Quinn eased down the hallway until he reached the doorway of the large open space that had once been the main storage area. He stood in the threshold looking back toward the rear entrance.
Click.
A sound that almost wasn’t a sound at all.
But he’d been waiting for it. The doorknob had been turned.
Quinn stepped all the way back into the storage room, then leaned forward just enough so he could still see the back door. Nothing happened for thirty seconds.
Cautious, Quinn thought. Definitely not a street person.
Then, almost in slow motion, the door began to swing open.
Quinn pulled completely back into the storage room, then took a quick look around. There was nothing he could hide behind except the door itself. But he knew he didn’t actually need to hide behind anything. If he went far enough in and kept near the wall, the darkness would be enough to conceal his presence. He began moving away from the door, careful not to step on any of the trash that was scattered around. As he did, he lowered the zipper on his coveralls enough to pull his gun from its shoulder holster. It was his standard SIG Sauer P226. From one of the pockets, he removed a suppressor, and attached it to the end of the barrel.
After he’d gone twenty feet, he stepped against the wall and stopped.
He could hear footsteps. Soft, with no pattern. Whoever was in the hallway was taking a step or two, stopping, then starting again. Cautious.
Quinn rested his gun against his thigh as he tried to picture what the other person was doing. Whoever it was had to have at least seen Quinn and Nate put the package into the back of the van. There was a good chance he had seen the operations team leave, too.
If this person was not here by chance, then the only way he could have found the warehouse was by following the ops team in. Quinn was the one who had secured the building, the one who had informed the operations team where it was after they were already en route. No one other than Nate knew about the location, and they had arrived together, without being followed.
But whatever the reason the intruder was here, he was only one thing to Quinn — a problem.
Quinn’s job was to cover up the crime scene, and make it so no one would know what had gone down. Sometimes that meant misdirecting someone who’d strayed dangerously close to the job site.
But this was different. Here was a person who obviously knew that something had happened. By now the still-potent smells emanating from the op room were acting as a guide, drawing the intruder forward. The question was, what should Quinn do about it? Killing was not a normal component of his job.
In the hallway, the steps stopped right outside the door to the big room.
Quinn raised his gun and aimed it along the wall.
A dark shape leaned through the doorway into the room.
Not a man, Quinn realized. A woman.
She was maybe five-five or five-six. Age, hair, skin tone, all impossible to tell due to the lack of light.
She hung in the doorway, unmoving and patient. She was good. If someone other than Quinn had been the one hiding, he might have made a move by now, alerting the woman to his presence.
So was she a direct threat or not? If yes, all he had to do was pull the trigger and she would be dead. But that would create another mess that would need to be cleaned up, this one without the benefit of any pre-placed plastic. And for all Quinn knew, she might not be alone. A successful cleanup was obtained through knowledge and planning. He had neither with this woman. Who knew what chain of events her death would set off?
Until he saw a gun in her hand moving in his direction, he would wait and observe. Without shifting the SIG, he removed his finger from the trigger.
The woman stood in the doorway a few seconds longer, then disappeared back into the hallway. As Quinn lowered his gun, he could hear her steps moving toward the op room.
Quietly, he made his way back to the door, stopping just short of the jamb. The woman continued down the hall away from him, still unaware of his presence. As soon as he was sure she’d entered the op room, he headed for the rear exit.
When he reached it, he checked back down the hallway, then stepped outside.
It was another ten minutes before the intruder exited the building. Quinn watched her from behind a couple of old weather-beaten signs. She moved with caution, but not as much as she’d used entering the building. Quinn could now see she was Caucasian, in decent shape, and probably about ten years older than he was.
He waited until she had rounded the side of the building out of sight, then crept out from behind the signs. The woman only had two choices: return to the back of the building or head toward the main road. Of the two, the latter made the most sense.
Instead of following her, Quinn cut over to the other side of the building and made his way to the street, paralleling the path she would be taking on the far side.
He stopped at the corner, tight to the wall, and did a quick visual sweep. The areas in front of the warehouse and off to the right were deserted. The building next door, a dingy two-story monstrosity with more windows broken than intact, was dark and dead.
Quinn turned to the wall, then eased his head out just enough to clear the corner. In the distance, the lights of downtown glimmered against the night sky. Closer, but still about a hundred yards away, a solitary streetlamp provided the only illumination for blocks.
He searched for any sign of the woman, but all was still. He then focused on the far corner of the building and waited.
It wasn’t long before a shadow took a step away from the warehouse, paused, then took several more. He gave her a head start, then followed. She must have a car stashed somewhere. His goal now was to get a plate number. He stuck as close as possible to the empty buildings that lined the street, and kept a good fifty feet between himself and the woman as she walked along the curb.
About sixty feet shy of the feeble streetlight, she turned into a small warehouse parking lot. Quinn slowed, then dropped to a crouch and continued forward another twenty feet. There he used the bushes growing at the base of a useless chain-link fence as cover. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, accessed the camera, and switched to night vision mode.
Ahead he heard a car door open, then voices. One voice was muffled and indiscernible, while the other was clearer and female. The words they spoke weren’t from any of the several languages Quinn was either fluent in or familiar with. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a pretty good idea what language they had used.
Russian. Or, at the very least, some derivative.
Quinn slid around the chain-link fence and shimmied in as close as he could get, then watched the woman climb into the car and pull the door closed. He took four pictures before they pulled away: one of the car, a close-up of the license plate, and one each of the young guy behind the wheel and the woman. The intruder.
Whoever she was, Quinn had never seen her before.
Chapter 6
“I’m not a killer,” Quinn said.
He was walking toward Little Tokyo, a more populated part of downtown Los Angeles, where he’d be able to arrange for a taxi. Under his left arm he carried the folded-up coveralls he’d been wearing over his clothes at the warehouse. His first call had been to Nate to make sure everything was going as planned.
It was.
He’d then put in the call to David Wills.
“I know you’re not a killer, but aren’t you supposed to take care of loose ends?” Wills said, irritated. “Aren’t you supposed to make sure no one finds anything?”
“And she didn’t,” Quinn said. “We were finished by the time she entered the building.”