Fidelity Read Online Free

stoop from one of the houses a few blocks down from Williams’s turned his coat up over his throat, looking tired and cold, like anyone would look very early on a freezing morning in February. There were a few naked inches of skin between the heavy ski cap he wore and his upturned collar. “I gotta get to work,” he said dully, unimpressed with her announcement or with the FBI raid jacket she was wearing over her body armor. Kay supposed this was the kind of neighborhood where the occasional intervention of law enforcement was not a subject to get particularly thrilled over—one of the many scarred battlegrounds over which the cops and the crooks fought their nightly battles, like half the city.
    â€œThis is police business, sir,” Kay said. “I’m going to have to ask you to return to your home.”
    The man sucked his teeth, pulled his cap farther down over his head, looked back warily at the way he’d come. “Boss gonna fire me if I don’t get in on time,” he said unhappily, like he already knew what Kay’s answer would be. “Boss ain’t gonna be interested in any police business.”
    â€œAs I said, sir, we’re in the middle of an operation. For your own safety, I’m going to have to ask you again to return to your home.”
    â€œYou gonna sign me a note?” he joked bitterly. “I don’t go to work, I can’t pay my bills; I can’t pay my bills, they gonna take the house. Come on, lady, I been late twice this month ’cause the bus never comes in on time. Third strike and—”
    There was a sharp sudden noise from the stash house, Torres and the rest going in fast and hard, as they’d been trained, overwhelming anyone inside with speed, with numbers, with the sheer intimidating force of authority. Another twinge of regret that she wasn’t amongst them.
    â€œAll right,” Kay said, shrugging, “but hurry up and keep your head down.”
    He thanked her and brushed past, heavy eyes still on the day’s labor. Kay’s own were keenly trained on the back door of the stash house, the sound of the action from inside bringing her senses back in hyperawareness. If Williams or one of his peons tried to make a sprint for it, she promised herself, they’d better be going west down the alleyway. Kay felt like a set trap, a grinning wolf, a cat ready to pounce.
    But when the back door finally opened, it was only Torres, looking puzzled and annoyed and waving for her to enter. Inside was a beat-to-heck couch facing a gigantic flat-screen television that had not been properly affixed to the wall, a rough hundred thousand dollars in heroin on the scarred wooden coffee table, three young black males cuffed and kneeling next to it, looking furious and a little bit scared. None of them, it did not take Kay long to note, was James Rashid Williams.
    â€œWhere is he?” Torres asked one of them.
    Staring up at Torres and twenty years in prison, he shrugged and smiled nastily. “Who you talking about?”
    â€œDickson,” an Agent shouted from the kitchen, “you need to come take a look at this!”
    Which he did then, and rapidly, with Torres and Kay following in his train. The kitchen had not been used to cook anything but crack in years and years. Stacks of empty pizza boxes rivaled empty beer cans in height and depth. The door to the adjoining storage room was open. Inside was a hole and a ladder leading down below the building. Two Agents had already gone to take a look at where it led, and one of them had come back and poked his head up to spread the info. “It heads down to another house half a block away,” he said.
    â€œMotherfucker,” Torres said.
    Dickson looked hard at Kay. “Anyone slip past you, maybe from one of the adjoining buildings?”
    â€œMotherfucker,” Kay agreed.

4
    K AY HAD not seen Christopher in nearly a year and had only spoken to him a