Chapter 8 - Blood on the Harbor
"We fall back," Marcus whispered, his weapon raised as he scanned the rusted rooftops above us. "Three operatives in a fortified position. If we engage now, the noise will draw Rojas’s quick-reaction force from the shipping terminal within four minutes."
"No," I said, my voice dropping so low it was barely a breath. Both men looked down at me. "The roof sentries are watching the main street and the canal bank. They aren't watching the drainage culvert beneath the cannery."
I pointed toward a narrow, rusted iron grate set into the brick foundation of the building we were hiding behind. It was a storm drain that emptied directly into the canal, passing underneath the loading bay floor of the locker depot. I had used it to hide from a rainstorm three weeks before my grandmother died.
"The culvert runs right under the locker floorboards," I explained, looking up at Morales. "The wood in the loading bay is rotted through. If we go through the drain, we come up directly behind the guy guarding the lockers. He won't even see us until we're standing on his boots."
Morales stared at the narrow, rusted grate, then at me. A look of profound respect crossed his scarred face. He turned to his lieutenant.
"Marcus. You take the roof sentries from the external fire escape. Use suppressed rounds only. When you hear me clear the loading bay floor, take them out simultaneously."
"Boss, sending you through a drainage culvert—"
"I started my life in these gutters, Marcus," Morales interrupted coldly. "It will not kill me to revisit them. Move."
Marcus vanished into the shadows without another word.
Morales knelt beside me, gripping the rusted edges of the storm grate. With a slow, steady application of brute force, he lifted the iron frame without making a single scrape against the brickwork, setting it silently onto the damp earth.
"Lead the way, street rat," Morales whispered, a dangerous glint in his eye.
I dropped onto my belly and crawled into the freezing, dark culvert. The smell of stagnant canal water and rotting kelp was overwhelming, but I moved quickly, my elbows and knees navigating the slimy brick tube with practiced memory. Behind me, I could hear the heavy, controlled breathing of Gabriel Morales as he squeezed his massive frame through the narrow passage.
We crawled for fifty yards in pitch darkness until the brick tube opened into a wider, dry chamber directly beneath the floorboards of the locker depot. Above our heads, through the gaps in the rotted timber, faint yellow light filtered down from the loading bay lantern.
I could hear the footsteps of the cartel guard above us—a slow, heavy pacing, accompanied by the metallic click-clack of a lighter being opened and closed.
Morales stood up slowly in the darkness, his head just inches from the rotted floorboards. He drew his heavy, suppressed tactical pistol, raising it toward the gap in the wood to track the guard’s shadow.
He looked down at me, holding up three fingers.
Three. Two. One.
Morales didn't open a trapdoor. He drove his right heel upward with shattering force directly into the rotted timber planks above him.
The floorboards exploded upward in a shower of splinters and dust. Before the startled guard could even scream or raise his rifle, Morales surged up through the broken floor like a demon erupting from the earth.
There was a single, dull thwip from the suppressed pistol.
The guard collapsed onto the concrete floor without making a sound, his rifle sliding harmlessly away into the darkness.
Above us, on the roof, two rapid, synchronized thwips echoed through the tin ceiling as Marcus executed the exterior sentries.
"Clear!" Marcus’s voice crackled quietly through Morales’s earpiece. "Roof is secure."
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I climbed up through the shattered floorboards, brushing damp canal mud from my coat, and stared at the row of rusted, industrial lockers lining the back wall of the depot.
My heart hammered against my ribs as I walked toward the metal door painted with a faded, peeling white number: 08.
