Page 61 of Cato

So I couldn’t tell you why it suddenly bothered me that the streetlights were mostly out, casting the area almost entirely in shadow.

I knew the shadows. I’d hidden in them. Familiarized myself with them.

Now, though, they felt ominous.

As did the fact that all there was on the street was an empty, unused parking garage across the way from a building—a long, low warehouse—that I would need to enter.

It wasn’t abandoned.

Maybe that was the most off-putting part.

Most of the times I’d scoped out the area, there had been no cars, no noise, nothing. Because I didn’t want to be spotted, so I avoided business hours.

Now, though, you could hear music, the chatter of raised voices to be heard above it.

The warehouse wasn’t a warehouse at all, but rather an underground club run by local neo-Nazis.

So, yeah, the blonde wig was starting to make more and more sense as a fashion choice.

It was unclear to me if the people who came to the club were aware of the white supremacist ties, but itwasclear to me that not a single Black or Brown person was going in or coming out.

The club worked as my cover. Pretty girls in tight clothes almost always got access to a club. Once I was in, though, my job was to find a way into the back.

Poor little lost drunk girlwas my persona if I was caught.

Would I likely have to endure some dickhead’s hand on my ass and breath in my ear for a moment or two before I steered myself back into the crowd? Sure. But I’d been in worse situations.

I was hoping I didn’t get caught early, though. Because it would make being in that same area a second time acting “lost” look super suspicious.

And my research had told me that there was no other way to get into the back room where I needed to be.

Funny thing about city planning was it was pretty damn easy to get your hands on blueprints for a building.

You take that information and mingle it with firsthand accounts of checking out said building, and you learn all sorts of things.

Like there was a room that had been closed off to the inside of the building at some point in the warehouse’s history, accessible only by the abandoned loading dock. The reason for closing it off was unknown. But where there was, on the plans, a little ten-by-twelve room—perhaps a storage closet at one time—there was now… nothing. Nothing save for a crawl space accessed via one of those ladder systems that unfolds from the ceiling and would allow me to climb up into the ductwork that a trusted source told me would be sturdy enough to hold me.

“If you were even just twenty pounds heavier, I would advise it,” he’d said, eyes moving over me. But not in a creepy way. Just appraising my frame. “They’re sturdy things, lots of anchoring. Especially in industrial buildings like that. But as you go on, it will narrow, and you’ll have no choice but to exit through it, or slowly back back out of it.”

I’d thanked him for that.

But I wasn’t planning on going far.

The room next to the closed off room was where I was heading. Not to exit down into.

Just to listen through.

That was why, in the other cup not hiding my phone, I had a little recording device.

I prayed that if they used a panel on me, and there was some static as it moved over my boobs, that the bouncer at the door was just stupid enough to believe it was the underwire of my bra.

Shaking the tension out of my shoulders, I walked down the street, leaving my car in its designated location so no one would be able to see it and trace it back to me.

Then I walked toward the line of the club, my stupid little wrist purse swinging with each step. It was full of my fake IDs. And cash. In case I needed to do the unthinkable and give these shitheads some of my money just to keep up my ruse.

I couldn’t see past the two tall, willowy women in front of me until they were allowed in the club to a chorus of rave music as the door swung open and closed.

Then there he was.

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