Page 50 of The Woman in the Garage

I rushed out of the car, going into the trunk, and pulling out a gun and extra ammunition as another car pulled up behind me.

“Any idea what is going on?” Dante asked, gun already in hand as he came up to me.

“Not a fucking clue. But everyone’s gone so… let’s move,” I said, nodding toward the rows and rows of shipping containers, some stacked five or six high, creating a labyrinth where any kind of danger could be hiding.

My brother and I tensed as footsteps crept around the corner toward us. We wordlessly started to part, spreading out to the sides of the alley to be able to confront the person from both sides.

“Whoa, just me,” Milo said, holding up a hand.

“Who are we looking for?” I asked.

“Fuck if I know. I was just told to get down here. When I got here, everyone was already in the docks.”

“You haven’t run into anyone yet?”

“You know this place, man. Goes on forever. Dunno how far ahead of me everyone got here. But we’re better moving together,” he said. “This is a dead-end. Let’s go back the other way.”

With that, the three of us set off as a unit, someone always having the others’ backs. But the deeper we got, the more confused we were becoming.

There were no yells, no sounds of fighting, no gunshots. Nothing.

Panic had my stomach clenching, wondering if our cousins and brothers were somewhere in there, shot, dying, dead.

It wasn’t often that we had trouble at the docks. Luca had great security around the place. But, shit, a lot of illegal stuff came through the docks. And where illegal stuff was, so were people trying to jack it and sell it for themselves.

That said, that wasn’t usually cause for Luca to call everyone in.

“Got one!” someone yelled from somewhere deeper in the same general area we were walking in. With that, we started to run until, finally, we found Lucky kneeling on the back of someone on the ground all in black.

Beneath him, the guy was struggling. “Get the fuck off of me,” he snarled.

Lucky adjusted his hold, grabbing something and pushing it back toward us.

It slid across the ground to come to a stop a few feet from us.

A gun.

For a split second, it fooled even me—someone who’d been around guns of all sorts since I was toddling.

It looked, at first blush, like a semi-automatic.

But before Milo even picked it up, I could tell something was off about it.

“It’s a fucking paintball gun,” he declared.

“You’re fucking with me,” Lucky said.

“See?” Milo said, lifting the gun, pointing it at one of the shipping containers, and pulling the trigger. A neon green splat spread across the blue metal.

“Are you out of your motherfucking mind?” Lucky asked, grabbing the guy by the back of his shirt and hauling him to his feet.

“Fuck you,” the guy snarled, looking up at all of us.

It was then that I realized he was just a kid. Late teens, maybe. Brown hair, brown eyes, splotchy, acne-covered skin. “I’m not talking without my lawyer.”

“We’re not the fucking cops, you moron,” Milo said, snorting.

“Come on,” Lucky said, half-dragging the kid along with him as he started off in the direction he’d come from.

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