Chapter 6: Rusted meat hooks sway overhead as Malik outlines the plan with cold precision, dividing roles: Nico as the silent infiltrator, Jalen as the charming distraction, Zeke as the brute force - all while Rina preps medical supplies in the corner, knowing this job will end in blood.
The smell of old blood was a tenant that never left. It had seeped into the porous concrete floor of the abandoned butcher shop on Freight Street, a faint coppery ghost beneath the stronger notes of damp brick, rat droppings, and mildew. The only light came from a single halogen work lamp hooked to a ceiling beam, its harsh white eye illuminating the massive, scarred maple block table at the room’s center.
Malik leaned over the stained wood, his palms flat on a set of architectural blueprints that crinkled under his weight. The stains were brown and old, but in this light, they looked freshly spilled.
“Counting house is here,” he said, his voice echoing slightly in the cavernous, empty space. His finger tapped a second-floor unit in a nondescript building on the edge of Gutter King territory. “Above a laundromat. They run all their street cash through it every Thursday. Count it, bag it, ship it out by armored car Friday dawn.”
Jalen let out a low whistle, pacing behind him. “A laundromat. How poetic. They’re literally cleaning money.”
“Security?” Nico’s question was a soft exhale. He stood at a separate bench made from stacked milk crates and a sheet of plywood, his hands moving with methodical care. Before him lay the disassembled components of three handguns and a compact submachine gun. The sharp, mineral scent of gun oil cut through the decay.
“Two inside, always,” Malik said, tracing lines on the blueprint. “Front door here, reinforced steel with a camera. Back door here, fire escape, also wired. Building’s mostly empty at night. Laundromat closes at ten. Their count starts at eleven.”
Zeke hovered at Malik’s shoulder, his body thrumming with unused energy. “So we hit the back during the count. Quiet. In and out before the street crews even blink.”
“It’s not that simple.” Nico didn’t look up from the pistol slide he was inspecting. “Thursday is also when the Gutter Kings’ lieutenants settle their books. There could be four, maybe five inside during the peak hour. Not just guards. Shooters.”
“Even better,” Zeke grinned, a tight, vicious thing. “More of them to share the regret.”
“We’re not starting a war in a hallway,” Malik said, his tone leaving no room for debate. He straightened up, his back aching. Three days of sleeping in this freezing, stinking tomb had ground his nerves thin. The image of those federal flashlights in the warehouse played behind his eyes every time he closed them. “This isn’t a smash-and-grab. It’s a bypass. We need the money to vanish, and for Crow to get the blame.”
He looked at each of them. Jalen’s usual humor was banked, replaced by a focused intensity. Nico was a study in calm precision. Zeke was a lit fuse. They were his. They were all he had left while the rest of his world teetered.
“Crow set us up for the Feds,” Malik continued, the words still bitter. “He’s playing a board game while Salvatore plays checkers. Fine. We steal his player piece.” He tapped the blueprint. “This counting house is fed by his new territory, the blocks he took from us after the warehouse. That cash is his proof of concept, his profit margin to show The Dominion. We take that, and his house of cards wobbles. Salvatore gets his result, and Crow gets a headache that’ll split his skull.”
“How do we bypass a steel door and a camera?” Jalen asked, leaning in. “We gonna disguise ourselves as a pizza delivery? ‘Uh, yeah, one large cash pile, extra bullets?’”
Nico finally looked up, holding a modified pistol with a thread barrel. “The laundromat.” He walked over, his footsteps silent on the concrete. He pointed to a ventilation schematic on the edge of the blueprint. “Shared forced-air heating system. The vent shafts connect. Main intake is on the laundromat roof. Large enough.”
A beat of silence settled over the cold room.
Zeke blinked. “You want us to crawl through a vent like we’re in some spy movie?”
“It’s how you avoid the doors and the cameras,” Nico said simply.
Malik studied the ductwork lines. It was insane. It was tight, dark, and claustrophobic. It was also a backdoor the Gutter Kings, who thought in terms of crowbars and kickbacks, would never consider. He felt the first flicker of real momentum since the pier. “Access?”
“Roof access on the adjacent building. Fire escape ladder. It’s four feet across an alley to the laundromat roof. A jump.” Nico’s dark eyes met Malik’s. “Once inside the duct, it’s a fifteen-foot crawl to a junction. Drop down into the laundry room. From there, the internal door to the staircase is usually propped open for airflow. Then up to the second floor.”
“Guards in the laundromat?” Jalen asked.
“Closing time is ten. They’re gone by ten-thirty. Counting starts at eleven. We go in at ten-forty-five.” Nico returned to his bench and began screwing a suppressor onto the pistol’s barrel. The threads made a soft, precise shink-shink-shink sound.
The plan coalesced, fragile and dangerous, in the frigid air. Malik could see it, a series of moving parts in a hostile machine. One slip, one cough, one loose screw, and they’d be trapped in a metal throat.
“We need the exact interior layout of the counting room,” Malik said. “Not just the blueprint. Where do they stand? Where do they put the bags?”
“I can get that,” a new voice said from the shadows by the boarded-up front window.
All of them flinched, hands going to weapons. Zeke had his gun half-cleared before Malik raised a hand.
A figure peeled away from the darkness. Aria. She wore dark jeans and a charcoal sweater, her hair pulled back, her face pale in the halogen glow. She looked like she hadn’t slept.
“The hell are you doing here?” Zeke growled, the gun still in his hand but lowering. “How’d you find this place?”
“You’re not the only one with eyes,” she said, her gaze locked on Malik. There was no flirtation in it now, just a stark, weary resolve. “I heard about the warehouse. The CBP sweep.” She took a step closer, ignoring the others. “That wasn’t me, Malik. The intel was solid. Crow must have moved the tooling the same day he gave me the location. He used me as the bait in his own trap.”
The room was very still. Malik could hear the distant drip of water from a broken pipe in the kill room.
“Why should we believe you?” Jalen asked, his voice uncharacteristically flat.
“Because you need what I have.” She pulled a folded sheet of paper from her pocket and placed it on the bloodstained table, next to the blueprints. It was a hand-drawn sketch. Desks, tables, a large safe, two makeshift poker tables where the counting happened. Arrows indicated typical guard posts. “I’ve been inside. Delivered a message for Silas last month. They pat me down at the door, but they don’t think I’m looking. This is what you need.”
Malik studied the sketch. It had the ring of truth—small details, the kind a blueprint would never show: an old floor lamp by the safe, a coffee maker on a filing cabinet, the reinforced bar across the inside of the front door.
“What’s the price?” he asked, finally looking up at her.
“I want in.”
Zeke snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious,” she said, her voice hardening. “Crow burned me. He used my access to set you up, which means he considers me expendable. I’m a liability to him now. My only play is to make sure his play fails.” She looked at the guns on Nico’s bench, then back to Malik. “I know the patterns. I know the faces. The man who runs the count is named Kelson. He’s left-handed, he chews cinnamon gum, and he keeps his piece in a shoulder holster that sticks. I can point him out. That’s worth more than a sketch.”
Malik held her gaze. He saw the fear there, sharp and bright beneath the bravado. She was running for her life, and she’d decided his crew was the best shelter. It was a cold, logical move. He understood it perfectly.
“You’re not on the roof,” he said finally. “You’re on the street. Watch the front. If anything goes wrong—if extra cars show up, if the patrol pattern changes—you signal. A flashlight, two bursts. Then you vanish.”
Aria nodded, a quick, sharp dip of her chin. “Okay.”
“And if this is another setup,” Malik added, his voice dropping to something quiet and lethal, “Nico won’t crawl through a vent to find you. He’ll walk right through Crow’s front door. And you’ll be first.”
The color drained from her face, but she didn’t look away. “It’s not.”
Nico finished assembling the last weapon, the pieces clicking together with final, chilling sounds. He laid them out on the plywood: three pistols with suppressors, the compact machine gun, four extra magazines. They looked both clinical and savage under the brutal light.
Malik looked at the tools, then at the blueprint, then at the sketch of the room where his survival would be decided. The federal noose was still out there, tightening. Salvatore’s clock was ticking in his head. Crow was sitting in his penthouse, thinking he’d already won.
He placed his finger on the blueprint, right over the laundromat roof.
“We go tomorrow night,” he said. The decision, once spoken, felt like a stone dropping into still water. Ripples of consequence spread out, invisible but inevitable. “Nico, you have the electronics. Zeke, you’re first through the drop. Jalen, you’re with me on the clean-up. We move quiet, we move fast. We take the cash, we trash the place to look like an inside job, and we leave through the front door like we own it.”
He finally looked up, meeting the eyes of his crew. The fear was there, in all of them. His too. But beneath it was something harder, something forged in the cold of the butcher shop and the failure on the pier.
“We don’t get a second chance at this,” Malik said. “So we don’t need one.”