We followed Santos’ car for an hour as he looped around the Village, cut down through Alphabet City, and zigzagged his way across Chinatown. He stopped a few times — once to grab a coffee at 7-11 and again to grab a burger and fries at a greasy spoon near Columbus Park — but other than that, he was pretty much the most boring target of all time. As the minutes ticked by and gradually turned into hours, Fae passed out cold in the backseat and even Simon began to yawn.
It was pasteleven. We were about ready to admit defeat and head back to Simon’s loft for the night, when Santos took an abrupt turn and headed for the bridge that crossed over the East River to Brooklyn.
I looked over at Simon, my brows raised in question.
“We’ve come this far,” he muttered, taking the exit that would lead us across the bridge. Twenty minutes later, we followed Santos into a rundown neighborhood on the west coast of Brooklyn. Red Hook or “The Point” as it was best known by its residents, was a gritty, working class district that jutted out into the bay, bounded on three sides by water. The former industrial port had at one time been viewed as a great location for gentrification, with transplanted businesses breathing new life into its downtrodden streets. Over time, though, the isolation and inaccessibility of The Point, coupled with a crumbling economy and a lack of funding, had stalled the efforts to revitalize, leaving Red Hook in a limbo state — half gentrified, half in ruins.
It seemed Santos was headed for the still-impoverished section, where overgrown weeds and garbage filled the vacant lots interspersed between Civil War-era brick row houses and Brooklyn’s largest public housing projects. Along with the empty warehouses that lined its waterfront, the neighborhood was marked by strips of deserted businesses and a series of ramshackle boat docks that no longer saw any traffic. During daylight hours, it wasn’t the most genteel of places; at night, it seemed even more desolate. It was empty of life — the forgotten, destitute, dark southern twin to Manhattan’s effervescent, ever-vital boroughs.
The traffic was thin here, with fewer cars to hide amongst as we trailed Santos deeper into the neighborhood. Simon put on the brakes and let a little distance grow between our cars. We slowed to a crawl when Santos turned onto a small side street by the water and parked in front of an abandoned brick warehouse. Its windows were boarded up, its foundation was chipping away, and if I had to wager a guess, I’d say it had probably been constructed at the start of the 20thcentury, when the Industrial Revolution swept the nation with a wave of new technologies and Brooklyn bloomed with factories and manufacturing plants. The building sat on the very outskirts of The Point, abutting a private dock which likely once served as a lively distribution port for shipped goods.
Now, the pier was dilapidated — the perfect counterpart to the factory it formerly serviced. Many of its wooden support beams hung down into the bay, waterlogged and termite-eaten with age. The planks were so brittle, one miscalculated stride might find you stepping down on sawdust and open air.
Santos’ brake lights glowed like twin red halos on the dark street around the corner. Simon cut his headlights and shifted into park on the cross-street just before the intersection — far enough away that we could watch inconspicuously through the vacant lot across from the warehouse. Fae stirred awake when the car jolted to a stop.
“Where are we?” she mumbled, her voice slurred with sleep.
“We’re not in Manhattan anymore, Toto, that’s for damn sure,” Simon whispered, his eyes following Santos as the officer climbed from his car and looked around.
“Otherwise known as Brooklyn,” I murmured, following Simon’s lead as he hunched down in his seat to avoid being spotted.
Fae wrinkled her nose in distaste as she peered out her window at the garbage and graffiti littering the abandoned streets. This was a far cry from the sleekly sophisticated bars of her usual late-night stomping grounds.
Though many of the overhead streetlights had burned out and been left in disrepair, there was enough light from the few remaining illuminated posts to make out Santos, his black duffel still in hand, as he crossed the street and walked out onto the pier abutting the warehouse. He walked confidently, as though he’d been here many times before, and casually shifted the bag’s strap over his shoulder as he lit a cigarette. I held my breath and watched as he took a few slow drags, his eyes cast out over the still, gray waters of the Hudson. When he’d finished his cigarette, he turned back for the warehouse and approached a rusted metal emergency exit door on the side of the brick building. The jarring sound of his fist pounding against the metalreverberated in the night. Santos waited calmly before the door, wholly unaware of the watchful eyes trained on him.
After a few seconds, what looked like a slotted metal peephole slid open, allowing whoever was inside a glimpse at Santos. He was obviously recognized, as the door immediately swung open to admit him. It closed behind him as soon as he stepped through the entryway.
It didn’t open again for two hours.
Fae was snoring lightlyin the backseat and Simon was nodding off sporadically, slumped over the steering wheel with drool pooling in one cheek, when the warehouse door finally creaked open and Santos walked out. I elbowed Simon in the stomach and he jerked awake with little grace.
“Whaaasgoinon?”
“Look,” I hissed, pointing toward the windshield.
Simon wiped the drool from his face and turned his eyes to Santos.
“Duffel.”
“What?” I asked, thinking he might still be half asleep and babbling nonsensical dream words.
“The duffel bag,” he clarified. “Look how full it is.”
I looked. He was right; Santos had definitely picked something up in the warehouse. The question was,what?
“When he went in, it was limp. Now, it’s practically exploding,” Simon noted.
“That’s what she said,” Fae chimed in from the back seat with a faint giggle.
I rolled my eyes. “Really, Fae?”
“It’s two in the morning.” She shrugged. “My humor isn’t exactly on-point at the moment.”
“So what’s in the bag?” I muttered.
“Could be anything. Money, drugs, you name it.” Simon’s brow furrowed as he watched Santos start up his car and pull away from the curb. “But he was in there formore than two hours. His shift is pretty much over now, and he barely patrolled. I don’t think that’s standard operating procedure for an NYPD officer.”
We all fell silent as we contemplated what that might mean.
Simon waited until Santos was a few blocks out of sight before starting the car and steering us back to Manhattan. I didn’t know how I’d do it, but I needed to find out what was in that duffel bag. And then, I had to come back here to see what was going on behind the tightly sealed doors of that warehouse.
As we wound throughthe streets and back across the bridge to the bustling island we called home, I thought about the missing girls, and how I was essentially no closer to finding out what had happened to them. But mostly, I thought about Simon and Fae, both of whom had work in less than six hours, and how they’d insisted on coming along with me on this charade just so I wouldn’t be alone. As it turned out, stakeouts weren’t like the movies. I’d been bored to tears, my butt had gone numb after sitting for hours in the same position, and I’d learned virtually nothing about Santos other than the fact that he liked to frequent strange, abandoned places in the dead of night. Which may have been suspicious, but was certainly not illegal.
Iwanted a smoking gun, something we could easily pin on him. I wanted to feel like I was doing something other than spinning my wheels while more girls became targets and vanished off city streets. I wanted Vera back home, and Miri safe again.
But, as I knew better than most, life rarely works out the way we want it to.