Muttering about bossy men, she felt around the panel in front of her and found a handle at the bottom—which kind of begged the question whether the makers had anticipated the thing being used as an emergency elevator during the infiltration of a drug den to save a patient a little pain on his way to his eternal reward.
Rio gripped—no, it wasn’t a handle, it was a bracket—and pulled. Pulled hard. Put her shoulder into—
Squeak!
Wincing, she froze. When nothing came at her, she forced the panel farther up. She was fighting against its function, some kind of resistance locked in to prevent exactly what she was doing.
Guess it was a no on the prognostication powers of its fabricators, at least when it came to someone like her being cargo. Either that or they’d been worried about bagels and cream cheese or maybe a fruit plate busting out and making a bid for freedom.
When she had the panel all the way up, she stuck her head into—
“Holy . . . shit.”
The well-lit area was the size of a large classroom, and as if it was used as one, there were a couple dozen tables set up in three rows. Each table had a pair of chairs set on one side, and a lineup of scales, bowls, and tools on its surface, including little hammers and straight-line pastry knives. Down on the floor, boxes were set at regular intervals, and there were rolling bins dotting around. At the far end of the workspace, there were two proper desks, a couple of stepladders, and—
She recognized the cellophane-wrapped bales in the far corner instantly—and was not surprised to find that the kilos of drugs were locked into a metal cage bin that was five to six feet high.
Extricating herself from the dumbwaiter, she moved silently between the tables, her brain snapshotting everything at the same time it did some math. Twenty-four tables, two people a table, that was forty-eight workers. And yet there appeared to be several hundred of those sleeping compartments.
So there had to be more workrooms.
The implications made her head spin. An organization of this size did not just appear out of nowhere. It was part of an evolved strategy for disseminating a huge amount of product. Clearly they had been selling a lot of drugs for a long time, and yet why had no drug market intel from the streets mentioned a big whale like this?
Then again, there were always cycles of preeminence, the eras coming and going as arrests were made or deaths occurred. Maybe this operation had come here from another part of the country, ready to make the most out of Caldwell’s close location to Manhattan and further accessibility to Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.
As she passed by a table, she paused and opened one of the cardboard boxes on the floor. It was full of little baggies . . . and each had the stamp of the iron cross on it.
How far up did Luke go in the hierarchy? she wondered.
Probably pretty far. She needed to get him to talk on their way back to the city.
Continuing on, she went to the locked-up kilos and couldn’t even estimate the street value. Well, she could—and it was in the millions and millions. How much product was on hand in the whole operation? And how did they get it in here? There had to be things like loading docks and other storage facilities to handle the pre- and post-processed drugs. With what she was seeing here? They could take in and put out kilos and kilos and kilos of cocaine and heroin in this place—and they clearly had the contacts with the importers to keep a steady stream of it coming.
It boggled the mind—
The sound of a door handle catching snapped her head around—and just as the way in opened, she dropped down to the floor.
All the way across the room, a man in a black uniform entered and hit a light switch that made everything even brighter.
Heart pounding, Rio looked through the legs of the tables and around the cardboard boxes as his boots started walking . . . to where the hatch of the dumbwaiter was still shoved up.
Proof that someone had gotten into the room.
And was still inside.
In the end, Lucan couldn’t stay put. After he came all over himself, and then buzzkilled that vibe with the hello-my-name-is-Wolfie-and-not-’cuz-I’m-related-to-Beethoven, he had to go see Rio.
He told himself it was to make sure she was safe. Also told himself that if anyone was following him after the showdown with the Executioner, they’d have gotten bored by now of waiting for him to do something.
And he might have further mentioned to his inner critic that the Rio-related wanderlust was not tied in any way to the kiss that had started the handshake deal with his dumb handle. Not at all. In the slightest.