Chapter 3: Chapter 3 - The Stash House Job
Chapter 3 - The Stash House Job
Machete came to the building at 1:47 a.m. Teo had been on the stoop six minutes when the car pulled up, a dark Accord, clean enough to disappear on the block. He had expected a text. The car was at the curb instead, engine running, Machete in the driver's seat. Teo noticed and kept quiet.
Two men sat in the back. He had seen them both on corners, one from 138th, one from Brook Avenue, both of them used to what a night job looked like. They did not introduce themselves and Teo did not ask. He got in the front and the car pulled away. Courtlandt Avenue went past the window, then the block he had grown up on, then nothing he needed to look at anymore.
"Sleep?" Machete asked.
"A little."
"Good. You want a little sleep before a job. Not too much."
On the passenger side a long diagonal crack ran the windshield, repaired once with a strip of clear tape and spreading anyway. Teo looked at it.
Machete drove slow and deliberate. The speed limit looked like a choice he had made and found correct. The pace required no explanation. Nothing in the car did. The two in the back seat sat without speaking, and Machete let the silence run.
Inside the car was the smell of clean leather and an air freshener clipped to the vent, something pine-adjacent, wrong for the season. Outside, the Bruckner Expressway went past the windows and then they were south of it, into Port Morris, the blocks getting wider and less residential until there were no residences at all. Warehouse fronts ran past, and a concrete batch plant with its drums still turning at this hour, and the East River smell worked through the AC.
"Edgewater Road," Machete said. "Number 114. There is a gate on the west side of the property. The padlock on it is ours. I put it there last Tuesday. The building itself has two points of entry: the loading dock in the rear and the door on the south face of the building. We use the south door. I will go in first. You," he looked at Teo in the passenger mirror, not the rearview, "you stay behind my left shoulder until we are in the first room and I can see how it's laid. Then you move to the right and take whatever is on the right. You understand?"
"Yeah," Teo said.
"Two men inside was what we had three days ago. It may be wrong. Assume it is. Assume four. If there are four, you do the math in the room, not before. You clear?"
"Clear."
"There's a guard position near the north window. If someone is in it, they will see us before we see them. So we move fast from the gate." He paused. "Questions?"
"They armed?"
Machete checked the mirror again. "May be."
Teo looked at the road ahead. The warehouses had security lights but they were the old kind, sodium floods mounted high, and they left pools of yellow-orange with gaps of dark between them. He counted exits on the road without meaning to: two blocks in and one out. The river was close enough that he could hear it, or thought he could, beneath the expressway hum.
"You're going to be fine," Machete said.
Teo kept his eyes on the road.
He believed him. Machete had been in enough rooms to know what this room was going to be, and the assessment of Teo had come out favorable. A long time had passed since anybody had looked at Teo and decided that. Dark blocks went past, and his hands stayed in his lap.
Number 114 was a long, flat-roofed building. Once it had processed something Teo could not name, judging by the heavy old loading-dock hardware and the concrete stained in the pattern of years of runoff. The security light on the south face was on, pointed at the parking area rather than the building, which left the door in shadow. Machete had known that.
The gate on the west side took twelve seconds, not four. The lock was theirs; the chain sat stiff in the housing and had to be worked. The man from Brook Avenue did it without asking. They moved along the west face in single file, Machete first, then Teo, the other two behind. Their door was metal, painted over so many times the paint had gone thick at the edges. This one had no padlock, just a standard key lock, and Machete opened it with something from his jacket pocket that was not a key, working it in the dark by feel, taking forty seconds while the rest of them stood still.
Inside was dark, and the air carried the smell of cardboard and something sweet and chemical underneath it: pressed pills. He had been around enough corners to know it on the breath. His eyes were adjusting, and Machete was already moving. Teo stayed behind his left shoulder.
From the entry, two rooms were visible, with a third door at the back of the right room, closed.
The first room was stacked with boxes, cardboard and tape, work light plugged in at the far end and turned off. Through a plywood doorframe, the second room held real light, a lamp of some kind.
Machete put his hand out flat at hip height. They stopped.
Teo listened. From the lit room came the sound of a man shifting his weight, and then a sound he could not place for three seconds until he did: the dry compression of a chip bag.
Two men inside. That was what they had. One was eating in the lit room. The other was somewhere else in the dark.
Machete went through the plywood doorframe without pausing, and Teo went right.
The man at the folding table had a bag of chips in one hand and a phone in the other. The screen blew his face out white. He had a second to understand the room was no longer only his before Machete was inside his space. His hand moved. Wrong answer.
His free hand grabbed for something on the table. Teo did not see what. What he saw was the reaching arm, and he was already moving, taking the right side of the room. Over by the north window the second man stood watching the boarded glass through a gap shifted for sightlines, not eating. He was the lookout.
Teo hit him before he turned all the way around.
Shoulder to the upper back drove him into the boards. Behind him now, Teo took the right arm and bent it wrong, not breaking it but showing where that road went. The man was forty pounds heavier and also not ready. A sound came out of him that was not quite a word. Teo put a forearm across the upper back, held the position, waited.
From the other room Machete spoke low, in Spanish, something Teo could not make out, and then the room went quiet.
The man under his arm stopped trying.
"Down," Teo said. "Get down."
The man went down. Teo kept the arm at the angle. His breath pushed out in short hard intervals, controlled, the effort showing in his shoulders.
Footsteps came up behind, and Teo's whole body went tight before he placed them: Machete's walk, already memorized in two hours.
"The table man?" Teo asked.
"Tied."
"This one."
Machete came around to look. He took three seconds to assess, then drew a zip tie from his jacket pocket and passed it to Teo. "Do it."
Teo did it. His hands were steady.
In the third room, behind the closed door, the man from Brook Avenue found the product: boxes, sealed, the chemical smell stronger here. He and the man from 138th started loading, efficient and without conversation. Machete stood in the doorway watching them and Teo stood near the two men on the floor watching the room.
The one Teo had put down lay on his stomach, face turned sideways at the wall, zip-tied hands in the small of his back. Teo checked the room again: the south door they had come through and a fire door in the back room, unsecured. Eight minutes had passed.
Over by the plywood doorframe, the man from the table was on his side. His phone sat on the table where it had dropped, screen dark now. The table edge had cut his chin, not deep, a thin line of red already drying against the skin. A bad night was coming for him, with more of them after.
The man was alive and the man was on the floor, and Teo was the reason for the second.
On the stomach man, the face turned from the wall and looked at Teo. He said something low in Spanish. The words did not matter; the register did. Anger had drained out of him, replaced by a specific question about what was going to happen to him. That question had a right answer and a wrong answer and both of them knew it.
"Nada," Teo said. "Stay on the floor, nothing happens."
The man looked back a second and then turned to the wall again.
They were seven minutes from done.
Moving toward the south door, Teo heard it before he saw it: scratch of a zip tie against hard surface, the effort sound of someone working a binding. Machete said "Go" without raising his voice and they went, the two back-room men already carrying boxes and not slowing, Teo the last one out, the door closing behind him, a sound from inside the building that could have been a lot of things and he did not stop to find out.
They got back in the car with the boxes loaded and the gate chain put back: nine minutes from entry to the engine turning over. Machete had said ten, and they were inside it.
It took two blocks north on Edgewater Road before Teo understood that his mouth had blood in it.
His tongue went along the inside of his lower lip and found the texture of split skin, the taste of copper where his lip had caught on his own teeth. The second man's elbow had done it. Driving into the boarded window, the man's elbow had come back and connected and Teo had not felt it in the moment. His whole left cheekbone carried a dull resonance now that would feel worse in an hour.
His tongue ran the inside of his lip again. The blood was warm and specific and already starting to dry.
He could spit it out the window. The middle of something was the wrong place for the window. He swallowed.
In the back seat, the man from 138th said something to the man from Brook Avenue. Teo heard it, did not listen, and looked at the road ahead.
They drove south toward the Bruckner service road. Machete kept the same speed, deliberate and correct, his hands on the wheel at ten and two. The air freshener swung once on the turn and was still.
For two blocks he said nothing.
"You did good, mijo," Machete said. He delivered it like a status update, which was what it was: a fact about the night that was now settled. "You're in."
The man from Brook Avenue said, "Yeah," flat. The man from 138th said nothing.
Teo also said nothing.
The blood in his mouth had dried. The left cheek was going to bruise; he could feel the dull contour of what had landed there, and the split in his lip. Later.
He was in.
The room ran once more through his head: the man at the table, the man at the window, the south door, the fire door, the boxes in the third room, the zip tie Machete had handed him and Teo had used without pause. Nine minutes.
The warmth of the words was real. He set it next to the dried blood in his mouth and his hands flat on his thighs.
The man from 138th leaned forward between the front seats. "First time?"
"Yeah," Teo said.
The man leaned back. "Gets easier."
Whether he wanted it to get easier, Teo did not know. He kept his hands flat on his thighs and looked at the road.
Machete dropped him at Courtlandt Avenue at 4:22 a.m. The car waited until Teo was inside the vestibule before it pulled away. He heard the engine note, then the distance, then nothing.
In the stairwell the air smelled like bleach and the neighbor's dog, and on the third floor like somebody's frying from the night before. The phone flashlight stayed in his pocket. These stairs in the dark were on his body.
His apartment door was unlocked. He had left it unlocked because he had expected to come back and because Fernando never locked it from the inside anyway. That had never been a problem before, and the thought of it landed for the first time as he came through the door.
The living room was dark. The TV was off, which it almost never was. Fernando had gone to bed before midnight, a sober-night thing, and he had not been awake in the small hours listening to the apartment. Teo stood in the dark and let his eyes adjust. The couch was empty and the kitchen was empty. On the table sat the ConEd bill, its outline white against the dark surface.
He stood a moment at the table. The bill was $214 and it would still be there at breakfast. His split lip had a pulse in it. He went to his room and closed the door.
Outside the window the street lamp threw its sodium-orange up through the glass and across the ceiling. In that light his hands looked clean. Somebody else had taken the bleeding. His lip had stopped, and his cheek would carry the bruise for a week and then be done with it.
Through the wall behind his head he could feel more than hear the 6 train passing, its weight in the building, and somewhere east a car with a bad muffler accelerating toward the expressway on-ramp.
Machete had come to the building instead of texting, had sat at the curb with the engine running like Teo was worth the trip. He had called Teo mijo without irony, the same way every time. It had been a long time since anybody had called him anything like that.
Under the bed sat the shoebox. He left it alone. The knife was in there with the $47, and neither one had moved. The bill on the table was still the bill on the table. But it was not the first thing anymore.
The man from 138th had said it gets easier.
Whether that was something you wanted or something that happened to you, Teo did not know.
He lay back with his shoes on. The ceiling was the same ceiling. The train passed again, heading south toward the city, its sound arriving before it arrived and gone before he finished registering it. His cheek had a pulse. His lip was sore in the specific place where it had split, and his tongue went over it once and tasted the dried copper and left it alone.
He stayed there until the ceiling got light.