across the desk was looking at his phone. The kid had not been looking at his phone. He had counted the combination twice, eight weeks apart, and the second count had confirmed the first.
The dial went right four turns to the first number. Left three to the second. Right two to the third. The back three reversed the direction, the only thing Ricky had done differently from the standard sequence, and the mechanism gave. The bolt released with a sound too small for the weight of the moment.
The door pulled open.
House money sat in rubber-banded stacks on the left shelf, the money that would be checked against the books by tomorrow morning. Below it sat a separate loose stack, the money that did not appear in any book. The loose stack came out first. Two of the banded stacks came off the right side of the shelf, not the left, which would take longer to catch. Teo's jacket had two inside pockets. The money went into both and he buttoned them.
Fifty seconds in the room. The Punta Cana print swung back into place and the office door closed behind him as he had found it, the visitor's chair at its angle and the lamp inside its circle. When Ricky came back here, the safe would be the first place his hand went. The print would be the second. The count came after. Teo did not intend to be inside the city by the count.
The corridor was still empty. From the main floor came the sound of a panicked room, human pitch layered over human pitch, a crowd that did not know yet whether the danger was still present or had already passed. The music had cut when the lights cut. Without the dembow the room sounded exactly like what it was.
Hands loose at his sides and his jacket buttoned, Teo moved toward the bar at the pace of a soldier with somewhere to be. He had somewhere to be.
The kitchen exit waited forty feet ahead.
The STAFF door behind the bar gave onto the kitchen pass, with the industrial refrigerator on one side and the mop closet on the other. Thirty-year-old linoleum took his weight without sound. The gray metal exit waited at the far end under its dead alarm panel. His hand went to the bar handle and pushed.
Cold air came in first, then the alley. No alarm sounded. Eight months of nothing and tonight ran the same as every night before it.
The alley ran east and west, parking lot at one end and service road at the other. Sodium light from the road threw amber across the concrete in long streaks. His breath went visible in front of him. The door closed behind him on its pneumatic arm, the click of the latch small and final.
She was already there.
Ten feet west along the alley wall she stood with her back to the brick, the bag on her shoulder, her eyes on the service road instead of on the kitchen door. Her weight rode on her back foot. The street sneakers were on her feet. She had put them on before the lights cut.
Her eyes found him when he came through the door. Her breath went visible between them in the cold. She asked nothing about where he had been or what was in his jacket pockets or how long they had before someone came through the door behind him.
She pushed off the wall, the bag riding up on her shoulder as she straightened.
They were already moving west.
The service road was empty at eleven fifty-two. One block west and south the Honda sat in the main lot, in line of sight to the front entrance, where the Albanian crew and Ricky's soldiers were still working something out in the language of whoever had the gun up. The Honda was not part of the plan tonight.
Cris's car was in the rear lot. A 2019 Civic, silver, backed into the space by the chain-link fence. The break-room hook had held Cris's jacket since nine o'clock and the carabiner with the spare car keys had been clipped to the inside zipper loop. At nine forty Teo had stood at the hook with his back to the camera and unclipped the carabiner, slow and without weight, sliding the whole thing into his own jacket pocket in the same motion. The break room had stayed empty for the eighty seconds the lift required.
He had taken them without knowing exactly when he would use them, and had known he would use them.
The Civic unlocked with a single beep. Teo got in the driver's side and Cami got in the passenger side, set her bag at her feet, and closed the door without a sound. The engine turned over before her door latched. They rolled out of the rear lot onto the service road with the headlights off, thirty feet to the corner, then the headlights came on and the wheel pulled left onto Bruckner and the road opened up ahead of them.
The shooting may have stopped behind them. Hard to know at this distance, hard to separate from the expressway's constant bass and the trucks going south on Bruckner's outer lane. The system would settle what the system had started. None of it was Teo's problem anymore. The money sat in his jacket and thirty-four minutes lay between the service road and the room where the rest of the plan was waiting.
His hands stayed on the wheel and he drove.
The highway on-ramp was empty.
Somewhere behind them the club was still working itself out, and somewhere in the club Ricky was on his way to the office. Teo ran the time. Two minutes since the kitchen exit. Maybe three since the safe. Ricky would know what was missing before the Albanians had cleared the block.
Bruckner northbound unrolled ahead of them, the city's light low on the clouds, the expressway running indifferent under the tires. The needle held at sixty-two. Seventy at midnight in a stolen car was a problem he did not need.
Cami had her head turned toward the passenger window. Her reflection sat in the glass at an angle, the outline of her face and the bag riding on her lap now instead of at her feet. The road kept his eyes. They were three minutes out.
She laughed.
It came from nowhere and then it was everywhere in the small car. Not the laugh she used at the bar when someone said something she found barely tolerable. This was the real one. It started in her shoulders and her face caught up after, hysterical at the edges and terrified underneath and alive. The laugh of a person who had been calculating a moment for eleven months and had not been sure, until four minutes ago, that it was going to work.
His hands loosened on the wheel by one degree.
The laugh wound down. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and looked at the road ahead of them, and exhaled once, long. The car ran north through the city's edge, overpass lights strobing across the windshield at their regular interval.
"Teo," she said.
"Yeah."
Nothing else followed. Her hand came down on his arm. Through the jacket sleeve the warmth of her palm came first, and under the warmth, faint but real, the pulse at her wrist. It ran fast and was coming down. His own pulse had not settled either.
The Motor Inn was thirty-four minutes north. Room 9 lay at the end of a route he could drive without thinking it. The second light after the overpass would be a left, the service road off the next right would run parallel to the expressway, and the parking lot in back held a space behind the dumpsters where the broken lot light let the asphalt stay dark. He had parked there before without knowing he was planning this.
"The bag," he said. "You've had it since Wednesday."
It was not a question. She looked at him.
"I had it since Tuesday," she said.
His head moved once. The road went north and the expressway did not stop. The alley came back to him in pieces. Her weight had been on her back foot and the bag had ridden high on her shoulder. Her eyes had not been on the door he came through. They had been on the service road, on the route west. She had mapped the exit before he opened it. She had been waiting because she had finished deciding.
The thought arrived clean: he had not gotten her out.
She had gotten herself out of the dressing room and out of the building and into the right position in the alley. She had read the chaos as an opening the same way he had read it, and she had moved through it alone, without his hand on her arm and without a signal and without being told which door. The kitchen exit had opened from his side. She had already been at the other end of the calculation. The door had been both of them at once, and the understanding of that arrived only now, watching the highway open ahead of the headlights.
He had opened the door. She had been there to walk through it. The distinction sat in his chest like something he would not have words for tonight.
"There's money in my jacket," he said. "Enough."
She was quiet for two seconds. "How much?"
"Both tickets. After, too."
Her eyes went back to the windshield. Overpass light moved across her face and was gone. "Okay," she said.
Her hand was still on his arm.
The Bronx pulled back on both sides and its lights receded in the mirror. The mirror was not where he was looking. A room waited ahead, and a train at 5:08 out of Penn Station, and Track 7, and whatever was on the other side of Track 7. All of it required his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel.
His hands stayed on the wheel.
The expressway was the only sound. Cami's pulse under his jacket sleeve went from fast to steady by degrees. Somewhere behind them, in an office with a Punta Cana print on the wall, Ricky was already counting.