He watched the BQE pillar from a block away, from the side opposite where he wrote that message with the charcoal. Wanted to sneak in on the surroundings, see if he could maybe luck out and spot the hoodie guy he’d caught in the picture.  

After ten minutes, all Weecho had seen was a couple of drunks arguing about who’d just farted and a woman walking a big dog he had no interest in getting near. He waited another minute, let a truck piled with old tires go by, then crossed over and walked down to that pillar. When he stepped around it he saw that somebody had used one of the charcoal pieces he’d left, had scratched something under where he wrote What did you see? 

It said lv nmbr. 

Yeah, right. Get calls from who knew who. But how else to do it? He decided to just hang for a while. 

Two minutes later, the problem took care of itself. 

Or took on another dimension, depending how you looked. 

A little ways down and across the street, somebody in a hoodie came out of one of the abandoned buildings, started walking away from him. Not too fast. Almost like they were asking to be followed. Which he did. 

Guy had his back to him, hood up, so Weecho couldn’t see his face. Weecho hung back maybe half a block, picked it up when the guy turned a corner, fell back again and stayed with him while the guy headed away from the BQE and its elevated traffic. 

He took a route opposite from the one Weecho took when he ran from the cops. The neighborhood, hard to believe, got even grungier, more remote. Ruined factories lined both sides of the streets, pavement and sidewalks buckled, strewn with junk. A pack of stray dogs came to the head of an alley, stared at Hoodie, stared back at Weecho. Weecho heard some growling, fingered the folding knife in his pocket. Hoodie raised his hand and the dogs stayed put. 

 Interesting.    

They came to a street that paralleled Newtown Creek, an offshoot of the East River and one of the city’s great toxic landmarks. Weecho saw Hoodie make a sideways check to see if he was still being followed. Turned east and followed the creek, both sides lined with warehouses bombed with graffiti. 

By this time Weecho had been watching Hoodie walk for maybe ten minutes. There was something about the way the guy moved that didn’t track with that picture Weecho took. A little too… you know? Then it hit him. 

Hoodie was a girl. 

Or at least this Hoodie was. She led Weecho to a warehouse that hung partway over the oily creek. Glanced again to see that Weecho was there, let herself in by a side door. 

Weecho went up to the door and stood there, could see that Hoodie Girl had left a piece of chipped concrete in the frame to keep the door open. Weecho reached for the handle, backed off. If she wanted him in there, why do it this way? Who knew what kind of setup she could be sucking him into? 

Maybe there was another entrance. Weecho looked around. No low windows, at least not on this side. Just high ones and big roll-up doors, which, even if they weren’t locked, would be more exposed, chancier to go in by. And truth was, it was him who got this started, leaving that message on the pillar. 

So he sucked it up and went in the door. 

Keeping low. Moving quick to one side. Letting the door shut so he wouldn’t silhouette. 

Like he knew what he was doing. 

He did a quick take in the bad light, saw he’d come into an office nobody had used for years. Dust coating everything, thick layers, papers all over the place. Beat-up desks with typewriters could’ve been put in a museum. No sign of Hoodie Girl. Everything quiet. 

Weecho went over to a grimy plate glass window, could see out into an open interior space that had to be the size of an airplane hangar. No sign of her out there either, not that he could see everything, corners back there all in shadow. The office had a door open next to the window, some steps going down that he took slow and careful. Came out onto a big concrete floor.   

High windows on the far side cast hazy shafts of light, enough for him to see that the place was pretty much cleared out. He stood there looking for Hoodie Girl, squinting until a flapping sound made him look up – pigeons up there in the rafters. One swooped down, flew from one end of the place to the other, disappeared behind what looked like a truck trailer. Weecho took his time going over to check it. Had no trouble recognizing it – a rolling shipping container, red and white sticker on its side: DIPLOMATIC CARGO. 

So – they’d doubled back and brought it here. No more than a two minute drive from the crash. And Hoodie Girl knew it? 

 He froze when he heard a kind of scratching sound. It wouldn’t be Soul Patch and the truck driver, he told himself, no reason to still be around. They’d have offloaded what they were after and split. Could be weeks before anybody looked in here.  

One end of the container was left swung open. There, the sound again, coming from inside. He stepped over, took a slow, careful look. Couldn’t see much in there but shadow. Could make out some shapes – chests, chairs, rolled-up rugs, little lit eyes moving around. Scratching sounds, rat noises. What he’d just heard. He stepped in, sniffed and got a nose full of funk. Like bad cheese. Took another step. The further in, the funkier and darker.   

“Want a match?” 

He whipped around. A match flared. Hoodie Girl. 

“Stay where you are,” she said. 

Weecho could see by the flame that Hoodie Girl was pointing a pistol. 

“Here.” She tossed him a book of matches. “Light up and check it out.” She jabbed the pistol toward the darkness behind him. 

Weecho struck one. Not enough light, so he lit the whole book. Turned around and held up the flame. Could see in the flickering what looked like a homeless campsite. Garbage tossed all over the floor, bread crusts, fruit rinds, rats going at it. Blankets in a pile against the wall. Somebody’d been stashed in here a while. 

Hoodie Girl came up behind him. “That was the cargo. Six of them.” 

“Six who?” 

“Who knows? But I guess worth killing over.” 

Weecho switched hands with the burning matches. “They foreign? I mean they have accents?”  

“I didn’t see any of it, my friend did. He said there was a faceoff when they opened that end door. Everybody waving guns, trying to figure out who was who.”       

Weecho was about to ask what the friend was doing here when Hoodie Girl waved the pistol.  

“Let’s talk outside,” she said. “It stinks in here.” 

                                                #          #          # 

They came out into the daylight by the side door Weecho went in by. Walked over and stood by the loading dock. Hoodie Girl flipped back her hood and Weecho saw a face he thought was kind of plain. No makeup, no tatts on the neck like some models he knew, hair cut a little butchy. She looked to be about his age, high-teens, low-twenties, was maybe two inches taller. 

She still had the pistol, looked at it, shrugged. Tossed it at a trash can. It bounced off, clattered when it hit the pavement. 

Plastic.  

This was an interesting person. 

“You pulled that off pretty good,” Weecho said. 

 “I needed to see if you’re a problem.” 

“Am I?” 

“You’d know by now if you were,” she said. 

He wasn’t sure that was a compliment. Held out his hand. “I’m Weecho.”

 She looked at his hand, reached out and shook it. “Juna.” 

“I was gonna ask before what your friend was doing here.”    

Juna shrugged, looked down at her high-top sneakers. Started talking in a voice Weecho heard some south in. “We came down here couple times to feed those dogs you saw. Day-old pizza mostly, from the place he delivered for.” 

Why the dogs backed off, why he didn’t get bit. 

“One day there’s this SUV parked right here. Same two guys who were at the crash come out that door we just did. Got in and drove off. No big thing, not then.” She nodded toward the street. “Two days later my friend sees the same car, one of the same guys in it, guy with the chin fuzz, parked around the corner from where we’re camped in that factory. Still no big thing. But then my friend comes around the corner and there’s this big-ass truck that’s got no business being where it is, and the guy behind the wheel is the other guy we’d seen. And then you come along taking pictures.” 

She and the friend both wore hoodies. It was him Weecho had caught in the picture. “After the crash,” Weecho said, “your friend knew where they’d be.” 

“Which is what got him killed.” 

“Killed?” 

                                                #          #          # 

She led Weecho through a tight passageway choked with trash and broken glass that ran between the concrete wall of the warehouse and a cinder block building next door. They came to a dilapidated dock that stuck maybe thirty yards out into Newtown Creek. Juna walked out on one of the rotten timbers, hopped off onto the rocks left exposed by the outgoing tide. 

“Take a look.” She was down there pointing under the dock. 

Weecho picked his way out and hopped down next to her, turned to look where she was pointing.  

Back in the shadows under the dock, he could see a body face-down in a tide pool.  

They ducked under the dock and made their way back, Weecho slipping, catching himself, and stood hunched over the half-sunk body. A hood was pulled over the head, a big red stain on the back with a hole in it.     

“Gimme a hand,” she said. 

Before Weecho could say anything about maybe they shouldn’t screw up the scene, she had her hands under the body. Weecho bent down and together they rolled it face-up. 

Jesus, some face. What was left.  

The shot that killed him had blown out one of his eyes. Crabs or something had started working on the nose and lips. Weecho swallowed back a sharp taste in his throat.   

They both straightened up, staring down, Juna wiping her nose. “He was giving me a blow-by-blow on his cell,” she said, “watching through that window in back. Then there’s like a shot, and somebody says put him in the creek. That’s how I knew where to look.”    

“Why didn’t you call the cops?” Weecho couldn’t take his eyes off the guy’s face. 

“Would you?” 

He looked at her. “Somebody should.” 

Juna shook her head. “I’m on the run. I went back and wrote under that charcoal sign you left. It was across the street from where him and I set up camp in that empty building.” 

“Running from what?” 

“Trouble. Like you did. I saw how you ran from the cops.” 

The trouble with trouble, it could find you no matter.  

“You don’t sound like you’re from around here.” 

“I’m not,” she said. 

“Where?” 

“It doesn’t… Oh, Jesus.” 

“What…” 

Weecho looked down. From the blown-out wound where Hoodie Guy’s eye had been, an eel had poked its slimy head out. Took a second to look around. Then corkscrewed itself free in a stew of eye gunk, slithered off Hoodie Guy’s face, left a bloody trail across the rocks and plopped itself into the creek where it came from. 

They looked at where the thing had disappeared. After a minute, Weecho looked back at the body. “Who was he?” 

“Just somebody I met,” Juna said. “Another runner. But now I owe him.” 

Welcome to the club.