Chapter 170: 170. The Chase And The Trouble That I’ve Caused to Make The Real One In Trouble

He turned around.

The guard was the one with the neck tattoo, the phoenix curving up past his collar. Up close, he was younger than Mike had clocked from the door, mid-twenties, with the particular build of someone who spent enough time in the gym to be useful but not enough to be the first one sent into a room.

He had a folded paper in one hand and the other resting near the handle of the fixed blade at his hip, not drawn, not threatening, just where his hand lived when he was walking.

"Give it here," Mike said.

The guard held out the paper.

Mike took it with his left hand and looked at it long enough to register that it was a form with handwritten entries and a signature line at the bottom, and then he looked back up at the guard with Big G’s flat expression and said, "You got a pen."

The guard reached into his jacket with his right hand.

His left hand dropped away from the knife.

Mike dropped the paper.

He stepped inside the guard’s reach before the pen was out of the jacket, got his right hand on the grip of the fixed blade, and pulled it clean in one movement. The guard’s hand came up too late, grabbing at Mike’s wrist, and Mike used the grip to turn the guard’s body so the guard was between him and the door, one arm locked across the guard’s chest, the blade at his side.

"Don’t," Mike said, quietly. For the guard specifically. Not a performance.

The guard went very still.

’Three seconds,’ Mike thought. ’Before whoever’s on the other side of that door registers the sound of the paper hitting the ground... Maybe less.’

He released the guard with a shove that sent him stumbling toward the door, hard enough to be disorienting, and ran.

Not the direction he had come. He went further down the lane, away from the service road, toward the far end where the lane met the cross alley behind the residential block.

Behind him the guard hit the door, and the door opened, and a voice said something Mike did not catch, and then a second voice said it very clearly:

"Hold on! Somebody check that!"

’There it is.’

He rounded the far end of the lane at pace and came out into the cross alley, which was narrow and unlit and smelled like wet concrete, and he went left because left was the direction away from the service road and toward the residential block he had mapped two weeks ago.

He shoved the blade grip-first into his jacket pocket. He was not going to use it on a residential street with people on it.

But it was evidence of what had just happened in the lane, and he was not leaving it behind him where someone could pick it up and use it as a data point.

’What you just did,’ he told himself as he moved, ’was break the one thing keeping you invisible in there.’

’So make sure what you got was worth it.’

Seven property designations on a whiteboard. An entry arrangement that he could now replicate.

A layout he had walked through himself. The weight of the ledger in his memory.

’Yes,’ he decided. ’It was worth it.’

He heard them coming around the lane end behind him.

"He’s in the alley! Go left, go left!"

He went faster.

He rounded the service road corner at pace and dropped low into the gap between two parked delivery vehicles, crouching against the wheel arch, checking the gap underneath for feet.

Two sets of feet came around the corner. They stopped.

There was a pause of three seconds, which was the pause of people looking at a lane that was empty in both directions and deciding what that meant.

"He was just here," one of them said.

"I know he was just here."

"So where the hell did he go!?"

"Check the service road."

The feet split.

One went toward the casino. One came toward the vehicles.

Mike held still.

The footsteps came along the passenger side of the van ahead of him, slow and checking, at the pace of someone looking into gaps. They passed the van.

They passed the first delivery vehicle. They were going to reach the second one in approximately four seconds.

’This is going to be close,’ Mike thought, and then immediately, ’Don’t be dramatic...’

’You’ve been in worse gaps than this.’

He moved before the footsteps reached him, sliding under the chassis of the second vehicle and out the other side into the maintenance strip between the vehicles and the wall behind them, a gap of perhaps sixty centimeters, enough to stand in if he went sideways.

The footsteps reached the vehicle and stopped.

A pause.

"Nothing," the voice said. And then, louder, to the other: "Clear this side."

"The front’s clear too," came the response.

"So what, he just disappeared?"

A longer pause. Mike heard one of them pull out a phone or radio and start talking.

’Radio,’ he confirmed. ’Four minutes... Maybe three now...’

He moved east along the maintenance strip, staying flat against the wall, until he found the gap at the back of the vehicles that opened onto the residential block behind the service road. He came through it at a crouch and straightened up on the footpath between the backs of the terrace houses and the commercial premises.

He went fast. There was no longer any reason to hesitate.

’Narrow path, single direction, one way in and one way out.’

’If they figure out which way you went, this is a problem. So don’t let them figure it out before you’re clear.’

Forty meters.

Sixty.

Behind him, from the service road direction, he heard one of them come through the vehicle gap. Faster now. Less methodical.

"There! Go!"

Two sets of footsteps. Both of them now.

"Where the hell is he going," one of them said, and the voice had the particular edge of someone who was not asking a question but expressing disbelief at the situation they were currently in.

Mike did not answer this.

At the end of the footpath was a small residential close, four houses arranged around a shared parking area, and a gap between the last two that opened onto a cross street.

He went through the gap at speed and came out onto the cross street and turned left without slowing.

The footsteps behind him grew louder, indicating that they had discovered the close and were determined to pursue this path.

"He’s on the cross street," one of them called to the other. Breathless. "Go, go."

’Amateur,’ Mike thought, not unkindly. ’You’re announcing direction to someone who can hear you.’

He kept moving. Not running now, because running on a residential street at this hour was the thing that people remembered, but the particular walk of someone with pace and absolute direction, the walk that is indistinguishable at a distance from anyone with somewhere to be.

Fifty meters from the cross street junction, on a section of pavement between two lampposts where the lighting was at its lowest, he let the shapeshift release.

It went the way it had arrived, without event. He was himself again, smaller than he had been for the last twenty minutes, with his own hands, his own face, and the cut on his right cheek that he had put there himself two nights ago.

He did not look back.

He turned right at the next junction onto a road he knew, a wider residential street that ran toward the commercial strip three blocks west of Harwick Lane, well-lit and populated enough at this hour with people coming back from the kinds of Saturday evenings that put people on the street after eleven.

He slowed to a walk and joined them.

The knife was still in his jacket pocket. He would handle it at home.

Thirty seconds later, from somewhere behind him, he heard one of them reach the wider street. He did not turn.

A man in a gray jacket walking at the pace of someone who had already had a full evening was not notable on this street right now, and notable was the only thing that mattered.

"What the—" one of them said, somewhere behind him, looking at a street full of ordinary people. "Where the hell did he go?"

"I don’t know."

"He was right there."

"I know he was right there."

A pause.

"Call it in," one of them said. Quieter now.

The tone reflected that of someone who had followed a problem to its conclusion and was dissatisfied with the outcome. "This is above what we can deal with right now."

"What do we tell them?"

A longer pause.

"We tell them G went out the front, and that’s the last we saw him," the first one said. "We tell them the alley was empty when we checked."

"That’s not what happened."

"I know that’s not what happened, you fucking dumbass! But what happened is something nobody in there is going to want to hear, so we tell them what we can tell them and let someone else figure out the rest."

Their voices dropped below what Mike could carry, and then a bus passed on the cross street behind him and covered the rest of it, and they were gone.

’Smart enough to manage what they report,’ Mike noted. ’Useful to know.’

He pulled out his phone.

Gerald had sent two messages.

The first from Callen Street: "Here. What happened?"

The second, four minutes later: "Mike."

Mike typed back, "Go straight home. I’ll come to you."

Three seconds.

"Okay."

He walked the twelve minutes to Harwick Lane at his usual pace.

[SHAPESHIFT — COOLDOWN: 24 HOURS. NEXT AVAILABLE WINDOW: SUNDAY EVENING.]