First Blood Read Online Free Page B

projects. It was a parallel world, closed off and inward looking, with its own economy. Dealers with handguns were a common sight. And those were the small shots. Higher up in the ranks, they had more sophisticated equipment, actual weapons of war.
    These thoughts were exciting Eva, and she immediately felt ashamed.
    Are you sinking that low? Is danger the only thing that can get you to react?
    To get you to forget this obsession of yours?
    It was not the right time to be thinking about that. Her obsession could wait. It was safe on her computer. For now, she had to focus on their goal. She had to be attentive to what was going on here. They were not safe.
    She made sure her Beretta was loaded and slipped it into the holster on her belt.
    Be a cop. That’s what you do best.
    That is the only damned thing you know how to do.
    She was there to help her colleague. Admittedly, it was outside standard procedure, but if something did happen in this place tonight, it would help them bring a case against Constantin. After the humiliation they had experienced in his hands, who would hold it against them?
    “Here it is.”
    Leroy parked at the curb, next to a low wall topped with green fencing. He turned off the ignition and made sure the doors were locked. Eva noticed how nervous he was. She saw it in a thousand tiny details: the way he blinked too frequently, the stiffness of his neck, how he clenched one hand on his thigh and dug the fingers of the other into his jeans.
    “You’re a ball of nerves,” she said.
    “It won’t be long now,” he said, taking out a tiny digital camera. “You’re with me, right?”
    Eva blew her bangs off her forehead. She, too, was more nervous than she would have liked.
    “Of course, Erwan.”
    She observed the street, trying to get a feel for the neighborhood. Her heightened sense of empathy had already saved her life on several occasions. It was her way of working, her very specific way of thinking and analyzing things. When she stepped into someone else’s shoes, she could predict what they would do.
    What she felt here was especially depressing.
    There were a few banged-up cars and half-dismantled barricades, making a play of shadow and light. Beyond the low wall, apartment buildings rose up. They were covered with graffiti to the top floors. Eva couldn’t help but wonder how the taggers had been able to do their work that high. Along the sidewalk, garbage cans had been systematically overturned, and trash was scattered all over. At the end of the street, Eva glimpsed a kind of small square, where teenagers had set fire to something. A pile of garbage , she figured. The flames rose several feet in the air. A dozen or so youths wearing jackets and knit hats were standing around the blaze, talking loudly and gesticulating. In the light of the flames, their young faces were already surprisingly hardened. Eva felt their violence, how on edge they were. The law of the strongest ruled here.
    “Constantin’s apartment building is right over there,” Leroy said.
    “Which building?”
    “The first one, on the other side of the parking lot. He lives on the top floor. He took the only two apartments up there so he wouldn’t have any neighbors. Of course, just about everyone living in the building works for him. Grandmas who stash, touts, steerers, gophers, bagboys. It’s a perfectly organized economy.”
    Constantin’s building was the tallest in the neighborhood. Eva counted twelve stories. The exterior corridors on all the floors were filled with mattresses and furniture. The balconies of the apartments were overrun with satellite dishes of every size. People did not live here; they burrowed here. They survived. Eva wondered how they managed to avoid going crazy.
    The car windows started to fog up.
    “Shit.”
    Leroy turned the key one notch to get some heat going.
    “Careful, there’s someone on the watch right over there,” Eva said.
    She pointed her chin toward a storefront down the