Page 264 of Sweet Ruin

Twenty feet of alley. That’s all it is. Twenty feet of alley and then Fourth Avenue, where there are streetlights and a bodega that never closes and a bus that runs all night. People will see. They’ll help.

I make eleven of the twenty.

Then somebody takes my legs. The concrete comes up and knocks the wind out of me, and then there’s weight on my back, a knee between my shoulder blades, and my arms are being folded up behind me by two different people.

I bite. I thrash. I scream at the mouth of the alley, at the streetlight, at the bodega, but it comes out as a shredded, smoke-ruined whimper that doesn’t carry ten feet.

Somewhere far off, there are sirens.

They’re coming for me.

But they won’t get here in time.

Not to save my life. Nor to save my bakery.

A hand goes over my mouth. It’s holding a cloth, damp and acrid. One inhale of whatever it’s soaked with and my world starts going gooey at the edges.

The last thing I see clearly is my own back door standing open, and the orange light on the brick, and the smoke pouring up past the fire escape and into the dark.

Then they lift me off the ground, and they carry me to the van.

When they close the doors, it’s like an oven being sealed shut.

Except this time, I’m the one on the inside.

51

KANE

Anton knocks on my door in the early hours of the morning. Even if I hadn’t been awake, I’d have bolted upright.

The urgency of that knock says he hasn’t come with good news.

“Boss. Something’s happening..”

I’m on my feet before he finishes.

The camera feed is up on the laptop in the office. The rear camera over Lilah’s back door shows a gray blur that moves. It takes me a moment to realize what I’m looking at.

Smoke.

Under it, there’s a flickering orange along the bottom of the frame where the trash area is.

“When did it start?”

“Two minutes. Maybe three. I called Yuri.”

“Who’s on the alley?”

Anton winces. “Josef is supposed to be there. But… he’s missing.”

I take the keys off the hook by the door.

“Get Yuri on the phone and tell him to meet me there. And wake my brother.”

I drive myself. Down the West Side and through the tunnel and out onto the expressway with the needle on the speedometer where it shouldn’t be, and I take the Thirty-Ninth Street exit at a speed that makes the truck lean. The whole way, I tell myself it could be a dumpster fire started by kids or a cigarette in a pallet stack. I imagine Lilah standing on the sidewalk in her apron, annoyed at the inconvenience.

But I know in my gut that isn’t true.