Murray Hill || A Superhuman Tale - 1

Chapter Forty-Four

Twenty-five minutes later, Camille pulled around the corner and onto the street in front of Sam's Bronzeville home.

"Well, well, well," she said aloud.

A large tan SUV filled the no-parking zone in front of Sam's building. Two men in hiking boots, cargo pants, and sunglasses stood between the vehicle and the apartment. Both were white and stood casually, as if trying to appear inconspicuous in a black neighborhood. Looking ahead, Camille saw another vehicle like the first. It was parked just around the corner, and two more white men hovered about. All clearly were armed, but none was doing a very good job of blending in. No crowd had yet gathered, but several neighbors were watching.

She parked the SUV on the far side of the street four doors down.

Camille was on pure adrenalin by then, but took a breath to think. These men knew about Sam, and they knew about his apartment. Did they know about her? She didn't think so. In her fleeting time there, Sam had introduced her to only one person, his landlord, Mr. Buc, who ran a shop around the corner.

"Time to get ballsy," she decided. Picking up her phone, she took a couple of quick and surreptitious photos of the two men and the vehicle parked around the corner and texted them to Philly. Then she got out of the vehicle, locked up, and headed toward Sam's apartment like she belonged there.

Pretending to stop and check her calls, she clicked several pictures of the SUV in front of the apartment, careful to get clear shots of the plate numbers of that vehicle, as she had the other. These she texted to Philly as she walked, ignoring the two men standing outside Sam's building. One appeared as if he might stop her when she turned toward the entrance, but he hesitated.

The man's indecision confirmed her earlier impulse. They're winging this.

Someone had propped open the building's outer door. As she climbed the stairs, thoughts of how she might deal with intruders within raced through her mind. The only clear and effective tactic would be to begin talking and then to call the police. As she reached the landing, she saw that Sam's apartment door, one of two on the second floor, was open.

A sudden, flaring anger seized her at that moment, the type that almost never beset her. Who do these fucking assholes think they are?

The young woman was tall and strong and had studied martial arts since she was a kid, and, stepping through the door, a now fuming Camille didn't break stride as she snatched up Sam's old rotary phone, took three long steps, and smashed it upside the head of a lean young man standing in front of the computer keyboard at which she'd earlier been working.

The man, who'd fumbled to speak at the realization a living Fury was coming toward him, made not a sound before dropping in a heap.

She looked around; they were alone. Out of habit, the detective rolled the man, frisked him, and rapidly went through his pockets. Nothing, not even a wallet. The bloke was young and healthy but didn't have the same bulky, defined musculature of the men outside. Evidently this was some sort of technician.

A few seconds was all the detective needed to formulate a plan. There were four armed men outside, and she needed to move.

She jerked down a small canvas bag from a nearby shelf, emptied the contents, and grabbed Sam's tablet, spare phones, and the stash of cash he'd pointed out to her when they'd arrived. All these went into the bag. Reaching under the desk, she seized the CPU of the computer Philly had arranged to be installed for Sam. That too disappeared into the bag. As neatly as she could, she gathered all the papers on which she had been working and folded them away with the rest.

A loose ceiling panel on the landing outside the front door gave way and provided a quick place to stash the bag and its contents. Back in the apartment, the technician was still breathing but hadn't moved. She glanced outside the window. The two men closest to the building's front gate had come together and were talking. One of the incompetents looked repeatedly up toward the apartment.