Metro Girl (Alex Barnaby 1)

“You know those two guys you shot?” Rosa said to Felicia. “They stopped by the cigar factory just now and tried to get me to go with them.”

“They did not.”

“They did!”

“What’d you say to them?”

“I said they should eat some lead.”

“Maybe they going to stop here next, and I’ll miss them. That would be disappointing,” Felicia said.

“If they want to talk to you bad enough, they’ll be back,” Rosa said. “In the meantime, maybe your husband will shoot them.” Rosa leaned forward. “Turn right at the next corner,” she told Hooker. “And then go two blocks. The first property will be on the right. It’s an apartment building.”

The apartment building was four stories tall, and the ground-level wall was covered with gang graffiti. The front door was missing. Just some hinges left on the jamb. Inside there was a small dark foyer with four mailboxes built into the one wall and a scary-looking stairwell to the right. We all squeezed into the foyer and read the names on the mailboxes.

“I don’t know none of these people,” Felicia said. “They must be foreign. Some of those South Americans.”

The foyer didn’t smell great. And the stairwell smelled even worse.

“No point to all of us trooping up the stairs,” Hooker said. “I’ll go, and you three wait here.”

“Be careful,” Felicia said. “Watch for the big cockroaches.”

Hooker went upstairs, and Rosa, Felicia, and I stepped out of the foyer, onto the sidewalk.

“This building could use some bleach,” Rosa said. “That’s the best thing to clean up a building like this.”

“Be better if it had a fire,” Felicia said. “Urban renewal. Start over.”

Ten minutes later I was looking up at the windows, worrying about Hooker.

“He should be down by now,” I said.

“No gunshots,” Rosa said.

“Yeah, and no screaming,” Felicia said. “We give him some more time.”

A couple minutes and Hooker appeared at the bottom of the stairs, followed by a bunch of smiling people.

One man had Hooker written on his forehead.

“Good-bye, Sam Hooker,” they were saying.

“Thank you for autographing my hat.”

“Thank you for calling my sister.”

A woman came running with a camera, and the group posed for a picture with Hooker smiling in the middle of it all.

We got into the Mini and pulled away.

“Race fans,” Hooker said. “Maria wasn’t in there.”

We searched two more apartment buildings with similar results. The fourth property on the list was a warehouse. We all thought this had some potential, since a truck filled with gold could be hidden in the warehouse.

The warehouse was three stories tall and took up half of a city block. There were three garage bays and a standard door. All were closed and locked. Windows were dark above the doors. Second-floor windows were broken. We drove down a refuse-strewn alley that intersected the block and backed up to the rear of the warehouse. There were a couple Dumpsters back there, and there was a rear door, also locked. Ground-floor windows were painted black and secured with iron bars.

“Get on the Dumpster,” Felicia said to Hooker. “Then you can go in through the window above it.”