Page 51 of Stalk the Dark
“You’ll see.”
He shoved his hands into his jacket pocket and picked up his pace. This part of town was new builds customized to keep out the sun. As far as I knew, sunlight didn’t kill suckers, but it weakened them, even made them sick. Every building in New Town was fitted with metal shutters and special UV blocking windows.
Car horns honked, and someone let out a stream of curses. We took a left onto a quieter street lined with eateries and a couple of chic-looking bars.
This was nice.
A classy area to put the Order building, but no, we exited this street in favor of an even quieter one. A café called Bran’s Delight sat across the street, and next to it was a laundromat and a dingy-looking bar called The Cockshead.
Nice.
Atlas slowed at a set of iron railings where a flight of stairs went down to basement level. He jerked his chin up at the main building, all boarded-up windows. “This is it. But you can’t get in through the main door, got to use the side entrance.”
“Why?”
He cleared his throat. “It’s been used for storage, so there must be stuff blocking the door.” He hurried down the steps to the basement door. “You can enter this way.” It took him a moment to get the key to turn, and his jaw feathered with annoyance, but it finally tore open, and we followed him into a grimy space that smelled like mildew. Boxes of junk were piled up all over the place—clothes, shoes, an old coffee machine. There was even a washer and dryer and a busted vacuum cleaner.
“What is all this?” Padma demanded.
Atlas ran a hand down his face. “Like I said, this place has been used as storage for some time.”
“Storage…This is Sangualex junk, isn’t it?” Edwin said.
He sighed. “You have your space. The main office upstairs.”
They’d taken our office, not because they needed it to work from, but to use as a fucking dumping ground. I breathed past a surge of indignant rage.
He dropped the keys on a nearby worn table. “Good luck.”
He made to leave, but I grabbed his elbow. “Wait. I have a message for your people. I need you to make sure you deliver it.”
He arched a brow. “Go on.”
“You tell them they have forty-eight hours to come get their shit or I’m sending everything to the dumpster.”
He gave me a curt nod, a slight smile playing on his lips. “I’ll make sure to do that.”
He left, and we stood silently for several minutes taking in the mess that was supposed to be our base of operations.
“This sucks,” Edwin said.
“We can make it work,” Merry replied. “Once we get all this stuff out, we can clean up the place, and it’ll be as good as new.”
She was right. Anger was a waste of energy in this situation.
I wove past a pile of boxes toward the stairs to the ground floor. “Let’s take a look at the damage above.”
The hall upstairswas cluttered with old printers and fax machines, but the reception area was clear. Two rooms led off it, large enough to house eight to ten personnel, so they could be used as offices. There was a tea room down a short corridor behind reception, along with three small interrogation rooms. There was also a filing room filled with boxes of files.
Edwin and Merry rifled through the nearest ones.
“Whoa.” Edwin pulled out a file. “Missing persons case from three years ago.”
“Five years here.” Merry pulled a file from another box.
I moved farther into the room and picked a box at random. “Unsolved cases from ten years ago.” What the fuck?
“They must have dumped them all here to make it look like they were closing cases,” Padma said. “These are probably not even on any database.”
