Chapter 5 : SECOND APPROACH
The hardware store on 7th Street opened at seven. I was there at seven-oh-two.
Crowbar — solid steel, eighteen inches, twelve dollars. Pepper spray — the industrial kind in the red canister, the label promising "law enforcement grade" in letters designed to make civilians feel dangerous. Sixteen dollars. A roll of black electrical tape. Three dollars. I paid cash from the wallet that had been refilled by the Bonfire reset and walked out with my purchases in a plastic bag, moving through the morning foot traffic like a man running errands instead of a man arming himself for his second attempt at a drug den that had killed him twelve hours ago.
The warehouse shift passed in a fog of lifted boxes and Danny's chatter. He told me about his wife's double shift at the hospital. I told him I was fine. He didn't believe me, but he let it go — the grace of a man who understood that sometimes I'm fine was the most truth someone could manage.
My side ached. Not the wound — there was no wound — but the memory of the wound, a phantom pain that flared every time I twisted at the waist. Psychosomatic. The brain remembering trauma that the body had been excused from. I caught myself pressing my hand against my left ribs four times during the shift, checking for blood that wasn't there.
After work, I walked to the parking garage across from 4th and Rackham and climbed to the fourth level. This time I brought the prepaid phone and held it to my ear, playing the part of a man making a call — cover for standing on a parking structure and staring at a building for forty minutes.
The Death Echo had shown me the rooftop hatch. A rusted square of steel on the north side of the building, visible from the parking garage's upper deck. I'd missed it during ground-level scouting because the adjacent building blocked the sightline. From up here, I could see it clearly — the hatch was ajar. Nobody had closed it after whatever maintenance visit had opened it last, probably years ago.
That was my way in.
The fifth person — the shadow in the second-floor window — was visible now at 4:30 PM. A thin figure sitting in a chair by the window, not moving much. Through the phone's camera zoom, grainy but functional, I could make out a stained mattress against the far wall and what looked like foil on a table. A user, not a worker. Upstairs was a crash pad for someone buying product from downstairs.
The operational pattern held from my previous reconnaissance: heavy presence until 3 AM, skeleton crew after. But now I knew the skeleton crew included the fourth man — the lookout at the back door. My original three-man count had been a three-man-visible count. The fourth stayed hidden during day shifts and appeared for nights. The fifth wasn't part of the operation at all.
Four hostiles. One civilian. One rooftop entry.
I spent the evening in the apartment reviewing the Death Echo two more times, slowing the playback to quarter-speed during the critical seconds. The fourth man — the one who'd stabbed me — had come from inside, from the left, which meant he'd been positioned just inside the back door, invisible from the outside until the door opened. The knife had been in his right hand the entire time. He'd been ready.
They expected trouble from the back. Front door was for customers. Back door was for problems.
So I wouldn't use either door.
---
2:50 AM. The alley behind 4th and Rackham smelled exactly the same — garbage, urine, the chemical sweetness of something being smoked. My stomach clenched at the smell and the phantom pain in my side flared, muscle memory from a death that was thirteen hours old and still raw.
I wasn't going to the back door. I was going to the roof.
The building next door — a shuttered laundromat — had a fire escape with a retractable ladder. The bottom rung was eight feet off the ground, designed to prevent exactly this kind of use. I'd spotted a dumpster underneath it during my afternoon recon. Standing on the dumpster put the ladder at chest height.
The dumpster lid creaked when I climbed on it. I froze. Counted to thirty. Nothing stirred. Grabbed the ladder. It resisted — rust and gravity and a mechanism that hadn't moved in years — then dropped with a shriek of metal that echoed off the alley walls like a gunshot.
"Move."
I went up. Fast, or as fast as a body with a six in Agility could manage, which was more scramble than climb. The fire escape groaned under my weight. Second floor. Third floor. Rooftop. The laundromat's roof was flat gravel, littered with pigeon droppings and a dead air conditioning unit the size of a washing machine. The drug den's roof was three feet higher and five feet across the gap between buildings.
I backed up. Ran. Jumped.
Landed badly — one knee on the gravel, the crowbar in my belt loop clanging against the roof surface — but landed. The drug den's rooftop was tar paper and vents, and there, exactly where I'd seen it from the parking garage, the maintenance hatch sat open two inches.
I lifted it. The hinges screamed — old metal, dry and corroded — and I waited again. Twenty seconds. Below me, through the opening, a hallway. Dark except for a line of light under a door at the far end. The stairwell leading down.
I sprayed pepper spray into the stairwell. Two long bursts, filling the narrow space with capsaicin fog. If anyone came up those stairs in the next five minutes, they'd be blind and choking before they reached the top.
Through the hatch. Down. The second-floor hallway had two doors — one open, one closed. Through the open door: the crash pad. The thin figure from the window was asleep on the mattress, breathing slow and deep, a pipe on the floor next to an empty lighter. Not a combatant. Not a threat. I moved past.
The stairs down to the first floor were narrow and I took them in a crouch, crowbar in my right hand, the pepper spray canister in my left. The capsaicin cloud hung in the air like a chemical curtain, burning my eyes and nostrils even through the flannel I'd pulled up over my nose.
The first floor was one large room — former retail space, now cleared of everything except folding tables, the duffel bags, the checkout counter, and four men who were in various states of alert. One was asleep on a cot behind the counter. Two were playing cards at a folding table, one of them the lookout who'd grabbed me. The fourth — the one with the knife — was standing near the back door, doing exactly what he'd been doing when he killed me: watching the alley.
The pepper spray hit the card players first. I stepped off the bottom stair and sprayed — a continuous stream aimed at face level, sweeping left to right. The card player closest to me caught it full in the eyes and went backward off his chair, screaming. The second got a hand up but took enough to send him stumbling into the table, knocking cards and baggies of product across the floor.
The knife man at the back door turned and I threw the canister at his head. It bounced off his shoulder — bad aim, bad arm, six in Strength — but it bought me two seconds of confusion, and I used them.
The crowbar came down on the nearest duffel bag. Product — small baggies, maybe cocaine, maybe meth, I didn't stop to catalog — exploded across the floor. I hit the second bag. The third. The cash box on the counter took two swings to crack open and then the bills were everywhere, scattering like leaves, and the sleeper on the cot was up now, eyes red and streaming from the residual spray, reaching for something under the cot—
A gun. The man on the cot had a gun.
I was already moving toward the stairs. The first shot punched through the ceiling two feet to my right — plaster dust and noise and the immediate understanding that the escalation had jumped from drug den scuffle to someone is trying to kill me in the space of one trigger pull.
Up the stairs. Through the hallway. The crash pad occupant was sitting up on his mattress, blinking, confused. I was past him and through the rooftop hatch before the second shot hit, this one closer, punching through the roof surface three feet from the opening.
The night air hit my face like a slap. I ran — across the roof, leaping the gap to the laundromat, stumbling on the gravel, finding the fire escape by feel and muscle memory, going down it three rungs at a time with the crowbar still clenched in a white-knuckle grip.
Six blocks. I ran six blocks through the Glades at 3:00 AM with lungs burning and legs screaming and the phantom ache in my side competing with the very real burning in my eyes from my own pepper spray residual, and I didn't stop until I hit the parking lot of a closed gas station south of the warehouse district.
I leaned against a dumpster. Gulped air. My hands were shaking — adrenaline this time, not trauma, and the distinction mattered.
[MISSION COMPLETE: DRUG DISTRIBUTION POINT NEUTRALIZED]
[+15 CP. Bonus: +5 CP (Zero civilian casualties). Total earned: 20 CP]
[SKILL REGISTERED: Stealth & Infiltration (Basic)]
Twenty CP. Not fifteen — twenty. The civilian bonus had triggered because the crash pad user upstairs was technically a civilian and I hadn't touched him. The System tracked that. Good to know.
The Stealth registration hit my awareness like a new sense clicking on — not dramatic, not transformative, just a subtle sharpening of spatial awareness. Where my feet landed. How much noise fabric made against fabric. The way sound traveled differently in enclosed spaces versus open air. I'd been sneaking around for days; the System had been watching, and now it had formalized the skill.
It was Basic tier. The lowest rung. The skill description said it gave me improved awareness of my own noise generation and basic concealment instincts. In practical terms, it meant I'd be slightly less terrible at not getting caught. Slightly.
But twenty CP sat in my System balance like the first dollar in a savings account — pathetic and monumental at the same time.
I leaned against the dumpster and grinned. Scraped palms, burning eyes, hammering heart, the lingering taste of pepper spray at the back of my throat. But alive. CP earned. Skill registered. Mission complete.
The grin faded slowly, replaced by the steadier warmth of someone who'd done something impossible twelve hours after failing at it fatally. I'd neutralized a drug den with a crowbar and pepper spray and a body that had the combat specifications of a tired librarian. Ugly. Loud. Nearly got shot. But done.
I started the walk home. The Glades were quiet in the pre-dawn, the particular hush of a neighborhood holding its breath between one day's trouble and the next. My boots crunched on broken glass and I was aware of the sound in a way I hadn't been before — the Stealth skill, already whispering, quieter, softer, roll the foot from heel to toe.
The apartment was exactly as I'd left it — map on the wall, circle around 4th and Rackham, three approach routes drawn in pen. I added a fourth in red: rooftop hatch, confirmed viable.
The mission timer was gone from my peripheral vision. In its place, the quiet hum of twenty CP waiting to be spent and the knowledge that I'd died once, completed once, and the ratio only needed to keep improving.
I washed the pepper spray residue off my face in the bathroom sink. The mirror showed red-rimmed eyes and a face that had no business looking satisfied, but did anyway.
Then the prepaid phone buzzed — not a call, just the alarm I'd set for the morning news. I thumbed it open and checked the Starling City Register's mobile site. The headline loaded in blocky text, fighting through the phone's ancient browser.
BREAKING: BILLIONAIRE OLIVER QUEEN FOUND ALIVE — RESCUED FROM ISLAND AFTER FIVE YEARS
My hand tightened on the phone.
The clock had started.
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