Will Stutely (sly_stutely) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2023-10-29 21:02:00 |
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They couldn’t sniff out the tail, was the strange thing. Not with Robin and Michael staking out the house and the workshop, not even with the fancy security cameras Ben had installed. Their watcher was as good as a ghost. They were paranoid weeks. If finding out that he’d been followed had been bad, then this was so much worse: to know that somebody was tracking his movements and still to fail to find hide or hair of them. The knowledge prickled at the back of Will’s neck whenever he stepped out, made him feel like a moving target. He went back to his old habits, obsessively scanning the streets for hidden vantages and blind spots, counting exits, and taking wildly circuitous routes across town in hope of shaking or flushing the unseen person who may or may not have been following him. He might have taken some reassurance from the fact that it wasn’t just his failure, that Robin and Michael couldn’t pin the guy down either, but he was too busy being agitated by the fact that they couldn’t pin the guy down. Ben had come in with the save, suggesting in that offhand way of his – though Will knew there was nothing casual about the offer – that he could sift through the feeds of other security cameras in the vicinity. But it was Eddie himself who delivered the win, showing up at the workshop a couple of days ahead of the deadline to posture and threaten. Will, for his part, had put on a decent show of cowering and cursing and begging for more time, and when Eddie swaggered out the door, Ben’s eyes had followed him all the way home. Things moved rapidly after that. Within a few hours, Ben was back with names: Edward Dale Pittman, 44; Carl Francis Marino, 28; Jason Hodge, 37; each one accompanied by a lengthy dossier that began with aliases, addresses and criminal charges, and progressed down to bank account details, Social Security numbers and Netflix passwords. An hour after that came a second message, this one only a single line: the address for a micro warehouse in Red Hook. All of which brought them here, to a slightly grubby-looking sandwich shop around the corner from their target. Strictly speaking, Will shouldn’t have come. He knew that. They were leaning on surprise here, and he had to assume the tail was still on his behind, or at least that it was a possibility. But staying back wasn’t an option either: this was his own mess, after all, and it was too much to ask him to sit idle while others walked into possible harm on his account. (Fortunately for him, nobody had asked. Nor had they pointed out that, with an archangel on their side and Ben’s doxxing in their armoury, they were not the ones headed for danger. Nor had anybody ventured to suggest that, despite his words of restraint to Robin and his grunts at Scarlet’s talk of head-bashing, Will was maybe a little more keen than he’d admit to give Eddie a proper thumping.) He had, however, taken precautions. He’d left the van at Tuck’s, gone through the church and over the back fence, got on a bus headed for Queens and then ditched it for a succession of trains. Little surprise, he was the last of them to reach the rendezvous. “Alright?” he said as he reached the small group gathered outside the shop. |