NICKY LOOKED AT his now meager roll of cash. When he stepped into the Army Navy Store on Prospect he had every intention of buying a simple overcoat, maybe a pair of gloves. He had left the house wearing only his sweats the night before – a night that now seemed at least a month ago – and the temperature was dropping fast.
He was lucky that the store was open late, and after he had picked out a basic pea coat, he was caught by the selection of defensive sprays under glass by the front door. He pointed to the small can of pepper spray, with no idea how he would use it. It just seemed like the right thing to have in his pocket.
By the time Nicky stepped back out onto Prospect Avenue, Frank Corso’s fifteen-hundred-dollar roll had been reduced to eighty-eight dollars and twenty cents.
The corner of East Fifty-first Street and Euclid Avenue was deserted, a blasted landscape of rusting, blocked-up cars and empty stores with whitewashed windows. At night, nothing human stirred here. On the northwest corner stood a crumbling four-story redbrick building that at one time had housed the Acme Retail Supply company, long since defunct. The first-floor windows were covered with plywood, their surfaces coated three gangs deep in brightly hued graffiti.
The building on the northeast corner was imposing, monstrous. Ten stories high, a half block deep, a monolithic cube of soot-blackened stone and brick. The first few floors had tall, narrow windows, covered with decades of grime and exhaust, jailed by thick black bars. From there on up, at least as far as Nicky could see, the windows were bricked in, the color in those squares only slightly less gray than the older brick.
The top floor, the floor Taffy had told him about, was a mystery. Nicky would have to stand across the street, fully exposed, to see anything above the sixth or seventh floor. He decided to wait until Willie T arrived to check it out.
There was only one entrance on the west side of the building. The alcove was at least fifty feet from the nearest streetlamp, and the angle allowed a wedge of welcome darkness in the doorway. Nicky glanced at his watch. Nine-fifty. He had slept a few hours in Sandy’s car and awakened to two flat tires. Luckily, Sandy had had two bald but serviceable spares in the trunk. The delay had cost him nearly an hour.
At just after ten o’clock a car slowed down in front of the doorway where Nicky stood. It wasn’t Willie T’s car, at least not the car Nicky had seen at the Burger King. This was a late-model red Mazda. He couldn’t see inside, but he could hear the pulsing bass of the stereo.
Nicky flattened himself against the rusted steel door of the warehouse, trying to lose himself in the shadows, but knowing that the occupants of the car had probably seen him. Maybe Willie T had borrowed a car, he thought. Maybe some of his homeboys had come along to kick this crazy fucker’s ass. Bunch of drunk, off-duty cops with AK-47s.
But nobody made a move. For what seemed like an hour but was in reality no more than a few minutes, the car idled, Nicky idled. There was no sign of life or commerce for three full blocks in any direction. The occupants of the car weren’t there to pick up a forty-ounce. They were there for Nicky.
He was just about to run when, incredibly, the car started rolling again, slowly, toward the avenue. After a few seconds, Nicky leaned forward slightly, daring the light. The red Mazda made a right turn onto Euclid Avenue and disappeared into the night.
He leaned back and found that he had been holding his breath the whole time. And that his sweat-slicked hand was wrapped tightly, almost painfully, around the can of pepper spray in his pocket.
They had seen the power, he thought crazily. Wacko white boy waiting in an alcove. You never—
Suddenly the rusty hinge of the door behind him screeched like a wounded animal.
And Nicky fell, backwards, downwards, into the cold, lightless warehouse.